Walking with Dinosaurs: The Movie (2013)

Dinosaur Month pretty much stumbled at the first hurdle last week, when the interestingly named "Jurassic Island" failed to include hardly any actual dinosaurs... scoring it a 0 out of 5 on the Dino Score... but this week's movie choice promises to do much better in that category as I switch to DisneyPlus for the 20th Century Fox presentation - Walking with Dinosaurs: The Movie. I was a big fan of Walking with Dinosaurs (look, we're just gonna abbreviate it to WWD from here on out, alright?) the TV series when I a kid, so much so that the big chunky hardback companion book is still amongst my collection, and I remember it fondly as being just downright really, really good. The nature documentary approach to the production made it both entertaining to watch and educational at the same time and I remember the dinosaurs looking the realest they had ever looked on television since Jurassic Park. So it will be interesting, then, to see just how badly they fuck it up here. Because by most accounts this movie was really not that well received, currently holding a 5.2 / 10 on IMDB, and considering that they waited nearly 14 years to follow up a respectable TV series with an eponymous movie, I can only assume this was a vacuous attempt at a cash grab labelled with a title that was a cheap swipe at cashing in on some nostalgia treasure. Let's find out!

Ricky (Charlie Rowe) decides he doesn't want to go digging for dinosaurs with Karl Urban?! Sorry uh, Uncle Zack (Karl Urban) when a crow that sounds like John Leguizamo lands on the truck and starts talking to him... It transpires the crow is a distant relative of an Alexornis (feathery bird dinosaur) named Alex (John Leguizamo) and after some nifty time travel we are back in the Late Cretaceous period flying over the landscape with Alex who introduces us to a family of Pachyrhinosaurus (sort or relatives of the Triceratops) and to one in particular; the runt of a new litter; Patchi (Justin Long). Despite being less than a few hours old, Patchi manages to get himself immediately in trouble when he strays too far from the nest resulting in him developing a hole injury in his head frill. As Patchi begins to grow, alongside his tougher, stronger, bigger brother Scowler (Skyler Stone) he quickly learns his place in the pecking order, but remains infectiously enthusiastic that he can do all the things they can do, even if he fails every time... Whilst out exploring, he stumbles upon a fellow Pachyrhinosaurus from a different herd; Juniper (Tiya Sircar) who admires him for the hole in his frill, but the 2 can't speak long when Juniper's mum arrives to move her along. Unable to shake Juniper from his memory, Patchi returns to the same spot every day but to no avail and when the herd migrates south for the winter they are forced into a forest when the weather turns bad and a thunderstorm breaks out. Inside the forest, after a lightning strike starts a fire, the herd gets separated with only Patchi and Scowler surviving from their family, witnessing their dad taken down by carnivorous dinosaurs in the process. Joining up with the remnants of the Pachyrhinosaurus herds, now lead by Major, Patchi discovers Juniper amongst the new herd and Scowler immediately inserts himself into the situation. As the new herd makes it's way towards the resting place for the winter they are hunted by a pack of Gorgosaurs (relatives of the Tyrannosaurus Rex) and when the herd tries to defend itself, Patchi, Scowler and Juniper are accidentally muscled into a river, carried off by the current downstream. Washing up on a beach, but nonetheless still alive, the trio join up with a pack of Edmontosaurs (big tall duck billed things) and follow them in hopes they will discover somewhere to eat, but a injury to Juniper's leg means she can't keep up and Patchi chooses to stay behind with her. After making their way through a creepy forest at night, Patchi finally leads himself and Juniper back to the herd, reuniting Juniper with her mum, and arriving shortly after is Scowler with the rest of the Edmontosaurs. After several migrations north and south, Patchi has grown older and bigger, and so has his brother Scowler, who during mating season, challenges Major as the leader of the herd. After Scowler defeats Major to assume command of the herd, he also assumes Juniper as a mate, separating to two and leaving Patchi heartbroken. As the herd begins to move north once again for the summer, Scowler, in a blunder, leads the herd across a semi-frozen lake and when the ice begins to break and give way Patchi, with Juniper's help, leads the herd back to shore and to high ground to avoid crashing into the freezing water, leaving Scowler and only a few others behind. Catching up with the herd, Scowler is angry at Patchi for "stealing" the herd and Juniper and challenges him to a fight. Initially refusing, eventually Patchi concedes and the pair begin to fight and despite Patchi initially standing his ground he is overcome by the larger Scowler and loses the fight, left behind to fend for himself alone. Initially resigned to letting himself become food for the scavengers, Patchi is inspired by an insect triggering the memory of his first meeting with Juniper to, literally, dig himself out of the rut he's in and dash back to herd. When he gets there though, he recognizes his surroundings as the same place they were ambushed years before by the the Gorgosaurs, and sure enough; the same thing happens again as several Gorgosaurs take down Scowler. Patchi assumes control of the herd and despite his brothers pleas to lead the herd to safety, he instead leads them into a charge against the Gorgosaurs, battering them, and forcing them into a retreat. Taking command of the herd and with it, Juniper as his mate, Patchi leads the herd away with his brother, Scowler relegated in rank. In the closing scene Patchi and Juniper have kids, whilst fast forwarding to modern day, Alex finishes his story as Ricky decides to go join his Uncle to check out a fossil of a Gorgosaurus he is digging up...

