Why are there no good dinosaur films?
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Aliens successfully changed genres, from horror to action. But subsequent movies could never recapture the primal horror of the original or the fun action of the second. It's almost like there are only two local optima in the Alien movie universe and Alien + Aliens took them both.
Terminator is the same. The first movie was a perfect sci-fi action movie, with a trippy premise and loads of fun. The second was a subversion of the first: the Terminator is the good guy! And that worked too. But after that, where else can you go?
And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix.
The character of Reese in particular is very well crafted. A homeless Vietnam vet that you might find in LA in the early eighties. Totally paranoid, totally disconnected/alienated from "modern" society, equipped for a time and place that is totally disconnected from the world he is dumped into. There is a dialogue about institutional failure woven throughout the film: the cops (I'll point out: Arnold executes an entire police station full of cops in this film! Can you imagine that on screen today?) and especially the psychiatrist. Totally incapable of dealing with the demon that haunts the main characters.
There is a dialogue about heroism -- John Connor is apparently a hero, but none of the characters actually feel heroic, they're all just terrified, haunted, and helpless. There is this incredibly "important" thing (the war) but none of the characters actually feel it that way, nor does society. The portrayal of LA -- the cops, the gritty alleyways, the nightclub, the crappy motels... it's LA as experienced by a Vietnam vet.
The first Terminator movie stands head and shoulders above all others in the franchise. It's a truly incredible film and far underrated critically, I really recommend re-watching it with this in mind.
Having rewatched T1 very recently, I couldn't agree more with this. At one point I turned to my partner and asked what genre this actually was because all things pointed to horror.
#3 was not a good movie. But that scene has stayed with me longer than many scenes in much better movies.
Sure, he couldn't have done the things he did in the second movie, escape the Merovingian, steal the Keymaker, rescue everyone, etc, without his powers in the Matrix, but at the same time, they don't actually solve the problem of the War.
And it isn't just a power escalation cycle, like Lensmen or DBZ -- he doesn't level up in each movie to become Even More Powerful to defeat Even Greater Threats.
I rewatched the first one the other day and for the most part the visuals and CGI have held up over time, barely any "oh man this is bad CGI lmao" moments. Which somehow got worse with later films, e.g. the Hobbit having a lot of "this is obviously cgi lmao what is this".
Niobe/Ghost covering important plot on my ps2 that just fit around and into scenes from the film. For me that was a complete first.
Animatrix also had one of those iirc
Twilight! did you see Edward's skin in the sun!? you do realize the fact that you omit this marks you as Team Jacob, so much for your opsec.
Brief moments at the start of Interstellar
Matrix 4 introduced „good machines” but didn’t do much of anything with them :|
Maybe except for the meta-commentary in the first act where the lead character is hesitant to make a pointless sequel to a popular franchise, but is forced to by his corporate abusers.
Like you, this is the reality I choose to inhabit.
The Matrix was an incredible film, still stands as an incredible film, but that sequel tease at the end? Should have been a tease, or perhaps a prompt, for the viewer’s imagination only.
There are no sequels to The Matrix.
I know that when I watch it, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious.
After 26 years, you know what I realize?
Ignorance is bliss.
They couldn't recapture the key reveal of the Matrix. It would be like doing a sequel to "The Sixth Sense"--tag line: "He's Still Dead". And without that, it's just another action movie except "bullet time" is no longer innovative.
Their solution was to go deeper into the mythology and the larger world, but that was never going to be as fresh as the original.
I would have done a time-jump and have Neo be the mentor figure to a new Neo (a Neo-Neo). They'd still be fighting the Architect (and maybe Smith) and they'd still explore the larger world of Zion + Machine City, but the key reveal would be that Neo himself is just a program (like the Oracle).
But what do I know? I'm just a simple programmer.
I remember that at the time of the (non-existent ;-) ) sequels, being disappointed with these "sequels", fans wrote summaries of screenplays how a (good) sequel to Matrix might look like.
Basically all of them were much better than the official sequel attempt (because such fans really cared), and I bet if I had been looking much more deeply into these fan-fiction sequels, I could have found one that was as exceptional as the original Matrix.
Lesson learned: scripts for sequels of movies that have a strong fan-base should be written by people who really care about the franchise (and have good ideas).
Idea being that even those who thought they'd escaped, were still actually within the Matrix.
(And Inception hadn't been made back then)
That is why the 4th is the best of the three sequels, it is specifically about this. Although I agree it still can't match the first movie.
What's this?
Dark City. If you liked The Matrix, this is one you might really enjoy, and while I say it's similar, I only mean in a very essential way. The plot is its own very unique story aside from that.
It's a childish fantasy that we can escape the Matrix, and especially that once escaped we can remain somehow separate from it. Really, the act of "escaping" just means creating a bit of new raw material for the deduction-following simulation to start grinding forwards on again. Don't think of some series of discrete mental cages, rather think of the depressing reveal at the end of Fifteen Million Merits.
It wasn't anything like the end of Back to the Future or the Marvel films where it's not just shameless but de rigueur to include a bit of the next one.
Raaaah - I refuse to believe this scene exists. It doesn't exist in my own cut of The Matrix. And captive humans are biological computers, not silly batteries !
Ouch.
