Walking with dinosaurs
A review requested by Harold, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.
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We cannot say of the 2002 miniseries Dinotopia that it has small ambitions. Packed into its three parts, totaling over four hours, it attempts to create an entire alternative society full of CGI dinosaurs on a television budget, using television-grade effects. It has an all-CGI main character, a mere three years after Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace was the very first movie to attempt such a thing - again, on a television budget. The really amazing thing is that Dinotopia comes so incredibly close to actually pulling this off. Nobody would mistake for a big-budget theatrical release from the same year - a year that had borne witness to Spider-Man, not even two weeks earlier, and would eventually see the debut of the extraordinary Gollum in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - but to say that my expectations were surpassed would be seriously understating things. The Dinotopia creatures look pretty terrific: the seams are there and you don't even have to stare to spot them, but in terms of lighting, compositing, layout, texturing, all the boring unsexy stuff that goes into marrying CGI and live-action footage, this absolutely blows past my expectations for what you could do on the small screen in 2002. For this, the miniseries won four Visual Effects Society awards and the Emmy for visual effects (it however lost the BAFTA to an episode of Chased by Dinosaurs that wasn't eligible for either of the other awards in the same period), and I cannot imagine anyone finding fault with that.
But if we may throttle back to the original point: this was an ambitious, grandiose project, a fitting early-'00s extension to the run of grandiose over-the-top miniseries overseen by the Roberts Halmi, Senior and Junior, the impresari of Hallmark Entertainment, who had spearheaded a cottage industry of prestigious and fancy-looking two-part TV extravaganzas for the whole family in the middle and late 1990s (they continued in this vein through most of the 2000s, but Dinotopia was, unless I am mistaken, the last of their fantasy epics to premiere on a major broadcast network in the United States - ABC, as part of The Wonderful World of Disney). Its aspirations to high-end effects work was ambitious, its length was ambitious, and it was ambitious in its fearlessness in finally making something out of James Gurney's Dinotopia books, which had resisted adaptation for a decade by the time our current subject cracked it.
Ambition is terrific; I am all for ambition. I am also all for successful ambition, and this is where I think that Dinotopia lets us down. They may have spared no expense on the visual execution of this world, but that's the only way this avoids feeling like a cheap TV production; in particular, I think it would have enormously benefited the multi-national production (it took American, British, and German money to put this over) to have found a little bit more space in the budget for hiring better actors. Somewhat incongruously, the top-billed star is David Thewlis, who plays the villain and is certainly not more than the fourth-most prominent actor in the series, but he's also the obvious highlight of an ensemble that includes a grand total of two good performances: besides Thewlis, Alice Krige is pretty good (not great, but pretty good), and she's only really given very much to do in the second of the three episodes. Meanwhile, the actual leads, a pair of mismatched brothers, are played by Wentworth Miller, who shuffles through the adventure with a glassy, detached look of stoned calm, and Tyron Leitso, who comes across as relatively alert and lively and charismatic pretty much solely because of the huge number of scenes he shares with Miller. And then there's Katie Carr, who at least matches Miller for pure dazed non-presence, and suffers the added indignity of dealing with the most laborious dialogue of Simon Moore's gummy script.
The plot, which I might as well nod towards given that there's so much of it, kicks off with three men in an airplane over a large body of water: Frank Scott (Stuart Wilson) needn't bother us much, because he's going to be stuck in the plane when it crashes into the sea, but we do need to get to know his sons, half-brothers David (Miller) and Karl (Leitso), who will survive to find themselves on the rocky shore of a mysterious land. The first person they meet is a garrulous Englishman, Cyrus Crabb (Thewlis), who does absolutely nothing to explain what's going on, except to establish that this country is named "Dinotopia", and whatever that is, he's something of a pariah to its people. Shortly thereafter, we actually arrive at Dinotopia, which is very unique sort of Lost World, one that was in fact found many decades or even centuries ago, given the wide, multicultural range of humans from all sorts of eras and societies, though they sure as hell seem to average out to "Victorian England". They live in peace with a number of dinosaurs, which look exactly like they did 65 million years and more ago, but are also intelligent beings, except when the dictates of the plot require that they aren't. Naturally enough, these dictates tend to involve attacks by tyrannosaurs, or pterosaurs, because you cannot have your evolved civilised dinosaurs and your T-Rex thriller sequence that could probably do a better job of hiding its theft from Jurassic Park. But that sin is hardly unique to Dinotopia.
