A lot of intellectual thought went into the making of Walking With Dinosaurs: The 3D Movie. Every creature that appears in the film was native to Alaska, so for total realism, the film was shot in the same region (albeit moved slightly south to more accurately represent the climate at the time). Only afterwards were the 3D dinos added in, melding prehistorically-accurate beasts into the very same stomping grounds they spent millions of years stomping on.
But all the science in the world can’t make up for a trailer stuffed to the rafters with bad cliches. And that’s exactly what Walking With Dinosaurs: The 3D Movie is. A baby Pachyrhinosaurus (like a Triceratops with a few design tweaks) is the awkward runt of the litter who can’t live up to the expectations set by his imposing four-ton father. But he’ll grow up to be as brave a dinosaur as there ever was, getting into all sorts of adventures and presumably saving some kind of day.
Yawn. The idea of blending real-world plant life with digital-world animal life is intriguing, but more often than not the dinosaurs seem awkwardly pasted into the sweeping shots of nature footage that surround them. Ironically, one of the most life-like shots in the whole trailer comes in at around the 19-second mark, where a baby dino tossed into the brush looks surprisingly like a “let’s shot-put an obviously fake baby” gag that can be seen in any number of Seltzer/Friedberg spoof movies. Not exactly the best use of new technology. Check out the trailer below:
Walking With Dinosaurs: The 3D Movie stomps its way into theaters on December 20th.
