Series Good though with room for improvement
It is undebatable that Prehistoric Planet is the most accurate dinosaur documentary ever produced. The CGI alone is so remarkably detailed and attention to real world animal tissues and lackthereof that standstills can easily be mistaken for a National Geographic magazine. For many people, this was the true window to the Maastrichtian.
The first three episodes of the series are also willing to experiment with novel behaviours, like swimming T. rexes and sexual mimicking Barbaridactylus. "Deserts" in particular is worth noting for having a lizard as the main protagonist for a large chunk of the episode, virtually unheard off in any dinosaur documentary. The presence of ammonites, pycnodont fish and enantiornithean birds fill the background, making this Cretaceous feel more alive.
Unfortunately, the magic goes away in the last three episodes. Other than the Quetzalcoatlus segment, they are focused exclusively on dinosaurs and are a lot less willing to experiment with their behaviours. It is also odd that the "freshwater" episode has barely any freshwater animals at all.
Overall 6/10.
Series A new gold standard for paleo-documentaries
Like everyone, I absolutely loathed The Lion King (2019), but one thought that lingered in my mind while watching it was, “Damn, if only this company utilized their incredible CGI animation for a sequel to Walking with Dinosaurs, that would be a match made in heaven”. The last thing I expected was for that wish to become a reality, let alone that it would become a reality this quickly.
Prehistoric Planet is a marvelous example of documentary making, combining MCP’s insanely realistic and stunningly detailed CGI technology with modern paleontological evidence, along with innovative and imaginative but still believable speculation, all of which come together to form one breathtaking spectacle. It’s less Walking with Dinosaurs 2.0 and more like Planet Earth with dinosaurs (and not just for David Attenborough’s narration) in terms of structure, but that’s a trivial distinction, and the approach they took not only worked, it did true wonders.
The thing that makes this series special isn’t the scientific accuracy (that’s the whole point behind a paleontological documentary and a few things, like Nanuqsaurus and Antarctopelta were kinda dead on arrival) or the insanely expensive CGI, it’s the amount of creativity, care and attention to detail in the presentation of the animals. They didn’t just settle on the tired old tropes we’ve seen a hundred times before, like sauropods lumbering around and browsing, pterosaurs snatching fish, and have their main selling point be another T. rex vs Triceratops battle, while relying on the pretty CGI to get by. No, their imaginative and informed speculation breathes SO much new life into familiar animals like tyrannosaurs, raptors, sauropods, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, and so on, which makes this series feel necessary in its existence and a logical follow-up to BBC’s previous big-budget outputs like WWD, Chased by Dinosaurs, and Planet Dinosaur, rather than just another obligatory paleo-documentary. It says something when the swimming T. rex wound up being one of the less memorable things (for me at least).
One complaint I do have is that I would have preferred it if they took the approach of the previous paleo-documentaries and showed multiple different periods spanning across the Mesozoic instead of sticking to the Maastrichtian, but the plethora of lesser-known animals and the low number of Stock Dinosaurs more than makes up for it.
To put it simply, if you’re a fan of paleontology, this is a definite recommendation, 9/10.