Walking With Dinosaurs

Wait a minute. Stop everything. Karl Urban?! YOU have a role in this?!?! Dude...what were you thinking!!!! You're so much better than this movie!!!!

And is that John Leguizamo as a bird? Oh god...this is gonna be a long movie...

And that's all there is to say about this movie. It's Avatar, but for kids. Pedestrian, boring, unimpressive story telling, with gorgeous animation. But unlike Avatar, even the world seems to hate this movie. There's really not much to take away from this movie. It's shot as a pseudo documentary, letting the dinosaurs move naturally as possible, while allowing voice actors to give personalities to each of the dinosaurs. It doesn't work at all. To give these characters such off the cuff lines to such a boring story doesn't at all let us connect with them, and forcing a story doesn't make the dinosaurs interesting at all. Especially when narrated, inconsistently, by Leguizamo. It jumps between past, present, and future tense, before jumping back to a story and to strange documentary explanation, I don't know.

I wish I could talk to the filmmakers. I'd tell them to check out Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real. Pardon my quick tangent, but that's one of my favorite fake documentaries ever and I highly recommend it. It tells the story of a scientist who finds the first near-intact dragon body, and studies it to learn how dragons flew, breathed fire, and what happened to them. It at no point has fake characters in the dragons, and yet it manages to let me connect with them, and feel genuinely happy and sad for them as appropriate. This, on the other hand, forces a story that just does not work. And it only works less when only 3 dinosaurs have voices. Why can't the parents talk?! Are child dinosaurs inherently smarter? Is it evolutionary? I don't know...but it pissed me off that's for sure.

Maybe this movie would be good for kids, right? I dunno...I saw it Christmas weekend and until 15 minutes in, I was the only person in the theatre. Then a family walked in. They promptly walked out maybe 30 minutes in. A FAMILY walked out. That's bad. This movie is bad. Don't waste your time.

Rank - 1/5