– Lewis Adds Thespian Class –
by Neil Fisher | The Times | July 9, 2025
4 out of 5 stars
London’s Lightroom, the King’s Cross venue baptised in 2023 with a memorable David Hockney immersive experience, has just finished its show about Vogue magazine and Anna Wintour’s long reign. So it made sense to follow that spectacle about a well-preserved apex predator with Prehistoric Planet: Discovering Dinosaurs, the venue’s big summer holiday offering.
Can you survive an encounter with these scaly beasts as they claw and clobber each other, prowling around four walls while you quail in the middle, surrounded by ocean waves or volcanic sands? Yes, but take a three-year-old boy, as I did, and the gift shop — one on each floor, it’s inescapable — might turn out to be the real battle of wills.
The show is a team-up with AppleTV+’s acclaimed series, although narrator David Attenborough (currently fronting a different immersive experience at the Natural History Museum) has been swapped for the voice of Damian Lewis.
Lewis adds thespian class, and also, sometimes, a seductive tone in the manner of the Nescafé gold-blend ads. “Their snouts brush,” Lewis purrs over a meet-cute for a T.Rex pair. “They’re not here to fight …” The resulting scene of Coitus Tyrannosaurus is tastefully filmed behind some convenient foliage.
Discovering Dinosaurs has to tick a lot of boxes: there’s no minimum age, and the show itself is under an hour (tickets are £25 for adults, there are family options). So we need to get round some basic palaeontology, hit all the life stages — hunting, mating, hatching — and see enough drama on earth, in the air and in the sea.
Delivered with pin-sharp photorealist graphics, the sequences that feel freshest take us to unexpected settings. Underwater, a 17-metre mosasaurus fails to catch a pregnant plesiosaur (mixed sympathies — this toothy mum-to-be looks just as terrifying) before the latter gives birth to a three-metre baby. And on cliffs, a group of wily velociraptors (feathery and the size of a turkey — Jurassic Park was very wrong) almost balletically predate upon a roosting flock of pterosaurs.
The “science stuff” is more broad-brush. The six sections of the film feel more or less arbitrary, with facts lightly sprinkled across each one. A detour into the cultural significance of the dinosaur is interesting food for thought (“symbols of what lingers in the dark!” booms Lewis, going full Olivier) but tails off, more tantalising than educative.
Why are we obsessed with dinosaurs? Lewis reckons they are “close enough to haunt us, far enough not to hurt us’’. More conveniently, they don’t need paying and you can whizz them up in a studio without having to even go outside.
Read the rest of the original article at The Times