Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why are there no good dinosaur films?

briannazigler.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 485 posts

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#211

Post by zo1 »

sdenton4 wrote: post #190
CobaltFire wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to look this up because I wasn't aware of it. It seems the creators themselves have refuted this and said that it was a journalist twisting their answers. https://www.them.us/story/lilly-wachowski-work-in-progress-s...

That's a bit overly reductive of their answer: 'It's not something that I want to come out and rebut. Like, yes, it's a trans allegory — it was made by two closeted trans women, how can it not be?! But the way that they put that question in front of my answer, it seems like I’m coming out emphatically saying, “Oh yeah, we were thinking about it the whole time.”'

[flagged]

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#213

Post by happymellon »

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…

Yes, I worked my way through most of them last year with my dino obsessed 10 year old.

She loved the first, the second and third were okay. They haven't aged badly at all.

Jurassic World was bad, and completely ruined by the made up monsters. We didn't watch Jurassic World 2 and 3, because if you're going to make up monsters, there are better stories out there and she wasn't interested. At least JP 2 and 3 was trying to convey within the limitations of what a dinosaur would believably do.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#214

Post by happymellon »

cco wrote: post #185
jjmarr wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm curious why your answer concentrates on the VFX so much. Of course those were critical to pull off Jurassic Park, but the movie is good because of everything else (story, writing, acting, kids notwithstanding, etc).

> kids notwithstanding

I thought the kids were some of the least annoying in film. As a means to drive the plot, kids doing the complete opposite of what you ask sounds relatable.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#215

Post by watwut »

Spooky23 wrote: post #93
mpalmer wrote: post #43

Earlier 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…

Andor succeeded despite the bureaucracy porn. Good stories are universal. You need to care about the protagonists. The exposition is important, but doesn’t drive success. The best example of that is the original Star Wars. Contrast Star Wars to Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress — which inspired many aspects of Star Wars. Essentially the same story with different framing. Both are still excellent films. Shitty sequels or…

> Good stories are universal. You need to care about the protagonists.

This believe in one script that rules them all is why writing in American movies became boring and predictable. They did found that universal script with predictably likable protagonists that always win. It just got repetitive and boring.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#216

Post by happymellon »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #175
jjmarr wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've always felt that Seinfeld trope was overstated. I saw Seinfeld when it was current, and I didn't really find it funny then either. Some people just don't enjoy it and that's ok.

The Seinfeld trope is overstated.

There are plently of things to completely dislike about Seinfeld other than "other American comedies copied it".

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#217

Post by padjo »

Dinosaurs are a fairly limited topic for movies. There’s not much scope to do anything massively different to what Spielberg did especially if you want broad appeal and a big budget. You’re not going to beat what he did because he did it first and was a master.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#218

Post by Ralfp »

wishfish wrote: post #180
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…

To me, the sequels were worthwhile just for one solitary scene. In the third movie, Trinity is piloting the ship and has to gain higher than usual altitude for some reason that I've now forgotten. This takes her above the black clouds permanently enveloping the Earth. Sunlight pours into the cockpit. For the first and only time in her life, she sees the real sun with her own physical eyes. She's overwhelmed. It's jus…

They are flying over the cloudbs because thats only way to avoid defenses of the Machine City.

Matrix 4 introduced „good machines” but didn’t do much of anything with them :|

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#219

Post by strogonoff »

closetkantian wrote: post #209

There are no good dinosaur films because films are basically about people. Jurassic Park works because it allows for the conceit of people and dinosaurs coexisting.

It is under-appreciated but true that all good films (maybe all good stories) are about people (or, rather, human interactions). That said, I suspect a story can be about people without being about people in a direct way.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#220

Post by ivankelly »

> At the time of Jurassic Park’s release, the meteor as the cause for the dino-extinction was still a nascent theory and more than a decade out from being cemented as fact.

This assumed me. Like many people who were interested in dinosaurs, the interest didn't last much past by early teens, so the "nobody knows for sure, maybe meteor" reason for their disappearance was the accepted explanation until something triggered me to look a 2 or 3 years ago and see that the science had changed.

Post reply on HN