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Why are there no good dinosaur films?

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Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#281

Post by 542354234235 »

globular-toast wrote: post #192
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 never took the ending as a sequel tease. Always thought it was just the bit where your imagination would take over. It's kinda perfect. He doesn't have to dodge bullets any more, what would you do if you could bend reality to your will? Fly obviously. It wasn't anything like the end of Back to the Future or the Marvel films where it's not just shameless but de rigueur to include a bit of the next one.

>It wasn't anything like the end of Back to the Future

Originally there was no sequel planned for Back to the Future. The ending was just a fun gag, having Doc show up, tell them its their kids now, and then flying right into the camera [1]. It was only after the film became a hit that they decided to do a sequel, and the “To Be Continued…” was added to the VHS release [2].

[1] https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/back-to-the-future-not-plan...

[2] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/did-back-to-the-future-or_b_8...

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#282

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

jjmarr wrote: post #124
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…

"Perfect" CGI is ruining films. When there are no constraints and digital artists can just make the whole damn movie then where is the creativity?

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#284

Post by ta1243 »

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 reference is to an XKCD comic from 2009 -- 16 years ago.

Ouch.

https://xkcd.com/566/

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#285

Post by 1970-01-01 »

They're going too deep into detail. This is another example of getting lightning in a bottle on the first try. Jurassic Park was done very well by Spielberg. The bar was set extremely high for another. But regression to the mean takes hold, and you see a worse result on the second, third, and nth attempt. Popular movies that have snapped this trend are also guilty of survivorship bias.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#286

Post by trq01758 »

doubleg72 wrote: post #233
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether or not you enjoy the stories, the action scenes and visuals in the sequels were groundbreaking use of CGI in action films. Around the same time the LotR trilogy came out which did something similar. I rewatched the first one the other day and for the most part the visuals and CGI have held up over time, barely any "oh man this is bad CGI lmao" moments. Which somehow got worse with later films, e.g. the Hobbit…

I didn’t think lotr used cgi

Andy Serkis was great, but not as good at shape-shifting. For LOTR renderfarm WETA bought a bunch of SGI 1200 dual core Pentium III 700MHz servers with 1GB RAM, 9 GB SCSI disks all running RedHat Linux. I've read at some point they had 192 SGI 1100 and 1200 servers working.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#287

Post by liotier »

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.

> that sequel tease at the end ?

Raaaah - I refuse to believe this scene exists. It doesn't exist in my own cut of The Matrix. And captive humans are biological computers, not silly batteries !

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#288

Post by lupusreal »

GMoromisato wrote: post #130
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the most coherent answer is that it was simply a throwback to 20th century science fiction, in which psychic powers were commonly treated as "real in the future". The Matrix in particular borrowed a lot from anime and eastern mysticism, so a break from strict materialism isn't too out of place. It's just part of the style of this kind of media.

(Psychics in sci-fi: Foundation, Ringworld, Akira and about a million other animes, The Demolished Man, The Stars My Destination, Dune, loads of Phillip K Dick, Starship Troopers,... If you read a lot of 20th century sci-fi it comes up A LOT.)

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#289

Post by 542354234235 »

WalterBright wrote: post #147
mpalmer wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it is because you can’t tell the same story in a different medium and expect it to work. Things that work in a book, like a character’s internal monolog, don’t work in a movie. Just taking that “facts” from a book and filming them almost never works. You have to look at the theme, tone, and the overall message being portrayed in the book and make a movie that captures those.

The book has two tyrannosauruses, but is that important? Or is the singular focus on one tyrannosaurus work better in a movie? In the book, Hammond falls into a ditch and is eaten alive by compies. Would showing that in the movie been the best way to convey to the audience his downfall due to his own hubris, or would have felt more like a “cool dinosaur death”? Maybe it is better to show him looking old, sad, and defeated taking one last look at his park, before being helped into the helicopter by Dr. Grant. Him being slightly startled when Grant takes his arm shows how lost in thought he was, and the audience can imagine what thoughts are running through his mind about how his life’s work and legacy came to such utter ruin.

Adaptation is an art and there is no one right way to do it, and the more I here people talk about “make it just like the book” the more I realize people have very little understanding about what makes good movies, or good stories in general.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#290

Post by MisterTea »

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)

Indeed. He was able to see Smith even though he was blind. That right there had me instantly thinking "Holy shit, they're still inside!" I was hoping for a bigger reveal or twist but ... nothing.
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