Dinosaur - with Stephen Fry

I am not particularly interested in dinosaurs, but I adore Stephen Fry and will watch more or less anything he is in.

It says this show is from 2023 and features "hyper-realistic representation of the jungles of the Jurassic period".

In reality, CGI is bad.

And I am talking abysmally bad, like from 25+ years ago. Some scenes comically so, like the early blue screens with halos around.

I could not even finish it, despite Mr. Fry.

Also, IMDB, please rethink your policy on review length. I have already said everything and you still want 166 characters more. Well, here they are, are you happy now?

WTAF? Kept my eldest up to watch it and within 5 minutes thought it was a weird comedy pastiche. Even my daughter said she could draw more convincing fireworks. The facts were rubbish, the interaction looked like it was from the 1970s and the CGI looked like it was a GCSE technology project.

Mr Stephen Fry - you're a national treasure Sir - this kind of s**t is utterly beneath you. Your name comes with a premium that Channel 5 clearly wanted to cash in on but nothing can paper over the meteorite sized cracks in this mess. It's the kind of cheap rubbish you'd expect from Channel 5 back in 1997.

Stephen, Stephen, Stephen... did you lose a bet? Did you lose all your money on the stock market? Why are you doing this to your reputation? WWD did this far more thoroughly, far more entertainingly and far far far more realistically 24 years ago (and you can still buy/rent it) Whomever green lit this cheap, nastly knock off needs to be fined, fired and flogged. Perhaps the fate of some of the heroes in Fry's tremendous book Mythos would be more apropriate than a simple flogging? If I hadn't seen the channel 5 logo in the corner of the screen, I would have imagined that this garbage was straight off the History charnel, it really is that bad.

I like dinosaurs. I like Stephen Fry. I like immersive documentary series.

You'd think this series would be a slam dunk for me.

It was not.

Like almost every other review has pointed out, the CGI is bad. Really bad. 90s TV show levels bad. That's not an overreaction. This is genuinely some of the worst CGI I've seen out of schlocky B-movies in years. It's almost like they ran out of time and just threw a bunch of stuff together in the hope that no one would notice.

But I could easily look passed all that, if the show was at least informative. If it was at least an interesting show, that provided some interesting material, they could've used muppets as dinosaurs, and I still would've enjoyed it.

(possibly even more so)

And that's where the problem is.

It is absolutely rife with basic objective inaccuracies. Dinosaurs that are somehow 5-10 times heavier than they actually were, dinosaurs that just did not look the way we know they actually looked. Locations. Behaviours. Feeding patters. The list goes on and on.

It is genuinely shocking how much of the information portrayed in this show is just factually wrong. How did this ever make it to screen? Why was there no fact checking done on this? Why on earth did Stephen Fry attach his good name to this?

Unbelievable.

As a low-budget documentary, I can understand forgiving bad CGI, but using dinosaur models that are so vastly different from actual scientific facts is unacceptable. A documentary should have used accurate models of dinosaurs. This is not a documentary, it's just a fantasy film.

Not only are the terrible dinosaur models a problem, but the lack of authenticity is also woefully outdated and incorrect. This is a serious mistake for a documentary that should be providing accurate information. This documentary appears to create a lot of incorrect knowledge and misconceptions for the general public who may not know much about dinosaurs.

This is truly the worst documentary without a doubt.