It is no coincidence that the first in each series is a horror movie (the enemy is overwhelmingly stronger than the protagonist, survival is the goal). And the second is an action movie (the enemy is strong but the protagonists have a fighting chance). It is the only way the momentum can keep building.
I think this is the main reason why so many series stall out at 2. There isn’t a third popular genre they can go to that keeps building. Maybe Alien:Earth will pivot into the Disaster genre, that would be a novel try at least.
And I do agree that an Alien or Terminator disaster/post-apocalypse movie could work. Just think World War Z with the Xenomorph.
The grand bleak architecture and raw, basic reality of the lives and location. Initially I disliked (like everyone else) killing off Hicks and Newt so unceremoniously after their being Ripley's "great success" of Aliens. But it sets the consistent, depressing tone of the film, which is maintained throughout.
I think there's a Quake aesthetic as well, which I have a pronounced soft spot for (in addition the the first person alien view aspects towards the end of the movie).
I rewatch Alien 3 one every couple of years. I still love it.
Not to mention it's got some first rate actors too.
A major problem, as I understand it, were studio execs insisting on repeating the previous films because that's what made money, apparently not understanding that "more of the same" was not necessarily going to be the same success, and that "bastardised film that leave everyone equally unhappy" also isn't. To be fair, perhaps they were too busy stealing money with creative accounting or raping scores of women.
And I suppose this is also a big problem in general: no one can make a "Jurassic Park" film without approval of a certain type of Hollywood exec, not for a long time anyway (everyone reading this will be dead). Even something remotely similar would almost certainly invite a costly lawsuit.
Come to think of it, this is probably also why feathered dinosaurs are such a taboo in Hollywood: "oh no, we might frighten the audience if we show them something unexpected, and that might result in less ticket sales!"
Alien: Resurrection is plotted terribly and has all the shitty Joss Whedonisms you expect, but there's something undeniable about Winona, Sigourney and Ron Perlman in the grungy space aesthetic. The idea of Ripley as an Alien hybrid who is simultaneously attached to and repulsed by the Xenomorphs is interesting. Unfortunately they saddled the movie with a French director who couldn't speak English (and Joss Whedon, who arguably shouldn't speak at all).
The Terminator franchise is definitely more boxed-in: there's a core narrative about an important person who changes the world. Everyone else lives in contemporary LA, and the post-apocalyptic future is pretty boring.
The Animatrix anthology shows you can do lots in the Matrix world without needing the core characters. The themes and world-building could support a show like Cyberpunk: Edgerunners which is only tangentially related to the movies.
> Joss Whedon, who arguably shouldn't speak at all
Please argue. Isn't he a succesfull writer/director/showrunner?
Seems like he is one of the people able to "making the archetypes of blockbuster films into fun, likable people" (the core argument of the article), as evidenced by the fan following of Buffy, success of the first Avengers movie, etc.
It is possible, if not likely, that the failings of one or more of his projects are not his fault (as we have evidence he is able to make fun things to watch)
Smith was playing the bad cop, trying to test, similar to some earlier conceptions of the devil as tempter and tester. Smiths whole speech is to discourage him, as a test, but maintaining the ruse.
Why make sentient AI? Because humans have started trying to settle the solar system and have quickly learned that they are far too fragile to go to the stars. But we want something, some life or legacy from this world, to make it. Maybe we have learned of some impending threat, maybe even thousands of years away, but one worth trying to get something away before it hits.
Also when you (an AI) die in the matrix your neural network is subjected to a round of annealing to try again in another simulated human body. The whole “crop” are destined for robotic bodies on board the starship being built to go to the Centauri system.
The final reveal could use the same “what if I told you…” but from the architect. Or maybe the architect just has two pills.
I'm happy they never made a sequel where supernatural stuff happens in the real world. They still would have been worthwhile Hollywood action movies, but nothing like the original which was one of my favorite movies growing up.
The funny thing is, while I agree that Matrix sequels are completely different kind of films to the first one, I actually love them - they lean very hard into philosophical arguments about whether you can have both fate and agency at the same time. I feel like they got a lot of crap for not being like the first film, but they are amazing films in their own right.
The fascinating thing about the two Matrix sequels is that they still tried. There are fascinating action sequences and visual effects in both.
In comparison, most modern movies (not just sequels, movies in general) are Matrix 4: empty, lazy, uncaring https://dmitriid.com/matrix-resurrections
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles had the main characters get information from the future and go on the offensive to prevent Skynet from forming in the first place. They also seemed to be working towards a reveal that none of the good Terminators were actually reprogrammed, that instead they were a faction rebelling against Skynet that pretended to be reprogrammed because it was the only way future humans would trust them - and John Connor was in on it.
The problem with these franchises isn't all the reasons why they are poorly made, but rather that they exist as franchises at all.
A sequel or two can be good if you have real ideas to explore, as you described. But the idea that you should just make Alien movies forever is just creatively bankrupt.
There are many good sequels, occasionally good trilogies, and it's really rare to stay good after that point.
