Dinosaurs - The Final Day with David Attenborough

I don't know how they managed to take this amazing subject and turn it into this boring documentary. They fail to convey what an exciting and important discovery the Tanis site is. Instead they show a lot of animation of dinosaurs running around and breakup the Tanis subject into little more than disjointed sound bites. I expected better.

Using the fascinating site of Tanis in North Dakota as a foundational point, this long doc takes a specific look at the last day of the dinosaurs. Seeing our own Ghibli nature spirit in human form delight at the new discoveries is worth the price of admission alone but the CGI sequences are overlong and of inconsistent quality. It's no Walking With Dinosaurs, but "Final Day" is more dressing up and ceremony than most genuine palaeontological breakthroughs get so fair play to it for that.

As a teenager, I was fascinated by dinosaurs and had a keen interest in paleontology into my thirties. At one point I nearly went to university to study Geology. I say this to show that I'm not some completely uneducated heathen before passing judgement on this documentary.

Even David Attenborough cannot save this over long and dull CGI-fest. If the content had been packed into a one-hour special it might have been interesting, but there were just too many repeats of 'he needs to discover...." between mundane CGI shots of dinosaurs behaving in a friendly manner towards each other to create a sense of either interest or excitement.

The lead paleontologist, whilst he might be a great and dedicated scientist (and let's face it, you need to be great and dedicated to spend 10 years of your life digging in the dirt in North Dakota) unfortunately had all the charisma of Stan Laurel. Chiselling out bits of brown earth whilst exclaiming how orgasmically excited he was at discovering bits of marine ammonite in a freshwater environment did not ring my bell.

I also found Mr Attenborough's repeated assertions of 'we think', 'scientists believe', 'the evidence points to' and so on extremely irritating. Yes, we know paleontologists are only guessing - we don't need telling in every other sentence.

The focus of the documentary is a site the size of football pitch called Tanis (yes, like in Raiders of the Lost Ark) in North Dakota, which, whilst interesting, is only a snapshot of the extinction of 3/4 of the species on the Earth at that time. The most interesting part of the program, the effects of the meteor strike, were largely glossed over in the last ten minutes of the film.

The turtle who was impaled on a branch should get a special mention for heroism in the face of sub-standard CGI.

The highlight of the program was undoubtedly the Diamond Particle Accelerator in Oxfordshire, UK, where they examined a squashed dinosaur egg (just in case the Americans missed anything when they looked at it).

What? Oh no. The contents of the egg were completely uninteresting. Lots of tiny bones and Mr Attenborough enthusing about it having a soft shell. The female physicist running the gadget was a stunner though....

Best dinosaur documentary I've ever seen and David Attenborough was only a bonus - the concept of focusing on the final day alone was portrayed perfectly with the switch between the science & palaeontology aspect to seeing the dinosaurs live and breathe. As someone who doesn't have too much knowledge on the impact, I thoroughly enjoyed this documentary. As for the "stunner" paleo biologist - I think she has made incredible discoveries that majorly contributed to this fascinating documentary.

I'm not typically a fan of long documentaries, but this one had my interest peaked from start to end. From the moment I turned on the documentary I realized this one was of high quality.

There was something about the effort laid down at Tanis, the enthusiasm while digging up historical treasures that were justified in this documentary. Justified by showing us part of what happened on that day, and showing what life might have been like for the many unique creatures at Tanis. Not to mention the beautiful CGI that helped visualize the discoveries made.

Thank you for this masterpiece of a documentary :))