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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?

#141

Post by ggm »

Does not appear to mention "the land that time forgot" (1974) with the inimitable Doug McClure, not his eponymous cartoon alternate Troy, who we all remember from his fine educational films such as "Dinosaurs: not a good addition to a shaving Foam cannister"

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.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#142

Post by arp242 »

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…

I watched it with my then-girlfriend when the first Jurassic World came out. She wanted to see that but had never seen the originals as she was ten years younger than me. Naturally, I made sure we watched the first three films first. She agreed the first film is by far the best, and that Jurassic World is a four-cup tea bag imitation at best.

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.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#143

Post by Klonoar »

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.

The Animatrix is the only other bit of Matrix-related media I consider to be real.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#144

Post by bravesoul2 »

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…

They could have gone back to something not unlike what happened with power wrangling at OpenAI where OpenAI goes on later to build the machines that take over. In this world it is not LLMs but maybe more robotic like intellegence. Robot assistants. Kind of completely different. Maybe someone there sees the future and tries to prevent it but just narrowly fails. While not that fun it would be nice to see the Matrix situation explained how it got to that.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#145

Post by WalterBright »

vkou wrote: post #72
optimalsolver wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Hobbit was more of a Disney theme park ride than a story.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#146

Post by SoftTalker »

jtrn wrote: post #50

I’m not sure if “kicking in open doors” is an idiom in English, but this is a good example of that concepts. This is basically a rehearse of old tropes. 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 lac…

Hollywood hasn't told an original story in decades. It's all sequels and remakes.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#147

Post by WalterBright »

mpalmer wrote: post #52
xhkkffbf wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 detail…

> why haven't we seen more totally faithful adaptations of well-written, detailed speculative fiction?

Because people always think they can "fix" it to make it better.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#148

Post by throaway955 »

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…

It's way better than the sequels, but it'll never match the impression it made in the 90's. Some really good performances by the cast though.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#149

Post by bee_rider »

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…

Aliens and Terminator 2 also make sense as continuations. Of the character growth of the protagonists (growing more competent). And also of the “size” of the threat.

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.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#150

Post by defrost »

jccalhoun wrote: post #126
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?

Indulging the notion that money is no object; perhaps a mix of

* 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.

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