Dinosaur Love Review – The T-Rex Game Is More Fun
I first stopped watching this series after five episodes, then resumed seeing the rest after a few weeks just so I could write the review with a better perspective. And no, the remaining episodes weren’t much better. “Dinosaur Love” is a Thai college romance, with almost no story, so it’s funny that it needed two directors – Tonnam Piamchon Damrongsunthornchai & Zaanook Jukkroww Nipitpon Muangsinun – or maybe it’s the case of “too many cooks spoil the broth”.
Zaanook directed the 2022 series “Remember Me”, which was a bittersweet nostalgic show about childhood friendships and love, “Dinosaur Love” on the other hand is completely forgettable and quite cringe-y. The ten episode follows senior Engineering student Dino (Pepper Pongpat Unhapipatpong), who falls in love with cute junior Rak Passakorn(Kong Montree Pattarachitphinyo) and aggressively pursues him. More than half the series is about the courtship and then the last few episodes show how Dino becomes overtly possessive and then the two encounter a few random problems and suddenly the show ends.
The screenplay for the series was choppy, with several abrupt transitions and sudden change of scenes. For some reason, the creators seem to be obsessed with making everything look too bright, so all actors have too much make-up on and there’s a bright filter running throughout the runtime, with a lot of overexposed shots. If that’s not bad enough, the background score was just terrible. Dinosaur Love included lots of cartoon kind of sounds, meant to add comedic effect, a lot like the exaggerated effects you would hear in shows like “Tom & Jerry”. The choice of background sounds would be absurdly ridiculous in some scenes; for example, there’s a scene where Dino is meeting his family and other guests to discuss marriage, and there’s a crow-like cawing sound accompanying their interaction; it is meant to be comedic, but isn’t funny at all. I wondered if the sound was coming from somewhere else and even paused the episode to double check if I had something else playing on a different tab, that’s how irritating the effect was.
There was something off about Pepper Pongpat Unhapipatpong and Kong Montree Pattarachitphinyo as lead couple Dino and Rak. Despite several romantic scenes between the two, their chemistry was mechanical and a lot of it also had to do with the awful direction. Both their characters are single-dimensional and stereotypical. Dino is an alpha male who pursues his target relentlessly, while Rak’s character is like a dumb innocent damsel in distress. The juvenilization (it’s not a word, but still) of Rak was extremely irritating to watch. Nicknamed ‘bunny’ by Dino, Rak is like a thirteen-year-old lost child with no individual thought, instead of an adult college student. The actors too didn’t have enough charm to rise above the plot’s ridiculousness.
Here’s the most hilarious thing about “Dinosaur Love”, it starts with a bunch of different college students discussing famous campus love stories and that’s when they start to narrate Dino and Rak’s romance, but by the end of the show, the opening trope is completely forgotten. It’s like the creators were under some tight deadline to finish filming the series, so they just served viewers a rushed romance with a string of repetitive scenes and random shenanigans. None of the sub-plots and secondary characters were even necessary in the tale. This should have been a 3 episode mini-series. Playing the pixelated T-Rex game that appears on Chrome when your internet isn’t working is more enjoyable than watching “Dinosaur Love.”
Rating – 3 on 10. The show is on IQIYI
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