WHY DINOSAURS?

WHY DINOSAURS? was watched as part of the Seattle International Film Festival 2024! It had its showing on Saturday, May 11th as part of the festival, and it was the World premiere of this film!

WHY DINOSAURS? shouts at you while asking the question…why do people get fascinated over dinosaurs?

Apparently they are badass and mysterious isn’t enough of an obvious answer.

The goal of this documentary is to try and get a deeper answer than that. And so it is going to look into the history of finding fossils and the science/time it takes to put things together. It is going to look into many real scientists who are on the field and have real stories, real successes, and real failures. It is going to look into some of the dinosaur experts who were used to work on Jurassic Park, the decisions they made with the dinosaurs, what they wanted them to do, and why they had them look or act in various different ways. Based on science!

And you know, kids and other people too are talked to I guess.

The camera man never gets love, so let’s love him now.

For a documentary to exist, I really hope it can bring something new to the table, and for the most part, I don’t think WHY DINOSAURS? does really anything at all new. There is a decent size chunk focused on Jurassic Park, its legacy, and talking with people involved in the film. If this was actually a documentary on Jurassic Park and its legacy and the making of the films and decisions, with a lot of deep dives, it would have given us something new and interesting to look at.

The most part however this just feels like an episode on any random nature show. Talking with scientists about paleontology and dinosaurs. There isn’t really anything new and interesting here. There are SO MANY TV show based documentaries that go into dinosaur deep dives and interesting people and research. I can’t name any, because its just something that is out there, or used to be out there. Like documentary shows on the making of food, or on cultural healing. These are just things out there.

I just don’t understand the added purpose of this documentary in the lexicon. Like, maybe it was just a labor of love, and good practice for other things. But the topic has been done more times than the number of extinct dinosaurs.