'Ark: The Animated Series' Season 1 Review: Plunged Into a Strange New World

Madeleine Madden, Elliot Page, Gerard Butler Michelle Yeoh, Zahn McClarnon, Devery Jacobs, and Jeffrey Wright star in the animated series.

Now Streaming: On Paramount Plus, the image of people riding dinosaurs and its generic title and description, as well as my complete ignorance of its source material, fooled me into assuming that Ark: The Animated Series was designed for children. 

Like Halo, another Paramount Plus series, Ark: The Animated Series is based on a video game. Like Halo, though, it is definitely not for children, even if it is animated and features dinosaurs in a prehistoric setting. 

First released in 2015 on a variety of platforms, Ark: Survival Evolved is "an action-adventure survival game," per Wikipedia. Ark: The Animated Series begins with Helena Walker, voiced by Madeleine Madden (The Wheel of Time) waking up in water. 

Eluding death by shark, Helena makes her way to a nearby beach, where she finds herself in a world populated by prehistoric creatures. As it happens, Helena is a university professor of  paleontology and, naturally, she is fascinated by everything she sees around her, including an extinct dodo bird. She is happily married to Victoria (Elliot Page), and just as she is contemplating the good times they have enjoyed, she is spurred to action by Bob (Karl Urban), and made aware of the continuous peril they are facing. 

With Bob's help, Helena begins to piece together this strange new world that is clouded in mystery. Bob is, or was, a US Army Ranger who fought during World War II. So why is he present? Just as pressing as the why and the where issues, one more question arises: when are they? 

The first episode is double-sized, about 48 minutes, followed by five episodes, each less than 30 minutes, that begins filling in (some of) the blanks. Game creators Jeremy Stieglitz and Jesse Rapczak created the series as well, with the first six episodes written by comic book writer Marguerite Bennett and Kendall Deacon Davis. 

With each episode, more characters are introduced, all hailing from different eras and bringing their own historic inclinations, cultural prejudices, and personal strengths to bear on the overall storyline. An overall narrative goal is driven by three artifacts that will supposedly enable the bearer to return to their own timeline. 

More fascinating than that are the mysteries of this strange world. It appears to be some kind of limbo, but it's not moored to any specific religion or ideology. It's a violent world, and it's depicted in a manner that might alarm parental units, with free-flowing blood, multiple decapitations, and many, many deaths, both animal and human. 

The series is self-rated TV-14: "Parents Strongly Cautioned. This program contains some material that many parents would find unsuitable for children under 14 years of age." The equivalent explicit violence in a movie would likely be rated R. So, parental units, just be aware. 

For adults, though, the series moves at a good pace, while slowing down to deal with serious issues, such as Aboriginal Australian rights, as well as others related to how the characters ended up in the mysterious world. The voice acting is good, with Gerard Butler bellowing as an ancient Roman General, David Tennant hissing as a mad 18th-century scientist, Michelle Yeoh as a fear-inspiring Chinese rebel leader from the 3rd Century who befriends Helena, Zahn McClarnon as an 18th-century Lakota warrior, Devery Jacobs as a 17th-century Inuit teen, and Jeffrey Wright as an 18th-century spy. 

As teased in Episode 6, another season is promised. So far, it's intriguing, the kind of show that subscribers might want to check out, without being completely compelling or compulsive watching. [Paramount Plus]