Must Watch reviews Prehistoric Planet

Wednesday 25 May 2022, 9:24

Every week, the Must Watch podcasters review the biggest TV and streaming shows.

This week, Hayley Campbell and Scott Bryan review Prehistoric Planet.

Apple+ have brought together John Favreau and the producers of Planet Earth for this documentary series recreating dinosaurs that lived 66 million years ago with CGI, the series is also narrated by David Attenborough.

Hayley says: “Even though this is real science, it remains a kind of magic”

“I’m coming at this from the perspective of someone who, at eight years old, had a subscription to a monthly dinosaur magazine. I watched ‘Walking with Dinosaurs’ 20 years ago and I loved it too. But if you compare the animation from then to now, this is so much more evolved.

"The dinosaurs have weight, they feel anchored in the scene, they feel unbelievably real – even though these are animated animals that existed millions of years ago, within five minutes it’s already broken your heart. This is obviously helped a lot by the voice of Attenborough, which not only makes it feel like an extension of the BBC Planet Earth documentaries, but I would trust that voice no matter what it was saying.

"What I would really love and felt was missing from the show is a little 10-minute bit at the end of every episode, like in the Planet Earth series, where they show you how it was done. Here I would really love to hear from the scientists telling us how they know or imagine certain things about a dinosaur’s behaviour just from finding its bones. Because even though that is real science, it remains a kind of magic if we don’t get to see the detective work. It would be something like: ‘the teeth are worn down like this, so that means this’, but also behavioural things like: ‘we think they treated their young like this, because we found this, or they’re closely related to this other animal’. But aside from that, I think this is excellent.”

Scott says: “The level of detail in every single scene is stunning”

“The level of detail is to the extent where it kind of hurts your head, because you see these dinosaurs who have been brought to life by animated CGI, but they are so realistic; there’s a moment in the first episode when they talk about how many T-Rex’s die when they’re very young, and you feel emotionally-invested, you think ‘Oh no, these poor little T-Rex’s’, then you have to think to yourself: ‘No wait, hang on, these animals existed 50 or 60 million years ago, the ones we’re seeing now aren’t real’.

"We also had Ammonites – a beautiful scene from the episode where you go into the sea and there are these glow- in-the dark molluscs in the deep-sea who make pattern formations, they look like they’re having a rave, they light up in-sync with each other. This scene is breath-taking and stunning- and I think it’s that surreal level of it.

"The level of detail in every single scene is stunning. I would highly recommend that if you can; try to see this on the biggest screen you’ve got possible, because I was re-watching it again just on my little screen over the weekend and it’s nothing like it- it’s a small percentage. You realise that the bigger screen you have, the better it’s going to be. But just for the investment, also the amount of scientific level of detail: blooming loved it! Absolutely loved it, I learnt so much too.”