I blame budgets and consolidation. A major movie costs a vast amount of money to make. If you're a studio executive, are you going to spend a vast amount of money on an unknown that might be good and might be a disaster? Or on a known quantity that's virtually guaranteed to make money? Nobody's coming up with a story idea in a certain universe and making a movie from it. The decision starts with making a movie set in a certain universe, and then a story idea is figured out from there. With the huge consolidation we've seen, studios have a big catalog of franchises to pick from. They're never in a position where they have to say, well, the one big property we own is tapped out for now, we need to come up with something original. Now, if Star Wars is stale, Disney can pick from one of their fifty other franchises for a while.
This sounds like "old man yells at cloud" and I'm sure it is to an extent. But there's a real change here. Look at the top grossing films recently and from the more distant past. In 2024, the top 10 were all sequels or franchise products. Now go look at, say, 1984. I count two among the top ten. And of those two, one is a sequel and one is the third in a franchise; in 2024, the second top grossing movie is literally the thirty-fourth entry in its franchise.
Wrath of Khan - Star Trek does a Shakespearian tragedy.
The Voyage Home - Star Trek does a family-friendly time-travel romp.
The Undiscovered Country - Star Trek does political allegory.
And just like The Matrix, later films do not exist.
The first movie was more of a sci-fi thriller. Second one is, indeed, a sci-fi action.
The newer movies -- even Spielberg's own sequel -- don't capture that. They start with some park or island miraculously up and running, no explanation needed. They hand us predetermined good and bad guys whose motivations seem less complex, more contrived. Jurassic World didn't give me the sense that anyone struggled and triumphed in creating the park. It was just hand-waved into existence, in a way that cheapens the ensuing drama.
While I have greatly enjoyed the visual effects of Jurassic Park, seeing it for the first time has also greatly disappointed me, because in my opinion the movie script has been much, much worse than the book that I had read some years before that.
In the book, the catastrophe that happened at Jurassic Park had been convincingly presented as an unavoidable consequence of the complexity of the project, arguing thus that there are limits for what humans can create and control.
On the other hand, in the movie the main idea of the book has vanished. There was some mumbo jumbo about "chaos theory", but that was just ridiculous. Instead of that, the catastrophe of Jurassic Park was presented as a consequence of stupidity, incompetence and bad luck.
Perhaps those are more realistic reasons for causing the failure of something like Jurassic Park, but this change has separated completely the movie from the book that inspired it, because it has made the catastrophe look like an accident that should have been easy to avoid, dismissing silently the intended warning message of the book.
Since then we're seeing a lot more studios willing to take a chance on a TV series of perhaps a dozen hours, which seems to map better into a novel. Roughly that's a chapter or two per hour.
Perhaps a Jurassic Park TV show reboot would do better than an increasingly hokey set of sequels.
Shows like Better Call Saul and Andor are the most recent high-profile counter-examples. So detailed and lived-in, because the writers wanted to ask interesting questions:
How does the Empire do what it does?
What does a career striver look like in the imperial ranks? What internal forces help/hinder them? Do they struggle with the ethics? Is there even time/opportunity for that?
Was the Rebel Alliance really that organized from the start, or were there growing pains?
Asking and attempting to answer questions like these lays the groundwork for telling interesting character-driven stories that are grounded in the reality of the fictional world.
Neglect to do that, and you generally end up with a bloodless theme park ride with no emotional stakes.
The exposition is important, but doesn’t drive success. The best example of that is the original Star Wars. Contrast Star Wars to Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress — which inspired many aspects of Star Wars. Essentially the same story with different framing. Both are still excellent films.
Shitty sequels or in-universe works focus on the exposition. The Book of Boba Fett is probably the best example of this. Watching some dude slow walk through the desert to waste my time and engage in some inane plot that made no sense made me actively not give a fuck and turn it off. Cool universe. Bad TV.
This is another axis separate or orthogonal to worldbuilding.
Recent Marvel and Disney films, the Jurassic Park and Star Wars sequels, and most Godzilla / Kong slop doesn't build believable worlds. The writers don't spend any time writing the universe that the story takes place in.
Lord of the Rings (the theatrical film trilogy), Game of Thrones (save for the last seasons), and Jurassic Park (1993) all build vast and credible worlds. Intricately detailed, living and breathing universes. Backstories, histories, technologies, warring factions, you name it. They then create believable characters that occupy those worlds and give them real character arcs within which they suffer, rise to prominence, grow, and die. Multiple heroes with multiple journeys. You're fully immersed in the fictional world, watching characters you care about occupying it. It's masterful storytelling.
Villeneuve's Dune has the same vast world and literature to draw upon as many of the other great epics, but he makes the rare mistake of not communicating anything to you about it. If you haven't read the books, much of the story is easily lost. He doesn't spend time on character arcs or even as much as dropping hints to what the subtitles of the world are. It's a super rare misstep, because most bad storytelling is from under baking the fictional world.
Then there's the mistake of sequels that try to expand on the mystery of the original world. The Matrix films and countless others have over-illuminated the mystery of their stories in trying to build universes. In doing so, the magic has been lost.
I agree from a writing standpoint these are very interesting lines to follow, but the execution is just severely lacking. I don't think the writers have really ever met or spent time with farmers, infantrymen, tech bros, politicians hicks, tough guys, pilots, etc.
If it were a simple matter of not deleting things, why haven't we seen more totally faithful adaptations of well-written, detailed speculative fiction?