Anyway, Dinotopia seems pretty great to David, but Karl, always the more impetuous and hotheaded of the two, gravitates towards Crabb's way of thinking that as bucolic and pastel as this all seems, it's also basically just a big awe-inspiring prison, and Dinotopian society, for all its beatific surface, is staid and entrenched and dying of conservatism. I should make two things clear: Dintopia's plot, from very early on, requires that we understand Crabb to be a selfish villain and Karl to be hopelessly misguided in his desire to escape back to the outside world; and Dinotopia's plot, from very early on and all the way up to its "only we outsiders can safe this backwards land from its dangerous technological ignorance" climax, is really great at making Crabb's case. A lot of this gets back to the acting: when the "bad" brother keeps calling the "good" brother brainwashed, it would be really nice if the "good" brother didn't seem to in fact have had his brains neatly removed with a melon baller. And having all of the "here's why this place is evil" rhetoric given to a delectably camped-up Thewlis, while the "here's why this place is good" argument largely rests on the utterly lost, stilted Carr, playing the role of stuck-up know-it-all Marion Waldo, doesn't help matters either.
But, you know, this is all beside the point, really. The point of course is dinosaurs, and while I think Dinotopia suffers from spending its middle segment focused on such a small number of species, the dinosaurs are mostly good. The one we get to know the best, and the only one speaking English, is Zipeau Steneosaurus, a Stenonychosaurus library researcher who's voiced by Lee Evans, and who gets the most sympathetic, fully worked-out backstory of any character (the species is a clever in-joke: Stenonychosaurus had one of the largest brains relative to the size of its body of any dinosaur species). He's also the all-CGI character I mentioned before, which is where things start to get a bit rough for poor Zipeau. He looks pretty good - he suffers from having by far the most screentime of any CGI model in the film, and so we get plenty of nice long looks where that model is closer to 90% than 100%, but 90% is still impressive for what this project is - but he's animated like an actor who can't stop pulling faces and never entirely knows what to do with his hands. There's something amusingly ironic about a movie in which the CGI dinosaur overacts while the flesh and blood humans he mostly shares the frame with with underact like robots, and I will say to Dinotopia's immense and unmistakable credit that for the most part, I believed it when Zipeau interacted with humans. But he's just so annoying to actually deal with.
But back to the point: dinosaurs. And really only dinosaurs. Moore's script invests a remarkable amount of effort into world-building, which makes it a shame that the world ends up feeling so confusing and random; fairly late into the third episode, the story is still trotting out new concepts that it suggests are extremely important and probably something we should have had a pretty firm handle on back in the first episode. Befitting its origin in a series of books almost exclusively known for their elaborate and gorgeous illustrations, Dinotopia is besotted with the design of its fantasy world, but it rarely combines that design with any sense of place: the actual layout and structure of Dinotopia remains a complete mystery. And the actual function of everything we see doesn't seem to have been anybody's priority at all.
Even the beautiful designs only take us so far in the face of the extremely flat, unspectacular directing of Marco Brambilla, whose career has largely consisted of creating video montages for art museum installations, though he's also somehow responsible for the 1993 dystopian action-satire Demolition Man. Neither of those skill sets helped him out here, as he transforms the sprawling fantasy of Walter P. Martishius's production design into what feels like the demo reel for a Myst knock-off. And he's helpless in the face of the terrible decision to present this as a three-night miniseries rather than just two; even three hours would have been a lot of room for the amount of actual story in Dinotopia, but with over four, there's a huge ton of badly-paced deadweight. Nearly the entire second episode, which is disproportionately concerned with the exceptionally uninteresting subplot of whether or not David is going to hack it in the pterosaur-rider corps (a drowsy story that seems to have so captivated Moore that he bizarrely elected to hang the Part 2 cliff-hanger ending on it), could be snipped out and replaced with about five minutes of summary at the start of the third. And, of course, every moment we spend not watching Thewlis sneer and preen is a moment that suffers from the knowledge that we could be. It's a very logy 4 hours, which is never something you really hope to be true; but when it's a family-friendly adventure romp, something that's this slow and has this much deadwood is just brutal, and while I expect a merciless editor could carve a harmlessly cute feature out of Dinotopia - even with Miller and Carr stinking up the joint - the version of the story we got is much too irksome for its cute elements to land.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
Do you have a movie you'd like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page!
