Dinosaurs are back on our screens, after the excellent Apple TV series Prehistoric Planet in recent years. Now Netflix is returning to the subject with another production featuring big names: The Dinosaurs boasts Steven Spielberg as producer and the team behind Life on Our Planet, effects by Industrial Light & Magic, and a charismatic voice, at least in the original, in the form of Morgan Freeman. The result is good in this case too, with only one concern, which we will explain below.
Dinosaurs, from beginning to end
The title may be considered too direct and banal, but the meaning of The Dinosaurs is precisely that: to place this group of animals at the center of the story, from beginning to end. And we start from the conclusion, immediately hinting at what happened 66 million years ago and then jumping back about 150 million years, dwelling on the era of the supercontinent Pangea and the emergence of the small Marasuco, capable of something revolutionary for those times: knowing how to stand on two legs.
We are 235 million years ago, among Rincosaurians and other reptiles, on a planet very different from the one we know, where these adaptations gave these early dinosauromorphs a crucial advantage: they were born to run, which was essential for survival in those days. Still not enough to dominate, however, because it would only be the arrival of a natural catastrophe that would shift the balance, penalize the reptiles of the previous era, and cause dinosaurs to proliferate, eventually conquering every ecological niche. Until that end mentioned at the beginning, to close the circle.
The excellent staging of The Dinosaurs
The story of The Dinosaurs is structured to retrace all this, with four chapters that make the journey clear from their titles: Rise, Conquest, Empire, and Fall. Four steps in the evolutionary history of dinosaurs that the series outlines with extreme visual care, with impressive staging and equally impressive sound support. The series produced by Spielberg, who returns to the world of dinosaurs with great conviction, is as glorious a journey as that of its protagonists, but one that, by necessity, cannot be particularly detailed or complete.
It is more of an overview, a digression that does not aim to be exhaustive, but focuses on specific moments and examples, from the aforementioned Marasuco to Compsognatus, from sauropods to Stegosaurus, with the merit of mentioning some lesser-known species, such as Plateosaurus, which was the first to reach a considerable size, or the first bird dinosaurs, or a tyrannosaur less well known than the famous T. Rex, such as Yutyrannus with its characteristic plumage. All of this is brought to the screen with incredible visual effects, but suffers from having to summarize the entire 150 million-year period during which these animals were the protagonists on our planet.
At our side
A journey that did not end with the asteroid impact 66 million years ago, as the documentary series wisely points out: the final moments of “The Dinosaurs” offer an impressive parallel between current species and some of the animals shown in earlier episodes, as we have rarely seen in such contexts. We see the first aquatic dinosaurs alternating with modern penguins, a Tyrannosaurus feeding on prey on the ground parallel to a modern bird of prey, a running dinosaur, and an ostrich.
We all know by now that some dinosaurs did not become extinct and that bird-like dinosaurs still live among us, but representing this continuity between past and present is something that is rarely done in these contexts. Credit goes to the Netflix series, which is an excellent way to get an initial overview of the world of these wonderful animals, which can then be explored in greater depth with other recent productions that run parallel to it, offering other types of insights and approaches.
Conclusions
Visually striking and well-crafted in terms of sound, The Dinosaurs is an excellent overview of the entire dinosaur era, from its origins to the catastrophe 66 million years ago that led to mass extinction. By its very nature, it does not aim to be comprehensive and may leave a slightly bitter taste in the mouth of those who would like something more in-depth on the subject, but it provides an excellent overview of the 150 million years of domination of these magnificent animals.
