Dinotopia

How, who and why was it decided that this story needed FOUR HOURS to be told? It’s the flimsiest of plot lines that goes in the expected trajectory with no deviations from it, no surprises in the narrative along the way, yet it is still bloated and padded with loads of filler. Unfunny and contradictory elements abound, and I haven’t even begun to discuss the terrible acting or the strangest sense of wondering why so many talented British actors agreed to play supporting parts in this mess.

Dinotopia also has me worked up for a very simple reason: as someone who read the picture books as a kid, and some of the novels based on the property, this is not a good, fair or even decent treatment of the material. Jettisoning the Victorian setting, and the ingenious steam-punk images and gadgetry along with it, Dinotopia fails to find the correct amount of whimsy that the books possessed, transforming the culture into a thinly sketched thing and placing the power source into Sun Stones which somehow have the magical ability to ward off dangerous dinosaurs. There’s also the simplistic mantra of “Find the light” repeated ad nauseam, it makes Game of Thrones insistence on repeating “Winter is coming” look tame by comparison.

There is nothing going on with this story beyond the artifice on top. Sure, Dinotopia gets a middling grade from me, but it’s purely from a visual standpoint. I’m assuming most of the budget went into crafting lavish sets, costumes and, for the time and a TV-budget, pretty solid special effects work. While it never really does much to build up the culture or generate enough interest to make us care, Dinotopia does give us the building blocks to a grand fantasy world.

The problem is probably the involvement of Hallmark in making this thing. At all costs their increasingly lavish, and increasingly dwindling artistically, output of overly long fantastical TV mini-series’ must appeal to a broadly drawn audience. Yet the series is trying so very hard to make us feel awe and wonderment, nudging to the point of cattle-prodding us into gaining a reaction. There’s plenty of random and amateurish cuts to sweeping vistas populated with roaming dinosaurs and busy, but without any kind of eye for detail or sense of composition, shots of life in various cities and towns in the land. It’s hollow, eye candy for the sake of it without providing anything for these visuals to build upon like interesting characters or a dynamic plot.

To say the characters are 2D is an insult to 2D characters. They’re moronically bland and poorly acted by a trio of attractive but lifeless leads. Outsider half-brothers who must learn to love and respect each other while adjusting to life in this strange new world might sound like ripe dramatically fertile ground to explore, and in more capable hands it would’ve been even if well-known story beats were bound to occur. But here something as life-changing as their father’s supposed death is treated with a shrug and a let’s get going blankness. But Wentworth Miller and Tyron Leitso are very attractive to stare at, even if the words coming out of their mouths are both ridiculously stupid and delivered with all the believable emotionality of a coma patient.

But it’s not like any of the Dinotopian residents are given any better to work with. Katie Carr as Marion, the girl stuck in the non-existent love triangle between the two brothers and heir apparent to the ruling of the land, is plainly pretty, but has all of the emotional complexity of a doll. Worse yet, talented actors are stuck playing this stoic, noble characters with no dramatic weight to them whatsoever. Jim Carter and Alice Krige play Marion’s parents are the best example of this problem. They’re tradition-bound, staid and so in tune with community and peaceful living that there’s nothing engaging or interesting about them. Krige and Carter are often left adrift with nothing to do and looking quite bored or hammily overacting most of the time in order to try and spin this into some kind of gold.

There are adorable touches, clearly aimed at the youngest of viewers which demonstrate that maybe some charm could have done this thing a world of good. Leitso’s rebellious character getting stuck with a baby triceratops comes to mind, or his trying to teach a talking (the only dinosaurs that can actually speak English, while the rest talk in guttural moans and other animalistic sounds) dinosaur how to play table tennis. In general, the second episode is the “best” of the group as it finds a minor dramatic story to build itself upon. That one breaks the three characters up and sees them trying to learn the ways and skill-sets of Dinotopia. It’s not too much, but if the third episode had managed to build upon it more, then it would have turned out slightly better.

Then is also the overall looming issue of length. Four hours was totally unnecessary to completely tell this journey from start to finish, and stuffing in as much cute as possible doesn’t keep us engaged. Cute makes you feel like you ate too many sweets in one sitting without some kind of drama, depth or tension to build upon. Any chance to explore darker recesses of the mythology is quickly dissipated, lest we scare the children I guess.

I made it through all three episodes, because I hate quitting books, movies or TV shows no matter what. I committed to it so I have to see it through to the bitter end. As a fan of fantasy, there hasn’t been enough work put in to explain the logic of this world or careful thought into the everyday details. It’s like they took a random sampling of the images from the books and tried to reproduce them without much thought into the characters they would be populating the story with. As a dinosaur fan, well, there’s certainly plenty of that on display. To borrow a quote from a much better dinosaur property, they spared no expense.