I never thought Walking With Dinosaurs would change my life, but here we are!
Back in 2013 my mother took me to the cinema to watch Walking With Dinosaurs: The 3D Movie.
When we left the cinema I said, as a comment of endearment toward the movie, "so, when's that coming out on DVD?"
My mother replied "you're joking."
So, I took it she didn't really like the movie. I get it, when my mother and grandmother took me to the cinema a previous time, they asked if I wanted to see WALL-E or Star Wars: The Clone Wars; being the Star Wars fanatic I chose The Clone Wars. They, sharing the opinion of thousands of others, did not like it, and I think since then my family have been a little choosier when it comes to our movies.
But, she knew I was a huge Walking With Dinosaurs fan, I have one core memory of my friend telling me about the documentary in school, we must've been 5 years old, so I locked the name "Walking With Dinosaurs" in my head and first thing I asked when I was home was "DO WE HAVE THIS ON VHS!?", oh my God, we did, he had the special edition VHS. I would watch this documentary nearly every week since then.
So, we watched the new movie. How can I best describe the feeling of watching it...
Transformative.
Yes, utterly and radically transformative.
This is the point driving me to express myself. I watched one-off movie based on an old franchise, objectively average, universally shrugged-off, and I walked out an entirely changed person.
It first struck a nostalgic chord, harkening back to the documentary, as well as a lifelong obsession for dinosaurs, it struck a familiarity chord too, as I was a huge fan of Justin Long playing the underdog (see; Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story), but what I didn't expect the movie to do was open my heart and mind to nature, beauty and self-confidence, that previously never got through to me.
There is a scene where the protagonist Patchi (Justin Long) and his love interest, Juniper (Tiya Sircar) were running with each other at night, flirting and laughing, and they stop to ponder the breathtaking cosmos above them. As they do so, they are underscored by a beautiful western folk song, sung with softness, with conviction, with a spiritual and soulful depth that tore open my core and imbued me with a terrifically overwhelming feeling of wonder, and, mortality. This song was "Ends of the Earth", by Lord Huron, and it was the first song I ever "discovered" and ever loved - up until this point I didn't like music except for gaming and anime songs.
I want to drag you to the cinema and experience that moment with me. I can hardly give justice to the feeling, it empowered me, it destroyed me, it set me alight, it humbled me, how, how did CGI dinosaurs do this?
Let me expand, as best as I can, on the feeling of mortality which came with it. I have long believed dinosaurs to be so popular as an allegory for us humans. Think of it, we grow up learning and loving dinosaurs, we are so fascinated by them, we played as them, dress as them, watch media about them, all with the knowledge that they were utterly wiped out an incomprehensible amount of years ago.
To me, dinosaurs are our first lesson that things we love die. Dinosaurs have almost stirred melancholy in me, to this day, there is a wound within me, unhealed, it is a pit of nostalgia and love I have for the creatures, yet deep and wistful in the knowledge that they are extinct, that the earth of prehistory is alien compared to our earth.
This movie, this song, this feeling, utterly floored me. It was the innocent love between Patchi and Juniper, it was their relatable wonder of the incomprehensible cosmos, it was a feeling I suddenly shared with creatures hundreds of millions of years long dead, on the same earth they shared - this world is beautiful, and I want to see it, to the ends of the earth,
won't you follow me?