Ok so... this wasn't as bad as I anticipated. I kind of expected them to really distil it down to like, the lowest common denominator, y'know make it so simplistically entertaining to border on intelligence insulting but it wasn't quite at that low a level. The target audience here had definitely shifted from the original TV show. This was a movie for children, no disputing it. And by focusing more narrowly on that target demographic, in return, it alienated the more older young adult demographic, by not being a bit more edgy, not being a bit more graphic. And I think it's there that the movie is exposed at it's weakest. If they had instead taken it up a notch and focused more on producing a "Walking with Dinosaurs" style movie that told a story instead of sanitising it down to something safe for Kids TV I think it would have felt more genuine. But instead it was reduced to a live action cartoon almost and not really faithful to what WWD was best known for.

Despite this though, the voice acting was perfectly fine. John Leguizamo does a really good job as the narrator / storyteller and didn't feel out of place here. He could genuinely do a good job narrating documentaries! I don't know if he ever has before now, but after watching this, he certainly could! And the other x3 voice actors did a decent enough job too, although it was sort of odd that there was only x2, x3 at a push, other voices in the movie and the other dinosaurs just didn't talk.

In terms of a Dino score, well, there was certainly plenty of dinosaurs. Can't complain about the lack of dinosaurs here, and they made sure to include a handful of different species to keep it varied even if the focus was very much on the Pachyrhinosaurs. My only small, mild, complaint was that they chose to go down the Late Cretaceous route and a lot of the dinosaur species that are more famous and well known had long died out or evolved by that point, so there isn't much name value going on, but the movie does attempt to familiarise you with these lesser known species so it's a mild critique, Dino score: 4 out of 5.

And on the subject of the aforementioned dinosaurs, they looked really great here, with the same (if not better) level of production going in to bringing the creatures to life that went into the original WWD series. They looked real. Like you imagine dinosaurs to look and they interacted with each other and their surroundings like they were real. Absolute first class. There can be zero complaints about the special effects or the production here.

And storylinewise things moved along mostly comfortably and fluidly. The story follows the development of Patchi from a youngling right the way up to him leading the herd and whilst it does tend to rush forward at certain points to cram the whole tale in, it mostly paces itself pretty well focusing on the key moments to develop the story. It did feel like it was un-necessarily over dramatized at points, and it was at those points that it became obvious this movie was less about being a nature documentary and more about being a fantasy movie, but it was those moments I guess that were essential for developing the drama of the movie so it's swings and roundabouts. Regardless, it was still enjoyable and engaging, and probably more so if you're a young child.

I've touched on it earlier and throughout this post really, but this was really much less about being a movie faithful to the traditions set with the TV show, and much more about creating a kids movie applying the WWD formula. And I think it's in that where the movie suffers. The inclusion of the voice acting seems a bit odd, and the dilution of the formula reduces this to nothing more than a very impressive looking children's movie. You could have taken the voice acting and applied it to an animated movie and it wouldn't have suffered, but here it brings the tone of the production down as a result. And it's a bit of a shame because the dinosaurs looked fantastic, the story was simple, formulaic, but enjoyable enough enough, and the voice acting itself was pretty decent. But it's a combination that just doesn't quite work when put together and the sum of it's parts ends up lesser so than the parts going in. Walking with Dinosaurs: the TV show fans, might like it, but will likely feel it's too childish, and the younger child audience would have no doubt really liked it but the same result could have been achieved with an animated movie, and probably at a fraction of the cost. 

For what it's worth, that's pretty much where I found myself. This was just fine, and I enjoyed it, but it was a kids movie really and nothing more beyond that, and it felt like a squandering of the resources that were available. This could have been so much more, but instead it feels like the wrong decision was made early on to focus too heavily on a younger age demographic and as a result you have a movie that very much finds itself inside a dearth of competition that very much easily gets swept to the wayside and long forgotten and in not too short a time from it's initial release. This isn't a bad movie, but despite enjoying the WWD production values, it's nothing remarkable either. Weak 3 out of 5.