1999’s Walking with Dinosaurs is arguably one of the most pivotal moments in time for paleo-media. Before then, Hollywood-level VFX were mainly used for movies and general entertainment. But showrunner Tim Haines and his team did something revolutionary: he used CGI and animatronics to bring dinosaurs back to life for a nature documentary, allowing audiences to visualize an approximation of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures living life as actual animals. Few documentaries were able to come close to its achievement. Twenty-three years later, the world was once again blown away by a docuseries depiction of prehistoric creatures. Twenty-three years later, BBC and Apple TV+ gave us Prehistoric Planet.

Taking format inspiration from Planet Earth, even going as far as to get David Attenborough to narrate, Prehistoric Planet was lauded by critics and audiences for its incredible VFX, but also for how authentically it presented prehistoric life. It really felt like a camera crew went out an filmed dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and other animals in the late Cretaceous. 

I sincerely enjoyed season one of Prehistoric Planet quite a bit, and it features the best dinosaur CGI I have ever seen. Season two is hard to talk about, because while it has no overt issues, it retreads familiar ground to a fault. It stays in the same time period as season one and even covers some of the same animals as the first season. Considering both season one and two had 5 episodes each, the show would have been better off having one 10-episode season. Alas, we instead had a season 2 that feels repetitive.

Thankfully, Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age already fixes my main problem with season 2 by shifting topics entirely. Now, we follow what life was like roughly 300,000 years ago, long after the dinosaurs went extinct.

Another core difference between this season and the previous entries is that unlike the first two David Attenborough-narrated seasons, this season is narrated by Tom Hiddleston. Some fans might be disappointed by Attenborough not returning, but Hiddleston as his replacement was a fine pick to replace him. He does the job about as well as Attenborough, and he does not impact the quality of this season in any way. 

Once again, the visuals are outstanding. This show has legitimately some of the best VFX I’ve ever seen on television. The fur on some of these creatures is so intricately detailed. There is a Gigantopithecus (the largest ape ever known), featured in an episode, and it visually rivals the quality of the apes in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Other animals, like woolly mammoths, are given an interesting new look. Unlike previous reconstructions, where they have some fur on them, these creatures are caked in layers of thick fur, much like a musk ox. There are also creatures that haven’t been portrayed in a major documentary like this in quite some time. One such example being the Macrauchenia, those camel-looking animals with an elephant-like trunk in the animated movie Ice Age. In Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age, they do away with the trunk and give it a more squishy, bulgy-looking nose.

It may not sound like a lot, but with creatures that haven’t been shown to a wide audience in over 20 years, documentaries like this really should be showing what these animals look like according to what modern studies show. We are lucky that this series excels so thoroughly at that.

There is also a lot of variety in locations in the series. The ice age was not just constant snow and ice everywhere, and this season makes sure you know this. In fact, you see how the ice age affected the entire globe, including Australia, which became extremely dry and created vast deserts, and we also see some of the strangest creatures to have lived since the dinosaurs went extinct. 

But while this season has some jaw-dropping achievements, it is not without flaws. For one, the music isn’t as memorable as the first two seasons. The first two had a grand theme that doesn’t appear here. Especially compared to the very character-driven score in Walking with Beasts, nothing about the music here stands out. The other core issue is that the science is way too oversimplified. For about two-thirds of the animals featured in the season, they don’t say their names, they just give a vague description of them. This is a problem because the whole point of a nature documentary like this is to educate the viewer on what they are watching. You cannot just refer to a Megalonyx as a mere “ground sloth” and nothing more when you feature two other species of ground sloth in the show and even mention that there are over fifty different species of ground sloth. It is not just confusing from a perspective of not being able to tell some animals apart, but also from a location perspective. The show does not always tell you what place it is currently focusing on, so when it moves on to a new location, I often felt disoriented. 

Despite its faults, Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age is still a very good paleo documentary. It has VFX that rivals even the best blockbusters’ animal CGI, truly compelling theories about just what happened during this frosty time period, and portrayals of fascinating creatures that don’t always get the limelight. If any of that sounds intriguing to you, I would highly recommend this series.

8/10