Prehistoric Planet: Discovering Dinosaurs

This King’s Cross Lightroom now has surely the weirdest repertoire of any venue in London, possibly the world. With an oeuvre based around massive megabit projection-based immersive films, its shows so far have been a David Hockney exhibition, a Tom Hanks-narrated film about the moon landings, a Vogue documentary and a visualiser for Coldplay’s upcoming album.

It’s such a random collection of concepts that it’s hard to say there was or is anything ‘missing’ from the extremely esoteric selection of bases covered. But certainly, as the school summer holidays roll around it’s very welcome to see it add an overtly child-friendly show to its roster.

Bar a short Coldplay break, Prehistoric Planet: Discovering Dinosaurs will play daily at Lightroom from now until at least the end of October half-term. It is, as you would imagine, a dinosaur documentary. And indeed, if the name rings a specific bell it’s because it’s culled from the David Attenborough-narrated Apple TV series of the same name.

It’s quite the remix, though: Attenborough is out, and Damian Lewis is in, delivering a slightly melodramatic voiceover that lacks Sir David’s colossal gravitas but is, nonetheless, absolutely fine. Presumably Attenborough is absent because he’s very busy and very old, because while the film reuses several of the more spectacular setpieces from the TV series, it’s sufficiently different that repurposing the old narration would be a stretch.

Any child with any degree of fondness for the mesozoic era will surely have a great time

Essentially the 50-minute experience is sub-divided into six mini documentaries, which have a wealth of high-quality pre-existing CGI to draw upon, supplemented by new bits that add an agreeable educational aspect. A bit where life-sized dinosaurs are projected on the walls and audience members are invited to come up and stand next to them undoubtedly lacks the astronomical production values of the bits from the TV show, but it is also really, really fun.

And of course, it’s not like we’re just sitting there watching it on a big telly: it’s thrilling to see battling dreadnoughtus, courting tyrannosaurs, and sweet baby sauropods at huge, almost overwhelming scale. There’s a particularly impressive scene where a trio of crafty velociraptors pick their way down some cliffs to ambush some nesting pterosaurs – the pack’s murderous journey spirals its way around the walls of the room until they encounter their prey. It obviously doesn’t hurt that it’s genuinely tremendous CGI, that stands up to being blown up to giant scale (it’s far better than the BBC’s recent second season of Walking with Dinosaurs).

Basically, it looks great, it sounds great, and it’s pretty informative, and any child with any degree of fondness for the mesozoic era will surely have a great time whether or not they’ve seen the original docs. 

The standard caveat with Lightroom is that it’s expensive: although kids’ tickets are cheaper than adult ones and there’s a small family discount, a family of four is probably looking at something like £80 for a one-hour film (though as child tickets are cheaper it’s better value proportionally if only one adult goes). Is this reasonable? I’m always suspicious of stuff aimed at children where accompanying adults have to pay more. That said, the film has been created specially for the venue, and higher-than-the-cinema prices are surely inevitable. Prehistoric Planet is not cheap. But if you can afford it, it’s a spectacular hour for dinophiles of all ages.