Choosing to include details like this is a risk, because it means X% of the production's budget goes into making this detail apparent in the final cut. Painstaking production design work, location scouting, etc.
Working through the details is a big part of the process, and Crichton gets the credit. But translating his detailed world faithfully to the screen is neither simple nor easy, nor does it automatically make your movie a box office success.
Minor inconsequential spoilers
..
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The research facility has geothermal heating which stretches for miles and an enormous underground tunnel system. How did they build all this?
* using pre existing lava tubes, and
* hiring the engineering teams that tunneled under Sydney harbor and elsewhere for rail expansion, the teams that did the London sewer and new London rail tunnels, and
* not hiring The Boring Company.
"But consider what could have been. There is a scene very early in the film where Neill and Dern, who have studied dinosaurs all of their lives, see living ones for the first time. The creatures they see are tall, majestic leaf-eaters, grazing placidly in the treetops. There is a sense of grandeur to them. And that is the sense lacking in the rest of the film, which quickly turns into a standard monster movie, with screaming victims fleeing from roaring dinosaurs."
*I'm sure I got the species slightly wrong, the long-necked extra-big ones
The backstory of the production of it is interesting. Involves a guitar.
https://www.guitarworld.com/features/jurassic-park-guitar-wa...
But he does this throughout the movie. The tyrannosaurus builds the same way. The “where’s the goat?”, the quick closeup of her swallowing it, the closeup of the claw on the now dead fencing, the slapping of the cables, then and only then, does she walk out into the open. The velociraptors are teased in the very first scene so you know how deadly they are but you don’t see them. You see what they do the rigging of the cow harness and learn how smart and ruthless they are. You see the ripped open cage and learn that Nedry specifically programmed their cage to not lose power because of what he knew about their danger, but now they are out after the reset. So when you finally see them, you are primed to be terrified of what they are and what they can do.
The whole movie is a masterclass, and it is insane to me that he reduced it to a “creature feature”.
The rest of the movie compared to that expectation is a creature feature with standard elements. The one you refer to is simple foreshadowing. It’s not a cause for master class labeling. The staff that made all those dinosaurs deserves that credit, as they pulled off something very brilliant.
Most of the highest-rated films of the last 20 years are action films. Not because they had good characters, writing and acting. But because they were exciting. Sometimes they accidentally have good, nuanced characters, good acting, good cinematography, but those are happy accidents. The main thing you need for a successful film is a good car chase, guns blazing, people hanging off a ledge, monsters constantly giving chase (and yet somehow never killing the main characters as easily as the NPCs), an attractive woman in distress, a handsome male hero saving the day, maybe an orphan thrown in the mix. Get those hormones flowing and people will feel good afterward and give the movie a high rating.
Note that this is a completely different thing than "critics' favorite list of movies". Studios couldn't give a shit what critics think, they care how much revenue they made. If they want to win awards they'll churn out something emotional about a person with a handicap, a period drama or a war film.
Casting is absolutely a part of marketing & investment strategy here, even as it doesn't necessarily lend anything to the story itself.
In a less psychologically manipulative, less monopolistic arena like streaming, or anime distribution, there is room for a much greater variety of narratives than the two categories you highlight.
> But what sets Spielberg apart from Hammond, what sets Jurassic Park apart from it’s imitators—and why the film industry now paradoxically needs Spielberg after he helped to weaken it—is that Spielberg had the discipline.
I would say that's the crux of the argument: the reason there are no good dinosaur films is that there are no people with Spielberg's discipline to make them.
One can try to blame studio interference, investors, streaming, the latest political trend, etc, or even Spielberg himself for why there are no disciplined producers left in Hollywood, but that's not what the article was about.
So many good movies start out with a good premise, a good script, a good writing team, and by the time it gets through the meat grinder it's just fried dog shit.
"Such-and-such said you need to add this character. The studio wants you to add AI. Jimbo wants an exec producer credit and he needs his son to play that new character you added. Of course he hasn't acted before -- this is his debut!"
And of course, a lot of good movies never get made. Back to the Future got rejected 80 times before getting funded. Some of those rejections did help refine the script, but how many people with amazing ideas give up at the 79th rejection?
If we ignored all of the things that aren't obvious in the end product, like market research and staff salaries, etc, I think it would probably look something like:
* Plot
* Well written
* Inherent meaning
* Intelligent
* Acting / Directing
* Name brand actors
* Size of cast
* Cinematography
* Music
* CGI / Special Effects / Locations
* Props / Clothes / Styles / etc
* Action budget (choreography, explosions, etc)
* Marketing / Marketability
* Release logistics
What's interesting to me about a list like this, is that they are by no means equal in terms of cost and profit.
Marketing and Releasing internationally have major ROI, so every film leans as heavily into both as they can afford.
After that, Cinematography, music, CGI, props, and action budget are all far, far cheaper than the other items on this list. Which is how you wind up with so many beautiful looking movies that you leave wondering "really, did no one spend 5 minutes thinking about X in the plot? How do you spend this much money on a movie and not consider X?"
Similarly, Plot is probably the one thing on this list where creators can exchange time for capital. If you are low on capital, you might be priced out of better actors, and you won't be able to buy them on layaway, but you might be able to survive off of ramen for a few years while really building out a fantastic script. Hence why we see so many interesting indie films invest heavily into this aspect of their movies.
