Have always been fascinated by dinosaurs, whether reading about them or seeing documentaries and films on them. Love documentaries, especially those of the national treasure that is David Attenborough, and admire to love a lot of the late John Hurt's filmography. So my expectations for 'Planet Dinosaur' were quite big and that's an understatement.Expectations that were actually mostly lived up to, a good thing for me having seen my fair share of wastes of potential recently. 'Planet Dinosaur' is not one of the best documentaries personally seen (far from it), and there are better ones on the subject of dinosaurs. It is also not as ground-breaking as 'Walking with Dinosaurs', as far as dinosaur documentaries go, still a big achievement to this day. Standing on its own without comparing it to anything, 'Planet Dinosaur' was very interesting and mostly very well done.'Planet Dinosaur' isn't perfect. The dinosaur effects are stiff, hasty-looking and lack finesse too often, though there are some grand ones. At times, it gets a bit repetitive, especially in the last two episodes agreed.It sometimes is on the biased side, rather than a multi-dimensional picture of the dinosaurs they can be described in a certain way and viewpoint and one is not offered another.However, when it comes to how it's written, 'Planet Dinosaur' does just as good a job entertaining and teaching, it's all very sincerely done and it never feels like a sermon. There are things here that are common sense and knowledge but one is taught a huge deal as well.John Hurt's (RIP) narration delivery is similarly spot-on, very sensitively delivered and very dignified in a distinctively John Hurt way. Bias aside, the narration is comprehensive and sincere, with a good balance of things known to me and things new to me (really like it when documentaries do that), as well as compelling.Visually, 'Planet Dinosaur' may lack the awe-inspiring, almost cinematic quality one anticipates. With that being said, it is beautifully shot, shot in a fluid and non-static way. The sceneries and landscapes can be beautiful but also they can be at other times they can be rendered a bit flatly, would have been better with the real settings. Every episode is appropriately scored, never intrusive or too low-key. There is fun, tension and pathos throughout and the dinosaurs, prey and predator, are like characters that one cares for in the same way they do a human. The fossil evidence, very well researched and grounded rather than speculative, and the science, which in no way sounds like gibberish or like it was made up as they went along (a lot of homework was done in this regard) are also notable assets.Overall, very good though with flaws that stop it from being great. 8/10 Bethany Cox

Scientific issues aside, Walking With Dinosaurs was an immense success because it drew viewers into the lives of prehistoric creatures. They were living, breathing creatures, and audiences couldn't help but care about their fates.Planet Dinosaur has two things going for it: solid science, and a great actor doing voice-over. In all other ways, it is greatly inferior to a series made a decade and a half before.It is ugly, which for a big, expensive "spectacle" show is unforgivable. Every visual aspect is terrible: WWD's lush real-world locations have been replaced with flat, bland CGI backgrounds that would look disappointing in a video game; the dinosaur models are beautiful, but they are stiffly animated which makes them feel completely devoid of life; and the entire finished product is just terribly rendered. This is abysmal CGI, and the BBC bragging about how it only cost one third of WWD's budget is not a selling point; it's an explanation for why it's so damned ugly.It would have been so easy for the BBC to hire Impossible Pictures and the whole WWD crew and make a sequel series that kept the heart and soul of what made WWD great while polishing up its more problematic aspects. Instead we get Planet Dinosaur, a series so ugly to look at it makes it seem like it was made BEFORE Walking With Dinosaurs, not more than a decade after.I was so thrilled that the BBC had made another dinosaur series, but the finished result is deeply disappointing. I am one seriously unhappy dinosaur nerd.

Planet Dinosaur has magnificent, realistic, dynamic direction and SFX that serve to put you into the frame with the gargantuan beasts. The informative narrative puts you further - into the mind of these creatures, as they go through their respective daily grinds. PD mainly focuses on the big boys - the titans who are truly the movers and shakers in their environment. When you watch these giants engage in enterprises like mass hunts or migrations, the events on-screen take on truly epic proportions.The series uses appropriate props like maps and anatomical drawings to help you gain a better understanding of the dramas unfolding before you.Very well-made, visually and viscerally impressive. 8/10.

The best thing about Planet Dinosaur is not the CGI, the narration or the story (not that there is much of the latter). No, the best thing about the show is that it describes the fossil evidence for almost everything it, er, shows. From a bone broken by a stegosaur to a bed of eggs, when you see it on screen, you can be sure it's backed up by science and will be explained soon after, if it hasn't already been, with few exceptions.The rest of the show leaves something to be desired. Yes, the animals are quite detailed. However, the animation is of somewhat poor quality, despite the fact that a lot of effort has clearly been put into it. In particular, there is no sense of weight to the dinosaurs: when two carnivores collide, it feels as if two small stones banged into each other, rather than two towering animals intent on hurting one another. Given that every episode features multiple struggles between predator and prey or predator and predator, this is a problem. At many points they feel disconnected from even the ground itself. In addition to the lack of weight, their movements in general are either too jerky or too smooth, almost never at the right point in the spectrum.Planet Dinosaur repeats things a lot, especially in the last two episodes, where I think most of the salient facts were covered thrice over. The writing, too, is not quite up to scratch. The constant search for synonyms for 'monster' is a major offender. In many cases, the gravity of the narration seems very forced… it just doesn't gel with the image.This series is overall a major step in the right direction. Introducing the general public—myself included—to the discoveries that we base our knowledge of dinosaurs upon in such an interesting fashion is to be commended. I just expected more, and I hope we will get it in the future.