"It's a Unix system. I know this." They don't make lines like this today I tell ya.
I thought the "It's a UNIX system! I know this!" scene was in fact a generally accurate depiction of the SGI 3D File System Navigator for IRIX.
Why are there no good dinosaur films?
71–80 of 485 posts
Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It didn't dwell on it, but Tolkien was incredibly meticulous about consistency, distances, travel times, how politics works in his universe, and logistics.
And the films, for the most part, stuck very close to the source material.
... And then you get The Hobbit.
Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The book and movie didn’t (and was better for it - The Annualized Return of The Kings Fields would be dry reading) but Tolkien clearly did (both in his notes and in his thoughts). If I want these people to live here and go to the bar here, where would they have to work, and what kind of work would it entail?
“Real world” stories don’t need to dwell on it much because you can just use history and real life - if you base a story in 50s Detroit it’s going to be much different than 2020s Detroit. And if you mess it up and claim 2020s Detroit is a bustling hub of automobile manufacturing it’s going to feel off.
But fiction, especially fantasy and sci-fi, needs a lot of these details to be at least thought about. Then the references and glimpses will feel correct and real.
Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?
#74The 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 Jur…
Sadly, that is often a consequence of trying to turn a novel into a three hour (or less) film.
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.
Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?
#75The 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…
> unspoken "show-don't-tell" internal logic
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.
Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weirdly this is about the fifth time I've read this in the last couple of months and it's out-of-date. Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus are divorced and living as separate species again.
The rare double gotcha fact
I’m imagining a cabal of dinosaurs experts cackling and laughing “time to bring the bronto back, too many people are getting uppity!”
Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?
#77A lot of strong opinions in the article, but Ebert wasn't stupid and wrong. He said - correctly, I think - that there was a sense of awe and wonder at the first dino scene, with the Brontosauruses : "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, majesti…
He's correct. But those few scenes at the beginning bought a ton of goodwill for the film, before it turned into a run of the mill creature feature. Get audiences to buy in and they'll follow you even if the rest of the story doesn't live up to it.
Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?
#78> ”Nor did a lack of movement from prey visually impair the great beast’s hunt for flesh … “Don’t move. It can’t see us if we don’t move.” 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 pr…
Even us humans with our wimpy weak eyes are much better at seeing motion than stillness - it’s why camouflage works so well.
And “out of the corner of the eye” is almost entirely motion.
Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?
#79I still cannot understand how good movies with dinosaurs are so rare. There are dozens of great movies with zombies, and the concept is very simple: people running from the infected. Why running from dinosaurs is different?
Because dinosaurs aren’t human-sized.
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.
Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?
#80I 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…
> 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...
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.