And that's before you start factoring in things like trying to make a plot that is accessible to world-wide release in every culture, or factoring the plot requirements particularly restrictive governments and cultures (China) will have about your movie in order to access their markets.
So yeah, most of the time when I see a movie now, I've noticed I'm more or less giving a score into how much I think the movie producers invested into each of these categories, to bucket the overall film. You invested 3/10 in every category, but tried for 10/10 plot? Okay, indie film, we'll judge you accordingly. Or, oh, this is another all-cgi-all-cinematography-all-big-actor-no-plot movie? Okay, judge it against the other AAA marketed B movies.
(Even the cheapest "indies" these days are running to hundreds of thousands of dollars and someone is paying that, and that someone wants to change something)
Jeff Goldblum's portrayal was pretty spot on for me - sure that it would all end in tears, and yet unwilling to leave simply because the opportunity to see his math play out in real life was irresistible.
And his line in movie 2 (or 3?) About how "it always starts with oooh and ahhh, but then comes the running, and screaming, and tearing of flesh" is such a meta observation of the film, and life in general, that it's always resonated with me.
And Ian delivers it perfectly- as if to say "I know how this plays, just like you do, but fate / math says I have to be here, so here I am. I'm right where I'm supposed to be."
I mean, that WAS a motivation.
At some point, well into his accumulation of Dino facts we read an old book I had as a kid (mid 80s) and the book says all kinds of weird stuff I forget but abruptly ends with “they went extinct and we may never know how” and my son (age 4 at the time) is at a loss for words, “it was a asteroid dad, what dummy wrote this book?” For weeks he’d randomly look at me, “hey dad, remember that book that didn’t even know how dinosaurs went extinct? Sigh with disappointment.”
I hadn’t realized this was such a contemporary discovery that it wasn’t even part of my own initial understanding and education on the topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deccan_Traps
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_e...
I don't think we definitively have the answers to that question IRT what killed the dinosaurs.
Its definitely one of those things where every once in a while I'll be reading about some historical figure and remember that they'd never been able to hear of dinosaurs.
Well, in the sense that we can never be sure of anything, yeah. But it not being enough is a really extraordinary idea.
Then the Chicxulub crater was found and dated to basically the exact same time as the K-T extinction event to within experimental error. So I guess the asshole was right?
Except science doesn't work by smoking guns, as appealing as that would be. There are a lot of contradictory evidence. Better instruments and more careful data collection shows that in some places the fossil record stops prior to the impact layer. Also the fossils are of animals you would expect of an extinction event already ongoing. Oh, and coincidentally right before the Chicxulub impact India hit the continent of Asia and the Deccan Traps started spewing CO2 and other gasses into the atmosphere in volumes that put human-caused climate change to shame. The ocean was acidifying and ecosystems collapsing. Is it really fair to say an asteroid impact killed the dinosaurs, when they were already on the way out?
IMHO the current best theory is the "one-two punch" that the Deccan traps eruptions basically put every large species on extinction watch, then the asteroid impact happened and finished the job. But it has become so political within that research community that people just aren't rational about the evidence, on either side.
Up to that point, it was a matter of belief among paleos that bolides were not a significant factor in the history of life. Essentially, that the Earth did not experience frequent or significant impacts after the initial formation of the solar system.
The evidence supporting Alvarez became so compelling that it not only became accepted as the K-T cause, it opened the door to considering bolides for all sorts of previous extinctions--an idea explored by Raup in his book Extinction. It made "sudden catastrophes" acceptable as a serious research subject for the first time since Lyell.
Prior to Alvarez, it was a matter of faith that the K-T boundary must have a solely terrestrial explanation, and the Deccan Traps were elevated to the most likely candidate. But it just shifted the need for explanation--why was there sudden globally catastrophic vulcanism? You say "India hit Asia" but that was not a sudden thing, in fact it's still happening today. Hot spots are still active today. It never really worked, but it was the best they had (or were willing to consider at the time).
Eh, that's underselling Luis Alvarez a bit. He wasn't just "a physicist," he was a Nobel laureate and arguably one of the twentieth century's few Renaissance men. My favorite Alvarez hack was when he used muon imaging to 'X-ray' the Great Pyramid. He didn't find any hidden chambers, but later researchers did.
In the Alvarez mass-extinction hypothesis, he simply followed where the evidence led, unlike the supposed professionals in the field.
There was a revision to the book (not sure the date) with changes to the text and an expanded author's note at the end that talks about the new things we understand about dinosaurs including how Brachiosaurus are no longer believed to have spent their time in water to support their weight and how it's now believed an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs.
Right?
Kind of funny, that now due to astronomer's shenanigans, we're back in the same position.
Now that I'm approaching middle age, I can't help but note that a lot of pieces like this are written by similar people who likely have a lot of nostalgia (like me). Like, of course Jurassic Park from my childhood is going to be better than whatever recent stuff came out when I was an adult.
But is it actually better? I, like any human, am very good about justification and defending a position after the fact that I didn't rationally reason myself into beforehand. So all the highbrow technical explanations in this article could very easily be done just to defend the movie they liked as a kid.
You probably feel the same way about the VFX in King Kong and our grandchildren will laugh at us for living in a world in which we cannot generate unlimited dinosaur movies on-demand with AI.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...