We cannot say of the 2002 miniseries Dinotopia that it has small ambitions. Packed into its three parts, totaling over four hours, it attempts to create an entire alternative society full of CGI dinosaurs on a television budget, using television-grade effects. It has an all-CGI main character, a mere three years after Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace was the very first movie to attempt such a thing - again, on a television budget. The really amazing thing is that Dinotopia comes so incredibly close to actually pulling this off. Nobody would mistake for a big-budget theatrical release from the same year - a year that had borne witness to Spider-Man, not even two weeks earlier, and would eventually see the debut of the extraordinary Gollum in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - but to say that my expectations were surpassed would be seriously understating things. The Dinotopia creatures look pretty terrific: the seams are there and you don't even have to stare to spot them, but in terms of lighting, compositing, layout, texturing, all the boring unsexy stuff that goes into marrying CGI and live-action footage, this absolutely blows past my expectations for what you could do on the small screen in 2002. For this, the miniseries won four Visual Effects Society awards and the Emmy for visual effects (it however lost the BAFTA to an episode of Chased by Dinosaurs that wasn't eligible for either of the other awards in the same period), and I cannot imagine anyone finding fault with that.
But if we may throttle back to the original point: this was an ambitious, grandiose project, a fitting early-'00s extension to the run of grandiose over-the-top miniseries overseen by the Roberts Halmi, Senior and Junior, the impresari of Hallmark Entertainment, who had spearheaded a cottage industry of prestigious and fancy-looking two-part TV extravaganzas for the whole family in the middle and late 1990s (they continued in this vein through most of the 2000s, but Dinotopia was, unless I am mistaken, the last of their fantasy epics to premiere on a major broadcast network in the United States - ABC, as part of The Wonderful World of Disney). Its aspirations to high-end effects work was ambitious, its length was ambitious, and it was ambitious in its fearlessness in finally making something out of James Gurney's Dinotopia books, which had resisted adaptation for a decade by the time our current subject cracked it.
Ambition is terrific; I am all for ambition. I am also all for successful ambition, and this is where I think that Dinotopia lets us down. They may have spared no expense on the visual execution of this world, but that's the only way this avoids feeling like a cheap TV production; in particular, I think it would have enormously benefited the multi-national production (it took American, British, and German money to put this over) to have found a little bit more space in the budget for hiring better actors. Somewhat incongruously, the top-billed star is David Thewlis, who plays the villain and is certainly not more than the fourth-most prominent actor in the series, but he's also the obvious highlight of an ensemble that includes a grand total of two good performances: besides Thewlis, Alice Krige is pretty good (not great, but pretty good), and she's only really given very much to do in the second of the three episodes. Meanwhile, the actual leads, a pair of mismatched brothers, are played by Wentworth Miller, who shuffles through the adventure with a glassy, detached look of stoned calm, and Tyron Leitso, who comes across as relatively alert and lively and charismatic pretty much solely because of the huge number of scenes he shares with Miller. And then there's Katie Carr, who at least matches Miller for pure dazed non-presence, and suffers the added indignity of dealing with the most laborious dialogue of Simon Moore's gummy script.
The plot, which I might as well nod towards given that there's so much of it, kicks off with three men in an airplane over a large body of water: Frank Scott (Stuart Wilson) needn't bother us much, because he's going to be stuck in the plane when it crashes into the sea, but we do need to get to know his sons, half-brothers David (Miller) and Karl (Leitso), who will survive to find themselves on the rocky shore of a mysterious land. The first person they meet is a garrulous Englishman, Cyrus Crabb (Thewlis), who does absolutely nothing to explain what's going on, except to establish that this country is named "Dinotopia", and whatever that is, he's something of a pariah to its people. Shortly thereafter, we actually arrive at Dinotopia, which is very unique sort of Lost World, one that was in fact found many decades or even centuries ago, given the wide, multicultural range of humans from all sorts of eras and societies, though they sure as hell seem to average out to "Victorian England". They live in peace with a number of dinosaurs, which look exactly like they did 65 million years and more ago, but are also intelligent beings, except when the dictates of the plot require that they aren't. Naturally enough, these dictates tend to involve attacks by tyrannosaurs, or pterosaurs, because you cannot have your evolved civilised dinosaurs and your T-Rex thriller sequence that could probably do a better job of hiding its theft from Jurassic Park. But that sin is hardly unique to Dinotopia.
