Dinosaurs Review – Morgan Freeman’s novel is so soothing, you can use it as a relaxation aid | television

IIt’s hard these days to make a nature documentary that’s different from other films. Stunning landscapes, sharp close-up photographs, and tales of predation and survival, birth and death: whether you choose Pixar’s Gravity, Crimson Claws, or Eco-Crisis, it’s been done 100 times before. Watching The Dinosaurs, it’s hard not to feel like the same problem is starting to affect reality shows about the animal kingdom as it has for millions of years. It’s amazing that big-money dinosaur documentaries boast visual effects that resemble today’s Earth shots, except that we’ve grown accustomed to them.

Before the opening titles begin, clichés of two kinds are hybridized. Of the regular animal shows, there is the one in which a lone male tries to interfere in a family unit, forcing the current patriarch to fight for his position against a younger, stronger rival. Our friend who looks like he’s about to be fatally pushed aside is a pachycephalosaurus, but the dynamic is the same. Then, a head-smashing battle between the two men is interrupted by a scene familiar from dinosaur documentaries: the threatening animal is suddenly bitten in two by a Tyrannosaurus rex, and leaps unbidden through the undergrowth with a thriving camp. The pachycephalosaurus clan, led by their relieved father, happily scurries away at the sound of the intruder’s skull cracking.

In voiceover is Morgan Freeman, a reliable purveyor of grand Hollywood atmosphere whose macabre folktales are beginning to slide into self-parody, but are no less satisfying for it. He has a lovely habit of bringing us home in the last half of a line by modulating it into a bass growl, not unlike the satisfied sigh of a sated predator. When he talks us through it, you can use the audio of The Dinosaurs as a relaxation tape.

However, life is not comfortable for many of the featured creatures, as the story is an endless movement of species struggling to establish themselves before being replaced by nastier and toothier newcomers. Then everyone gets killed by climate change – floods, droughts, ice, another – and the cycle begins again. It all began 235 million years ago on the vast supercontinent of Pangea, which was initially dusty and inhospitable: “Storm and storms,” Freeman repeats, sounding as if there are storms in his throat.

The ancient reptiles gave way to a new wave, the dinosaurs, whose evolution began with young marassuchus avoiding being eaten by standing on two legs and running. One of them dramatically manages to chew up a carcass by tiptoeing into it while the larger animal that killed it takes a nap. Dinosaurs love little underdogs, comparing smaller dinosaurs to turkeys, chickens and chihuahuas, but in a very short time—just 10 or 20 million years—these creatures became giants, the kind of massive beasts that Freeman refers to as the greatest dinosaurs in history; Or, when it comes to T. rex and Triceratops, “the most famous dinosaurs of all time.” Elsewhere, there’s a Dilophosaurus (which sports twin red crests on its skull; you’ll remember that it ate Seinfeld’s Newman in the original Jurassic Park) performing a dance to impress a mate, and a mother hadrosaur leaving her babies behind in a herd nursery-like setting while she finds food, but then quickly returning to rescue them when an aerial predator swoops toward the nest.

It’s handsome – geology and meteorology are solidly presented, while the dinosaurs are just a notch below the best realistic simulations we’ve seen. If there’s a problem, aside from the well-worn storytelling, it’s the pacing and depth of the narrative. The show is careful not to overload us with science, but among the people willing to spend several hours watching a realistic show about dinosaurs, there is a large percentage of amateur experts: many people who love dinosaurs know a lot about them, in a way that viewers who might be watching a show about lemurs or dolphins may not. They may be frustrated by the lack of sophisticated detail there is about each genre and era, as the show orients itself more towards families. However, the children of these families will gain a good grounding in development, and in the devastation that changes in climate can wreak.

There is, of course, a happy ending. “Aaaasteroid,” Freeman chimes in at a frequency low enough to break one out of two, while the larger dinosaurs chew on the limbs of the smaller dinosaurs and wonder what that object in the sky is. They did well, but 66 million years later, this version of their story seems a bit outdated.