Set 66 million years in the past, as Attenborough explains, the manufacturing leverages every part we have realized about dinosaurs to craft narratives that observe the template of conventional nature fare. So viewers get to see these extinct creatures as behaving like animals, not monsters, as moms shield their younger from predators, males battle for territorial and mating rights and different circle-of-life moments, solely right here created in a pc, not filmed within the wild.
Counting “Iron Man” director Jon Favreau amongst its producers and boasting a rating courtesy of composer Hans Zimmer, the manufacturing possesses the appear and feel of a theatrical blockbuster, with an academic part woven all through it. (Every episode directs the viewers to a web page for extra details about that evening’s tales.)
The producers cleverly make use of tropes related to the type of documentaries that fill channels like BBC America and Nationwide Geographic, whereas the extent of digital visualization has clearly graduated by a next-generation magnitude over one thing like “Strolling With Dinosaurs,” an earlier model of the identical concept.
If nothing else, there’s benefit in presenting dinosaurs as what they had been — not simply big beasts, however advanced precursors to the animals roaming the pure world at this time — as an alternative of the entertainment-driven emphasis on displaying them chasing jeeps and consuming attorneys.
By portraying them as they lived in their very own time, “Prehistoric Planet” serves as a welcome reminder that the pop-culture imaginative and prescient of dinosaurs that has change into magnified within the rear-view mirror goes past simply the stuff of science fiction.
“Prehistoric Planet” premieres Could 23 and play over consecutive nights on Apple TV+. (Disclosure: My spouse works for a division of Apple.)