User reviews

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?

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.

As with many of the reviewers here, I am a great fan of Stephen Fry, this is just a very poor effort from Channel 5. There is nothing here that wasn't done far better 17 years ago in Prehistoric Park, or even 24 years ago in Walking with Dinosaurs. Do yourself a favour and go back and watch those, instead of wasting any time watching this. Personally I couldn't get past the first 5 minutes.

The CGI is really really poor, and all the scenes with Stephen in just look like he is standing in front of a screen. I can't emphasise enough how amateurish it all looks.

Many of the professional reviews of this show are good, but that can only be because the production company has paid them a lot of money to say so. Genuinely, there can be no other reason.

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.

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.

I like stephen fry, and his intelligence also I love learning about dinosaurs, he explaines things well and the cgi isn't too bad! It isn't about that anyway it's about information and new information some of it I new but it still covers a lot that people might be interested in, especially if you like dinosaur documentary series. So what if cgi is bad, it's not jurassic park movie. People are ao quick to say about the cgi yet we've moved so fsr in that respect anything that's not real looking automatically makes it a rubbish programme. People need to be more open about this sort of stuff, I like it and can't wait for the next episode.

I think I'm not exaggerating by saying that this is the worst piece of prehistoric-themed documentary ever made. Dinosaur with Stephen Fry contains ALL the worst aspects that a show could ever have. First of all, the scientific informations are mostly WRONG, some of them being outdated, like the Allosaurus axe-jaws, and some others being just straight up absurd: a major example are the biomechanic experiments, which are among the worst aspscts of this show. For example, we have steel T.rex teeth crushing a brick like if real teeth could do such a thing, or metal Allosaurus jaws slashing through a watermelon. To conclude with, sometimes they just contradict themselves in a really goofy way (EG: showing flowers after saying that in Jurassic flowers haven't evolved yet). Not everything is wrong, but even when we have correct informations, the show is so shallow, it really doesn't deliver any kind of useful, new, or unusual advice.

Another problem is that the entire show's concept doesn't work: Stephen Fry is completely out of place here. He clearly doesn't know what he's talking about, and his recitation feels so unconvincing, flat and cringeworthy, he's almost never funny or even slightly intringuing. So yeah, all of these things can be summed up as: bad writing.

Finally, to say it short, models and CGI look atrocious. Keep in mind that, before its release, the promos talked about "hyper-realistic visuals". And yeah, I'm blaming the CGI as one of the main issues, because such a bad graphic is undeniably part of what makes this show so unpleasant to watch.

So, to conclude with, if you want to spare your time, just stay away from this. Now let's wait for Prehistoric Planet 2 hell yeah.

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.

Stephen Fry is an intelligent , charismatic and interesting man, however, largely illiterate when it comes to science. This faecal fantasy (and a couple of other pop-science shows he's leant his gravitas to recently) show either he is being poorly advised by his agent and/or young husband or he has lost any sense of self reflection - if you hold a position of omniscience in the psyche of the public like Mr Fry you must be able to judge the veracity of what you're being asked to read as fact. Otherwise you're just misinforming the public as well as taking work away from qualified presenters innit. Do some documentaries on literature or philosophy or summit else you're qualified in Ste.

Most of what is in this show is very broad stroke and pretty uninteresting if you've read a book or been to a museum in the last 20 years. Some of is contradictory even within the same episode and some proposals are a real stretch (although in science all hypothesis are just that, I suppose) Thankfully there are a couple of reasonable experts (Dr S Maidment for example) who refer to the fossil record when answering the rather ignorant and childlike questions they've been compelled to address and who do make it clear theories are theories - even good ones - in their responses.

Basically avoid at all costs, unless you've a very small child who's not old enough to read but you need to distract for a few minutes, whilst you finish dinner/clean to loo/reply to emails.

As much as I like Steven Fry, this was atrocious and I only lasted 20 minutes. I had to rewind it when I heard a 'Dr' state that the Allosaurus weighed around 15 tonnes compared to the 30 tonnes of Diplodocus, despite moments earlier, Steven saying it was 1/5 of the size of a diplodocus . Most dinosaur fans would know that an Allosaurus was around 2 tonnes roughly, so 15 tonnes is miles off.

The CGI is horrendous and its badly written (ideal for primary school kids though) The melon scene was ridiculous also, whilst I appreciate the machinery replicating the dino bite, but was the victim a 30 tonne piece of fruit? Ofcourse not.

No idea how this has more than 1 stars... it is god awful, a lot of facts are wrong and misleading. They contradict them selfs a few times through out the show, you can easily tell they put very little effort into actually researching the facts of what they are talking about.

The CGI is so sloppy something I could forgive if they actually put effort into the information about the dinosaurs. The budget for this show must have been so little as it's so bad it's unreal. How does channel 5 put something out like this now, when in the past they had such a golden show which I still watch today, 'Prehistoric Park'

Unlike many of those who have already left review for this and travesty of a show, I'm anything but a fan of Stephen fry, who I just find it incredibly smug and annoying.

This show is terrible with PlayStation 1 level CGI: the representations of dinosaurs appear 2-dimensional and flat with Steven Spielberg's efforts of 1990s 3 miles ahead.

Also fried says we're going to start in the beginning so the first show should have been about the Triassic thing but no he goes straight to the Jurassic with the second episode jumping to the cretaceous!

Take my word for it this is best avoided unless you just want some schadenfreude.

I really enjoyed this,, ideal for a Sunday evening, striking the right balance between having a Pugh detail to be interesting and not too technical in terms of the science.

Other reviews have commented on the quality of the CGI. Firstly, the animation is not bad at all,t's pretty good, and secondly who would care if it was bad. It's.not some dumb superhero film. It's a presentation of science for a general Sunday evening audience relying heavily on illustrative animation and as such is really clear and well done.

Surely the whole point is to leave the audience better informed, not to make anyone think they're looking at real dinosaurs. Before it was halfway through I'd already learned interesting new things about dinosaurs and the planet as it was in the distant past.

Presentation-wise, Stephen Fry his usual engaging and amiable self, and asks the right questions.

What is the actual point of this? I love Stephen Fry and most of his tv shows and books.

However my husband and I started watching this and thought it was a joke as it was so bad. The graphics are terrible - like some 90s kids show - and the information seemed to contradict popular recent discoveries on dinosaurs.

We can only imagine that he was paid a lot of money for this. As you will see from other reviews, I'm not the only person to feel this way.

Not exactly what we expect from Stephen Fry but we forgive him as we love everything else he's ever done.

Just filling up now to get to required characters. The End.

What missed by many reviewers are the content. Everyone picking on the forest doesn't look realistic or the dinos move a little stiff. Well - the the content of the show isn't to demonstrate very realistic video game characters but to give a historical and informative insights of very well chosen questions and answered given recently by top professional and experts in the area.

If you give the first episode a shoot I promise you find great value and knowledge in this series. That also showcases that everything isn't about computer graphics and quality. Its quantity sometimes too that matters for the viewing experience.

Give it a watch mind you!