Anyway, Dinotopia seems pretty great to David, but Karl, always the more impetuous and hotheaded of the two, gravitates towards Crabb's way of thinking that as bucolic and pastel as this all seems, it's also basically just a big awe-inspiring prison, and Dinotopian society, for all its beatific surface, is staid and entrenched and dying of conservatism. I should make two things clear: Dintopia's plot, from very early on, requires that we understand Crabb to be a selfish villain and Karl to be hopelessly misguided in his desire to escape back to the outside world; and Dinotopia's plot, from very early on and all the way up to its "only we outsiders can safe this backwards land from its dangerous technological ignorance" climax, is really great at making Crabb's case. A lot of this gets back to the acting: when the "bad" brother keeps calling the "good" brother brainwashed, it would be really nice if the "good" brother didn't seem to in fact have had his brains neatly removed with a melon baller. And having all of the "here's why this place is evil" rhetoric given to a delectably camped-up Thewlis, while the "here's why this place is good" argument largely rests on the utterly lost, stilted Carr, playing the role of stuck-up know-it-all Marion Waldo, doesn't help matters either.
But, you know, this is all beside the point, really. The point of course is dinosaurs, and while I think Dinotopia suffers from spending its middle segment focused on such a small number of species, the dinosaurs are mostly good. The one we get to know the best, and the only one speaking English, is Zipeau Steneosaurus, a Stenonychosaurus library researcher who's voiced by Lee Evans, and who gets the most sympathetic, fully worked-out backstory of any character (the species is a clever in-joke: Stenonychosaurus had one of the largest brains relative to the size of its body of any dinosaur species). He's also the all-CGI character I mentioned before, which is where things start to get a bit rough for poor Zipeau. He looks pretty good - he suffers from having by far the most screentime of any CGI model in the film, and so we get plenty of nice long looks where that model is closer to 90% than 100%, but 90% is still impressive for what this project is - but he's animated like an actor who can't stop pulling faces and never entirely knows what to do with his hands. There's something amusingly ironic about a movie in which the CGI dinosaur overacts while the flesh and blood humans he mostly shares the frame with with underact like robots, and I will say to Dinotopia's immense and unmistakable credit that for the most part, I believed it when Zipeau interacted with humans. But he's just so annoying to actually deal with.
But back to the point: dinosaurs. And really only dinosaurs. Moore's script invests a remarkable amount of effort into world-building, which makes it a shame that the world ends up feeling so confusing and random; fairly late into the third episode, the story is still trotting out new concepts that it suggests are extremely important and probably something we should have had a pretty firm handle on back in the first episode. Befitting its origin in a series of books almost exclusively known for their elaborate and gorgeous illustrations, Dinotopia is besotted with the design of its fantasy world, but it rarely combines that design with any sense of place: the actual layout and structure of Dinotopia remains a complete mystery. And the actual function of everything we see doesn't seem to have been anybody's priority at all.
Even the beautiful designs only take us so far in the face of the extremely flat, unspectacular directing of Marco Brambilla, whose career has largely consisted of creating video montages for art museum installations, though he's also somehow responsible for the 1993 dystopian action-satire Demolition Man. Neither of those skill sets helped him out here, as he transforms the sprawling fantasy of Walter P. Martishius's production design into what feels like the demo reel for a Myst knock-off. And he's helpless in the face of the terrible decision to present this as a three-night miniseries rather than just two; even three hours would have been a lot of room for the amount of actual story in Dinotopia, but with over four, there's a huge ton of badly-paced deadweight. Nearly the entire second episode, which is disproportionately concerned with the exceptionally uninteresting subplot of whether or not David is going to hack it in the pterosaur-rider corps (a drowsy story that seems to have so captivated Moore that he bizarrely elected to hang the Part 2 cliff-hanger ending on it), could be snipped out and replaced with about five minutes of summary at the start of the third. And, of course, every moment we spend not watching Thewlis sneer and preen is a moment that suffers from the knowledge that we could be. It's a very logy 4 hours, which is never something you really hope to be true; but when it's a family-friendly adventure romp, something that's this slow and has this much deadwood is just brutal, and while I expect a merciless editor could carve a harmlessly cute feature out of Dinotopia - even with Miller and Carr stinking up the joint - the version of the story we got is much too irksome for its cute elements to land.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
