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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?

#101

Post by jerf »

cco wrote: post #80
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…

> 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 b…

The apparent "immense cost to run Jurassic Park" is largely a side effect of Hollywood's need to stack the deck to an implausible degree in favor of the dinosaurs so they can escape and create havoc and eat people.

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.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#102

Post by CamperBob2 »

adastra22 wrote: post #83
nicce wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that it still isn’t really known? Is is one common theory, but we have just probabilities to play with.

It'll be settled when the generation of researchers who fought over it retire/die off. The short TL;DR is that the guy who came up with the asteroid theory knew basically nothing about paleontology and paleoclimate, was way outside of his depth (he was a physicist that worked on the Manhattan project). He then made some pretty wild claims given the evidence that was available. When criticized by people who actually k…

The short TL;DR is that the guy who came up with the asteroid theory knew basically nothing about paleontology and paleoclimate, was way outside of his depth (he was a physicist that worked on the Manhattan project).

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.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#103

Post by YinglingHeavy »

Hilift wrote: post #95

> Brusatte writes that while a Tyrannasaur could indeed run quite fast, adults couldn’t move as quickly as their young. Therefore, an adult wouldn't be able to speed up enough to match the horsepower of a Jeep like it does as it trails Ian Malcolm and Ellie Sattler in Spielberg's film. 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…

The T-Rex was originally reported to have the same exact speed as the Tinny Lizzie, the Ford Model T.

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.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#104

Post by blibble »

mr_toad wrote: post #96
blibble wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> we can't directly observe what's going on the earth's crust over a period of millions of years Depends what you mean by “observe”. The parallel lines of reversing magnetic polarity that are embedded in the sea floor on either side of the great rifts are observations that demand explanation.

well that's easy to explain

the devil went over the seabed with a big magnet, to trick you

just like he concocted the entire fossil record, planet-wide rock strata, carbon 14...

(sarcasm, for the USians)

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#106

Post by bartread »

GMoromisato wrote: post #94

The Alien, Terminator, and Matrix franchises have similar problems. 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 mo…

> And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix.

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.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#107

Post by chasd00 »

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…

I don’t usually complain about movies but rebirth was pretty bad. I can’t think of a single role that was cast well. The convenience store scene was the kitchen scene in the first one all over again, the ventilation shaft scene was right out of alien, and the big bad dinosaur was a rancor from Jedi crossed with that dragon from Willow. The random family thrown in the mix randomly was so tedious I was actually rooting for the two daughters to get eaten so there would be a reason for the R rating. Not a fan.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#109

Post by prawn »

bartread wrote: post #106
GMoromisato wrote: post #94

The Alien, Terminator, and Matrix franchises have similar problems. 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 mo…

> And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix. 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 wonder how well it would go with some Andor-style prequels. Tell in detail the quiet but vital stories that precede the big moments.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#110

Post by losvedir »

Can any young person confirm that the original Jurassic Park is actually good?

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.

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