Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Having reviewed almost every documentary about prehistoric life from BBC I thought to end with this series ,the almost forgotten Monsters We Met, which shows what happened when we came into a new environment, mostly to the creatures that called these places their home before us.The locations are North America, Australia and New Zealand and when I first saw the series I was terrified with the devastating presence that it was depicted humans had to the area especially in New Zealand where ones huge birds ruled these land not to long ago. This series was definitely made in order to open our eyes to the impact that we have to our environment and that these creatures aren't the real monsters but we are. And the message isn't wrong ,far from it, considering our modern lifestyle it is quit urgent to rethink your place in the world.But the series has some major drawback which make the weakest from the BBC line up:1)The animation for many of the creatures is the worst from all the series, now I know it a TV budget , however the BBC documentaries have always provide excellent quality of CGI before.2) The message is to on the nose and mean-spirited, for it shows the humans as the sole to blame for all these extinctions and in short shows us as an infection to the planet.3) Although the title makes you think that you are going to see many creatures in all honesty we saw a very small scope and the end comes to soon.4) It is honestly boring, dispute the many interesting things shown in the series, the truth is that you feels that the episodes take forever to end and even the ending isn't all that satisfying5) The feel that this series was made by a Caucasian crew with little to no knowledge of the cultures portrait here, it in all honest shows them as equally bad a the European settlers.In the end here we have a passable documentary series ,which had the potential of becoming the Princess Mononoke of Prehistory but it end up as an angry hippie who says what is wrong and gives zero solutions to the problem.

This was a co-production between BBC and Animal Planet, and so there are two versions of this show, one was released on Animal Planet in the US under the title "Land of Lost Monsters". As for the UK version, it is known as "Monsters We Met". BBC released the UK version was released in three episodes (as demonstrated on IMDb) and the US version aired as one special. William Hootkins brings the US audiences' thrills to life with his energetic quality coupled with a couple of humorous one-liners while Ian Holm brings the UK into the darkest parts of human history and shows us the disgusting atrocities human settlers have done to the foreign lands we traveled. The programs both show us how early humans dealt with traveling for the first time through Australia, North America, and New Zealand as well as the unique megafauna of each part of the world. The films are also accompanied with awesome footage from BBC's "Walking with Beasts", "Walking with Cavemen", "Wild New World"/"Prehistoric America". The US Version incorporates more footage from these shows than the UK version does. The animals in North America are re-created with the same computer models from "Wild New World" ("Prehistoric America") along with animatronics interacting with live animals.My perfect 10 rating goes to the English version for: it's wonderful soundtrack, it's talented narrator, thorough exploration of each new land, and the compelling and even more chilling message it tells its viewers. That we have destroyed our own world, and the animals that reside and once resided within. It then goes to show how once humans ran out of resources, how they turned on one another for claim of the scares necessities. And while it mainly claims that people destroyed the world, it shows a few glimmers of positive outlooks on the Maori and Native Americans after they saw the error of their ways.I give a 6 goes to the American version because it still had the same footage, stats of some of the major beasts, a gripping narrator, footage from BBC's "Walking with Prehistoric Beasts", chronological presentation of each part of the world, and a few great soundtracks, but it was an insult to me as an American. It ends without the serious dread and truth of humanity's monstrosity and shows some irrelevant footage of a space shuttle being launched, and never directly faults people as the causes of the extinctions.Both versions are hard to find, but greatly entertaining and educational. But if you watch one, you should watch the other. It's also compelling to see the same film from both perspectives of the two film companies who made this happen.

At first I had expected this to be a documentary about the prehistoric giant animals that people actually met during their evolution. In part, this is exactly what it was about, each episode describing the strange fauna encountered by small groups of human explorers. The first one was the Americas, the second episode described the human colonization of Australia and in the end New Zeeland.But even from the first episode, one could see the animals for a short bit, then humans would cause their extinction, through over hunting either them or their prey. Soon after each human infestation of a new place, weird and wonderful animals disappeared completely, whether we are talking of the giant lizard Megalania 15 thousand years ago or the Haas eagle, in the 13th century.In the end, a thing that had become clear only through watching, without the narrator hinting to it one bit, was made obvious: humans spread like a bacterial disease, uncontrolled, destroying everything natural in their path, their destiny, repeated again and again, being to remain out of resources, fight each other and either learn to moderate their consumption or perish completely, like was the case of the Easter Island civilization: the only Polynesian civilization to produce writing, transforming their island in a barren land, unfit for life, then collapsing into brutal wars and cannibalism.Bottom line: even if a bit slow at times, it made for excellent watching. It shows a pattern of human behavior that is not described in any history book and spans too much time to be learned from experience. What was funny is that both Amerindian and Maui cultures reached a point in which they respected the land and nature and did not hunt or overuse resources indiscriminately, after wreaking havoc on their lands. Then the Europeans came. How are we going to end up?