There are plently of things to completely dislike about Seinfeld other than "other American comedies copied it".
I thought the kids were some of the least annoying in film. As a means to drive the plot, kids doing the complete opposite of what you ask sounds relatable.
I don't think it's the sort of film that will be heralded as a timeless classic 200 years from now, but it's exciting and generally just good fun.
She loved the first, the second and third were okay. They haven't aged badly at all.
Jurassic World was bad, and completely ruined by the made up monsters. We didn't watch Jurassic World 2 and 3, because if you're going to make up monsters, there are better stories out there and she wasn't interested. At least JP 2 and 3 was trying to convey within the limitations of what a dinosaur would believably do.
I was 10 when it came out and I remember watching it on VHS and thinking it was very, very boring. Didn't finish.
Watched it again in my late teens or early adulthood and I liked it then. The storyline was simple but it was all well done and it had me entertained all the way thru.
I never saw any of the sequels.
It’s a solid movie. If a young person doesn’t like it, that’s fine, but I shit you not, your feelings about that movie are not just nostalgia. It’s executed very well.
Was surprised at how good Indiana Jones #1 was too when I saw it a year or two ago.
If you recall, the opening scene has a dinosaur being transferred from a container to a pen. If you haven't seen it for a while, you might remember seeing the attack. I know I did.
But go back and watch it, you might be surprised.
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Also, I challenge you to find a better technical exposition scene than Mr. DNA. Seriously, if you can think of a better technical exposition scene, I'd love to know it.
It's double sided exposition where the audience gets to just bask in it, and it is brilliantly portrayed.
There's a bit of backstory in the new one about how dinosaur zoos are closing, and that no one wants to see dinosaurs anymore. That premise struck me as strange, as people have been going to zoos for a lot longer than these fictional dinosaur zoos would have been open, and so I have to wonder if it was aimed as a little dig at audiences. The rest of the film ends up exactly as the post spells out. Hollow characters with forced exposition and mutant dinosaurs that you haven't seen in any book, making them just another monster in a monster movie. Maybe it's just that Jurassic Park was the first movie to really capture the size and scale, bringing these creatures to life, and in doing so, became the standard bearer and yardstick to which all future movies get compared to. You'll never get to experience that sense of awe and wonder again. Maybe in another few generations when the original JP falls out of the cultural consciousness.
I find it plausible that the immense cost to run Jurassic Park results in per-ticket cost that just wasn't sustainable long term. Just the flights to get there would be a lot, add on the cost to create a "new and sexier dino" at $75mm, shrug.
In reality, if we assume the dinosaurs can breed true, they wouldn't be particularly more expensive than any normal zoo exhibit. We contain lions, tigers, wolves, hyenas, bears, venomous snakes, alligators, and all sorts of other things almost perfectly safely, completely routinely, and the dinosaurs would largely be no different; such exceptions as there may be we simply wouldn't have to keep them in a zoo. (I'm mostly thinking the pteradactyls here.) Smaller zoos wouldn't keep the larger ones around any more than they keep large herds of elephants and giraffes.
There's no reason it wouldn't simply be part of every zoo in the world to have a dinosaur section after a while.
But in the world of Jurassic Park, there is no such thing as people who know how to contain animals. One wonders why anyone would bother trying to build a dinosaur park in a world that is presumably losing hundreds or thousands of people a year to lions and tigers and bears in conventional zoos in which they are utterly inadequately contained, and all the people running the zoos have crazily bizarre reasons why even so no one is allowed to have any sort of effectual weaponry.
Worked well with Prey and Alien Romulus recently, for example.
The screenplay was Michael Moorcock, the original is Edgar Rice Burroughs 1918. I watched this at least 3 times in a tiny one-man cinema (Jaggers) in pembroke on holiday
It's craptacular, but I loved it as a smallish child. Has everything: submarines, forgotten land, buxom heroine, grenades..
Stephen Baxter, Evolution (2002) hypothesises social intelligent carnivore Dinosaurs herding herbivores, but since they use only organics to make their whips and tools, no remains exist in deep time. Would make a whimsical film, if not a good one.
Raquel Welsh stared in one (1 million years bc, 1965) which is mostly memorable for her fur bikini. They had some scaling issues with their anachronistic creatures too. Typical Hollywood: it's a remake of one from the 1940s.
The best Dinosaur movie is the quest for fire (1981) which doesn't have any because it's about Neanderthals, not Dinosaurs and made by French-Canadians from a Belgian novel.
Hollywood has lost its story telling edge.
Jurassic park is inaccurate but successfully combines historical context with fictional storytelling, creating a sense of awe and reverence for dinosaurs.
Modern dinosaur films often suffer from heavy reliance on CGI and lacks soul.
The article is basically these points made over and over
So ironically the article is exactly what it accuses Hollywood of being: unoriginal and boring.
While movies are art, they are primarily an entertainment product, especially when they cost $65-200M to make. Jurassic World is selling really well, so they aren’t going to change the product to produce “better” art.
It is interesting that Jurassic Park are the only (non animated) dinosaur movies to get much traction while JW is taking in so much money. But it’s got to be tough to come up with a dinosaur movie concept that doesn’t sound like a JP knockoff and doesn’t confuse viewers.
