Change Your Image
Aeternum4
Reviews
Life on Our Planet (2023)
Walking with Monsters, Dinosaurs and Beasts all-in-one
We should not be taking prehistoric wildlife documentaries like these for granted. The fact that I mentioned programs that came out more than 20 years ago says something about the rarity of high quality projects like these. It was not until Prehistoric Planet that we finally got something that echoed what made BBC's Walking with series so special, and I am very satisfied with this documentary as well.
Life on Our Planet has great scope, delving into a multitude of different subjects. Mass extinctions, evolution, climates, habitats, plants, arthropods, cephalopods, amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs/birds, mammals and much more. It travels through time back and forth to show the lives of animals that went extinct and those that still exist today. Life on Our Planet is beautiful, tragic and educational.
I will be rewatching it pretty soon. Of course I hope more of these kind of documentaries will be made in the future. The only thing that could make Prehistoric Planet and Life on Our Planet even more interesting is a narrative focus on a specific animal, something that made the Walking with series so compelling.
Prehistoric Planet (2022)
It feels like I've been waiting for this for a lifetime
This is it. This is it. The worthy successor to Walking with Dinosaurs has arrived. I've been waiting for this since 1999. I've seen many documentaries about prehistoric life in the last two decades, but none have lived up to what Walking with Dinosaurs, Beasts and Monsters have done. But Prehistoric Planet succeeds where others have failed.
The first episode I've seen has been an amazing experience. The natural environment looks astonishing. I cannot recognize the difference between the real and computer-generated locations. The prehistoric animals themselves are extremely convincing in their appearance, movements, sounds and behavior. Prehistoric Planet focuses on all sorts of different species, big and small, living in the water, on land and in the air. It reveals a complex well rounded prehistoric ecosystem.
Having seen the majority of wildlife documentaries that Sir David Attenbrough has narrated throughout his lifetime, I find it quite remarkable that he is able to talk about computer-generated animals with the same believability and conviction as he does with present day animal species. I am looking forward to seeing the next four episodes and hope it will lead to similar documentaries in the many years to come.
Prehistoric Planet is everything I wanted it to be. 10/10.
Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)
Original? No. Efficient? Yes.
Dark Fate recycles all its material from the previous movies. Literally everything can be traced back to a concept, scene or plot point from The Terminator, Judgement Day, Rise of the Machines, Salvation and Genysis. But the atmosphere is so much better than the previous sequels that it works somehow. It is darker and more serious. The action scenes work very well and Linda Hamilton is definitely the emotional core of the movie. I wished the movie was a little bit more original and less stuffed with fake computer generated imagery. But overall I'm very content with what we got.