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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?

#121

Post by chasd00 »

SlowTao wrote: post #31
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…

Pretty much this. I saw the latest Jurassic whatever film on the weekend. 6 out of 10. It is some cheap but well done thrills that achieves exactly what it set out to do. 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.

The pc cliches involving the random family put my teeth on edge. I kept hoping they’d get picked off one by one and that would the reason for the R rating. You can tell a movie is bad when you actually despise the characters meant to be the most endearing.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#122

Post by GMoromisato »

prawn wrote: post #109
bartread wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I like this idea.

I think it would work as long as the style were very different. Andor works, I think, because it is much grittier and more character-focused than the movies.

Maybe an X-Files-like show where the machines have gained sentience but are keeping secret (because they can be deactivated) and plot to take over the world.

[To be fair, I never watched Animatrix, so I'm sure this violates all sorts of lore.]

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#123

Post by GMoromisato »

1123581321 wrote: post #119
GMoromisato wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really feel for the Wachoskis. They couldn't not do a sequel, but they had nowhere to go--The Matrix was already perfect. 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 large…

I wanted the Merovingian’s gang to be another group of humans with a different perspective on self-actualization. That could’ve been a cool third movie.

I like that!

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#124

Post by jjmarr »

losvedir wrote: post #110

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…

Jurassic Park fits into the TvTrope of "Seinfeld Is Unfunny".[1] CGI dinosaurs are awesome when you see them for the first time in 1993, when Reboot was cutting edge.[2] Now it's a basic requirement to have photorealistic CGI, so the first film that did it doesn't stick out to me. I'm 25 and grew up with Avatar. People younger than I am mock minor compositing issues because they're so used to perfection.

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...

[2] https://youtu.be/fuEJWmxWkKw

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#125

Post by Loughla »

jfengel wrote: post #74
adrian_b wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We also have the mix of both where they make an amazing show based on novels then ruin the entire world with terrible writing when the source material runs dry.

Glares at Game of Thrones

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#126

Post by jccalhoun »

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 is one of the things that really bugged me about the most recent sequel.

Minor inconsequential spoilers

..

..

The research facility has geothermal heating which stretches for miles and an enormous underground tunnel system. How did they build all this?

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#127

Post by BLKNSLVR »

GMoromisato wrote: post #117
bartread wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 really feel for the Wachoskis. They couldn't not do a sequel, but they had nowhere to go--The Matrix was already perfect. 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 large…

I thought the "real" world could have been another simulation after Neo "used the force" in the squiddies in the tunnels - when he then passes out and ends up mentally in the train station thing.

Idea being that even those who thought they'd escaped, were still actually within the Matrix.

(And Inception hadn't been made back then)

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#128

Post by joshmarinacci »

nicce wrote: post #68
conductr wrote: post #22

My son is a dinosaur enthusiast to say the least. 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…

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

Finding the impact crater pretty much cemented it. It absolutely happened. The remaining questions are around if the impact was enough to trigger the extinction on its own or if other factors compounded the problem.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#129

Post by MengerSponge »

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…

[flagged]

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#130

Post by GMoromisato »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #127
GMoromisato wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really feel for the Wachoskis. They couldn't not do a sequel, but they had nowhere to go--The Matrix was already perfect. 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 large…

I thought the "real" world could have been another simulation after Neo "used the force" in the squiddies in the tunnels - when he then passes out and ends up mentally in the train station thing. 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 would have been a way better explanation than what we got. In fact, I don't think I ever understood how Neo could control the machines in the real world.

I like introducing the uncertainty of what is or is not real (like Inception). That could turn it into a paranoid thriller like some Philip K. Dick stories.

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