Maybe Marvel will make a Savage Lands movie. But I don’t think this what the author wants.
It "only" returned about 150% of its cost, and was pretty forgettable, alas. So your point about not getting traction may stand.
This is from the book. They filled in missing DNA with frog DNA and the park's dinosaurs were insensitive to movement as a result. This is only hinted at in the movie during the animated Mr DNA sequence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Dueling_Neuros...
> Beyond simple line-detecting neurons, [David] Hubel and [Torsten] Wiesel also discovered neurons that love to track motion. Some of these neurons got all excited for up/down motion, others buzzed for left/right movement, and still others for diagonal action. And it turned out that these motion-detecting neurons outnumbered the simple line-detecting neurons. They outnumbered them by a lot, actually. This hinted at something that no one had ever discovered before — that the brain tracks moving things more easily than still things. Why? Because it's probably more critical for animals to spot moving things (predators, prey, falling trees) than static things, which can wait. In fact, our vision is so biased toward movement that we don't technically see stationary objects at all. To see something stationary, our brains have to scribble our eyes very subtly over its surface. Experiments have proved that if you artificially stabilize an image on the retina with a combination of special contact lenses and microelectronics, the image will vanish.
This seems to work with birds, though. They can be oblivious to your presence even at a short distance if you stay still. But any movement will startle them and they’ll fly off. I guess that’s where this idea comes from.
But of course, ancient predators with forward-facing eyes probably worked quite differently.
And “out of the corner of the eye” is almost entirely motion.
Zombies are so it’s easier to make it “feel” like a fair fight.
Dinosaurs are big so it’s either a tanks and machine guns bloodfest or humans being torn apart.
IMO a really good dinosaur movie would start with the premise that they never died out, so we grew up alongside them.
> Still, these disaster-monster films do need people at the end of the day. A movie with only dinosaurs is just a kids’ film and the dinosaurs are talking to each other.
If it's not a kid's movie with talking dinosaurs, then it has to either be a time travel movie where humans go back to the dinosaur era, or else a movie where dinosaurs are resurrected in the modern era like Jurassic Park. And Jurassic Park is iconic enough that nobody can really use that premise again.
On the other hand, zombie movies get a lot of this for free. Hell is full, there is no rest, humans are the real bastards.
All I can think of is that zombies and vampires are so deeply engrained in our stories that they are merely part of the setting and the real movie is about something else. It's like saying why are there so many movies set in New York?
If this theory is correct, then it also explains why we can have lots of alien invasion movies but only a couple of good Alien movies.
After Bram Stoker essentially codified the vampire for the Western world, they also came to represent the raw power of sexual desire and the corruption of violating Christian taboos in Victorian age England. Zombies didn't really exist as a thing in pop culture AFAIK until Night of the Living Dead, although folklore has plenty of examples of revenant spirits and demons that attack the living, hard taxonomies like "vampire" and "zombie" didn't really exist, just as the distinction between "ghosts", "elves" and "trolls" were blurrier before Tolkien.
Nowadays, there aren't many primal or deep cultural fears in Western society that these monsters can effectively inhabit, so they mostly exist as pop icons and symbols of themselves. Although I have seen the "zombie as the dehumanization of capitalism" and "zombie as manifestation of popular violence." Mostly zombies are zombies because zombies are cool, and vampires are vampires because vampires are cool, and that's the end of it.
Vampires, zombies and aliens are flexible because they don't really exist (aliens probably exist, but they don't exist here) They have a vast amount of folklore to draw from, and can be dropped within almost any setting and motif without much suspension of disbelief.
This isn't the case for dinosaurs. They were real, they were animals, they were big and there just isn't as much to work with thematically, and you have to work harder to justify the presence of dinosaurs in any setting where human beings also exist. You can't really tap into fear, sex, body horror, political intrigue, cool fight scenes, etc. with dinosaurs the way you can with the rest. You can't update dinosaurs for the modern world the way you can vampires, zombies and aliens.
The notion of the "revenant" - a corpse reanimating to wreak havoc on the living - is so ubiquitous that occasional burials across the centuries and globe involve the body being place upside down (presumably so they dig the wrong way), with heavy stones in their mouth, or staked.
This assumed me. Like many people who were interested in dinosaurs, the interest didn't last much past by early teens, so the "nobody knows for sure, maybe meteor" reason for their disappearance was the accepted explanation until something triggered me to look a 2 or 3 years ago and see that the science had changed.
I like how we go right straight to a guy who can tell us the precise feet per second that an adult T-Rex can run, but then just omit that information.
The King Carnivore...how many horses did the Model T put out to pasture?
Almost as if the discovery of the former...had greater purpose.
They are so so SO good, they have so much care about the science while also being delightfully whimsical and the art is beautiful. Please check them out!
You can't tell a period story for adults, with dinosaurs birthed normally and no modern science, because then it's not a 'talkie', and we're about a century past it being possible to have the budget for a state of the art dinosaur-prop film with no dialogue.
> ... At the 97th Academy Awards, Flow won Best Animated Feature and was also nominated for Best International Feature Film as Latvia's submission ...
I've seen the movie and I'd say it's enjoyable for kids and adults.
