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Why are there no good dinosaur films?

briannazigler.substack.com

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Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#51

Post by LegionMammal978 »

tmiku wrote: post #28
sdsd wrote: post #17

I actually really enjoy dinosaur movies when I watch them with my toddler. To him, big dinos chasing people is pretty much peak cinema. Watching it with him is so much more entertaining than doing it alone, and tbh, the last thing I want to see is artslop where dinosaurs are a metaphor for the director's divorce or insecure aging professionals trying to feel better about their midlife crisis or whatever. Dinosaur mov…

"Artslop"? Care to elaborate on your usage here? I'm curious if your problem here is with the incursion of art into your preferred dinoslop, or if artslop is your catch-all for works that aren't in the high-concept genre film realm. Just trying to keep my finger on the pulse of a neoword as it spends more time outside of containment.

If I were to infer the meaning from GP's comment, I'd characterize 'artslop' as "works created with some particular artistic intent, in which the literal elements are neglected in favor of their metaphorical connections, especially when these connections are more relatable to artists than a general audience". The connotation being that it's slop intended for other artists and critics, who will think "how meaningful and relatable!" and love it in spite of the poor execution of the literal elements.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#52

Post by mpalmer »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #36
LeftHandPath wrote: post #27

The other thing that differentiates Spielberg's original work from all that's followed is the way it explored the details. From the sourcing of the amber, to the need to have paleontologists, botanists, and lawyers check Hammond's work, to the inclement weather, to the social interactions and workplace frustrations of the staff -- it all felt like much more of a living, breathing park than any of the renderings since…

Let's be fair. This was all Michael Crichton. It's in the original book. He worked through the details. Spielberg just didn't delete them.

Adaptation is a creative act.

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.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#53

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

csours wrote: post #37

I adore the opening shots of Jurassic Park. 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. === Also, I challenge you to find a better technical exposition scene than Mr. DNA. Seriously, if you can think of a better technical exposition…

The Matrix where they explain that we are all batteries. Gives the great visuals of the towers of bodies plus the baby in the pod as it is filling with nutrients. Provides basically all of the backstory plus some technobabble behind the human slavery.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#54

Post by bruce511 »

In the book I found the character of Ian Malcolm fascinating. He was the math guy, grounded in "chaos theory" which basically posited that things don't work out the way you plan.

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."

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#56

Post by ManuelKiessling »

yeahboats wrote: post #32

I didn't see any references to Rebirth , and I see that this was published before the latest film came out, so I'm guessing the author didn't want to wait to publish in case anything in there would have changed the tone of this essay. Having seen it this past weekend, rest assured that it would not have. There's a bit of backstory in the new one about how dinosaur zoos are closing, and that no one wants to see dinosa…

What sometimes works, when given into the right hands, is to go smaller, more intimate, instead of „again 2x as epic as the one before“: like, imagine a Jurassic Park movie with only one single, not even especially large and fancy dinosaur, and a small group that needs to survive. Imagine this being done in a very character-driven and claustrophobic way, keeping you on the edge of your seat instead of trying to make you gasp at some artificial grandeur. Still benefits from the established backdrop of its „universe“.

Worked well with Prey and Alien Romulus recently, for example.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#57

Post by optimalsolver »

mpalmer wrote: post #43
LeftHandPath wrote: post #27

The other thing that differentiates Spielberg's original work from all that's followed is the way it explored the details. From the sourcing of the amber, to the need to have paleontologists, botanists, and lawyers check Hammond's work, to the inclement weather, to the social interactions and workplace frustrations of the staff -- it all felt like much more of a living, breathing park than any of the renderings since…

This applies to most modern scripts. Writers/studios have largely decided people don't care about detailed, reasoned-out worlds with unspoken "show-don't-tell" internal logic. Are they wrong? I shudder to consider. 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 do…

Lord of the Rings doesn't dwell on the day-to-day details of how the various kingdoms functioned, and yet it's still a great story.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#58

Post by blibble »

dylan604 wrote: post #47
blibble wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's still "just" a theory, in the same way gravitation is "just" a theory and always will be until it's dis-proven, or someone invents a time machine and we can go and see it for ourselves

until it's dis-proven, or until it is proven. 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?

the large body of corroborating evidence (and ability to be dis-proven) is what makes it a theory

but we can't "prove" plate tectonics, because we can't directly observe what's going on the earth's crust over a period of millions of years

in scientific nomenclature, a theory is a very robust thing indeed

vs. the vernacular, where it isn't, e.g. "I have a theory that my cat vomits behind the couch after I give him ice-cream"

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#59

Post by adrian_b »

LeftHandPath wrote: post #27

The other thing that differentiates Spielberg's original work from all that's followed is the way it explored the details. From the sourcing of the amber, to the need to have paleontologists, botanists, and lawyers check Hammond's work, to the inclement weather, to the social interactions and workplace frustrations of the staff -- it all felt like much more of a living, breathing park than any of the renderings since…

That's because Spielberg's movie has summarized Crichton's book, so it had plenty of material from which to draw details.

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.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#60

Post by [deleted] »

bruce511 wrote: post #46
dylan604 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

plate tectonics is a good one. I definitely remember my mom telling me as a kid how South America and Africa look like they fit together, and my dad talking about Pangea being the name when the pieces were fit together. it wasn't until much later that I realized that my parents were not taught this in school, but my dad just kept up with current events much more. It is weird to think that something is so new that eve…

Obviously it will vary by location and age. But I was in high school in the early 80s, and plate tectonics & Pangea were already in our text books. (And in my country it takes forever for stuff to make it into textbooks.) I don't recall there being any controversy about it - it was used as the basis for a number of topics in geography (Indian Subcontinent forming Himalayas, bio-diversity and gene relations in Biology…

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