This palaeontological-based docu-series is so poorly structured. When you have a nature documentary focusing on prehistoric wildlife, you'd expect each individual episode to be centred around the ecosystem of one specific time period. Right? Wrong! They do this nonlinear type of narrative flow where everything keeps jumping back-&-forth between separate temporal ranges within the same episode and it gets real frustrating to me because I just wanted them to stick to the conventional ONE prehistorical local per episode format. The background music for this series is hardly even worth mentioning. And no offence to the him because I think he's a really great actor and all (don't get me wrong), but Martin Freeman's drawn-out lines of gentle voiceover narration (somewhat like David Attenborough's) were so soft and slowly spoken that I was nearly on the verge of nodding off (so lifeless). Despite how overly-dramatic his style of narration may have been, I was practically begging to hear Kenneth Branagh's voice again.
They placed a much greater emphasis on showcasing modern animals as the predominant feature of the programme; primarily utilising archival stock footage of real-life present-day animals from today's world. Why do this? Hate to sound salty (or even crabby) but nature documentaries about modern animals are ten a penny (or a dime a dozen). If I wanted to watch a nature documentary about MODERN animals, then guess what? I'd just watch one of the countless ones that already exist. The reason why I wanted to watch this is because I WANTED to see PREHISTORIC animals as the main draw and focal point of attention (that should've been the whole appeal of this show). You know how many modern wildlife documentaries there are out there? HUNDREDS!! THOUSANDS!! And do you know exactly how many prehistoric wildlife documentaries there are? Not an awful lot, only a handful of quality ones at best.
It's not all a total waste as it does have its compelling aspects. A majority of the photorealistic computer-generated reconstructions (when they actually appear onscreen for a considerable amount of time) were beautifully designed with finely rendered detailing and were fluently animated by the VFX artists to act out in such a lifelike manner. Many of the prehistoric animal models behaved in a very natural way and their movements were convincing. Sure, some CG shots seemed a bit ropey at times; particularly regarding a good bulk of the underwater stuff. But on the whole, ILM still did a pretty good job overall. The extinct animals themselves were expertly crafted with the most up-to-date accuracy as possible. So this series isn't completely without merit.
If you're like me and simply wanted to see new palaeo-media content, I honestly recommend you just wait to view some clip compilations of its prehistory segments when they get uploaded onto YouTube (which is bound to happen eventually).
They placed a much greater emphasis on showcasing modern animals as the predominant feature of the programme; primarily utilising archival stock footage of real-life present-day animals from today's world. Why do this? Hate to sound salty (or even crabby) but nature documentaries about modern animals are ten a penny (or a dime a dozen). If I wanted to watch a nature documentary about MODERN animals, then guess what? I'd just watch one of the countless ones that already exist. The reason why I wanted to watch this is because I WANTED to see PREHISTORIC animals as the main draw and focal point of attention (that should've been the whole appeal of this show). You know how many modern wildlife documentaries there are out there? HUNDREDS!! THOUSANDS!! And do you know exactly how many prehistoric wildlife documentaries there are? Not an awful lot, only a handful of quality ones at best.
It's not all a total waste as it does have its compelling aspects. A majority of the photorealistic computer-generated reconstructions (when they actually appear onscreen for a considerable amount of time) were beautifully designed with finely rendered detailing and were fluently animated by the VFX artists to act out in such a lifelike manner. Many of the prehistoric animal models behaved in a very natural way and their movements were convincing. Sure, some CG shots seemed a bit ropey at times; particularly regarding a good bulk of the underwater stuff. But on the whole, ILM still did a pretty good job overall. The extinct animals themselves were expertly crafted with the most up-to-date accuracy as possible. So this series isn't completely without merit.
If you're like me and simply wanted to see new palaeo-media content, I honestly recommend you just wait to view some clip compilations of its prehistory segments when they get uploaded onto YouTube (which is bound to happen eventually).