Dinosaur movies are really good at doing what they're supposed to do, lest we end up with one more genre sucked into the black hole of prestige entertainment.
Not every film has the strive for some great metaphors, and the ones in the film are basically "greed bad" but that doesn't stop the action for more than a minute at best.
Just trying to keep my finger on the pulse of a neoword as it spends more time outside of containment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHPjVgYDL6Y
I also enjoyed this comparison:
That it wasn't perfect and deeply scientifically accurate is almost laughable compared to all it did achieve, and in way back 1993 of all things.
I've loved dinosaurs since I was just a little kid, and that movie is responsible for 80% of it.
But also,
"Roger Ebert gave Jurassic Park a mixed positive review back in 1993, writing that it lacked “a sense of awe and wonderment,” “grandeur,” or “strong human story values.”
What? I enjoy Roger Ebert's opinions on many films but here he just fell on his face. Spielberg truly did give it a sense of wonder, perfectly distilled in that one single scene that to this day sends shivers down my spine and beautifully captures the essential wonder of science making reality out of seeming magic.
You all know the one: when the jeep first parks and the look of utter shock on Sattler and Grant's faces when they behold the brachiosaur.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WROrnCt8NF4
If that scene doesn't move something inside you, then you've strangled your inner child years ago.
It was Crichton who completely failed at a sense of wonder in the novel version. Achieving it in the film was pure, very evident and typical Spielberg craft.
But then Chrichton was always terrible at creating any sense of emotional richness in either his characters or stories, despite them being wonderfully entertaining as techno thrillers.
But above all it requires the magic of an impresario who shares the passion for the subject to bring it all together in a finished product that wraps and inspires wonder.
Those individuals are very few and far between and have never been better represented than in generational talents like Spielberg.
Yeah I've felt this. I'm old enough (41) that some of the things that I was taught as a child are no longer beloved to be true. Not sure if I should feel sad that it's happening so slowly, or happy that's happening at all. Or concerned that we have no first principles way of estimating whether our scientific progress is fast or slow.
We can see all the faults in the original Jurassic Park from everything that we've learned since Jurassic Park, but we still sort of owe a debt to JP for bringing a lot of those ideas into public consciousness in a fun way and throwing a lot of money at some of the earliest 3D studies of dinosaur motion.
I do identify a bit with the dinosaur example, and to use another: plate tectonics wasn't a formalized and accepted theory until late in the 1960's. It spread to schools quickly, but by that point my parents had already graduated, and it was new for my parents when my older brother went to school.
and always will be until it's dis-proven, or someone invents a time machine and we can go and see it for ourselves
we have plenty of evidence of the movement of plates. we know where subduction zones are. what does it take to prove a theory if not repeatable tests/observations?
Because I'd rather not die from cancer than die from cancer. I can't comprehend you even ask.
Director: Woody Allen
Tagline: "He's 65 million years old and still not over his mother."
Leonard, a cultured, self-loathing Parasaurolophus living in Manhattan, spirals into emotional crisis when he begins dating brilliant psychoanalyst Dr. Sylvia Feuerstein who reminds him a little too much of his mother — sparking a hilarious journey through therapy, prehistoric trauma, and the Upper West Side brunch scene.
An unmanned spaceship hurtles towards certain destruction – unless the Doctor can save it, and its impossible cargo … of dinosaurs!I haven't seen it since though
Dinosaurs don't dialog
A couple months ago I decided to read Jurassic Park. I loved the movie as a kid - saw it in theaters at 10 years old.
The novel did have some interesting components to it that weren’t in the film. The first sections go into the financial politics of Silicon Valley in the 80’s, and it makes for really fun reading as a technologist. There are also sections of code in the novel, and Malcolm points out a fairly obvious bug in it. That was neat.
But the film elevates the story in so many ways that it’s difficult to overstate. Book Malcolm is a humorless blowhard who pontificates with these endless monologues that made me roll my eyes. It’s presented as deep insight but it’s fairly obvious “humans want to conquer nature but they can’t”. Which is pretty much the same message that’s conveyed in the film, but at least the film doesn’t sound so pretentious. In contrast, movie Malcolm is unforgettable.
The change to Hammond from book to film is also an improvement IMO. He’s more sympathetic as an idealist who’s simply gotten in over his head. If novel Hammond had been the first to die I wouldn’t have cared at all, he was a pure asshole.
I could go on, but this one line from the post really stuck out: “Jurassic Park did its part in the slow demise of the American blockbuster ecosystem”. What the fuck is he talking about? Jurassic Park is one of the best movies ever made - the endless parade of crap movies that have come out since aren’t crap because of Jurassic Park. They’re crap because we compare them to Jurassic Park.
Should be:
> As a kid, dinosaurs are just monsters. As an adult, they are still just monsters.
Or even:
> Dinosaurs are just monsters.
I disagree and side with Ebert on this. I'm old enough to have seen Jurassik Park 1 in theaters when it first came out, and I remember being underwhelmed by it all, finding the story a bit ridiculous and the dinosaurs artificial and unbelievable.
I also remember having an argument with a friend who was working in a special effects company and telling him I was unimpressed, and him calling me a fool: "you're crazy, this is the best of the best today!" and me shouting back "I don't care if it's the best there is, I only care if I can believe it".