Why are there no good dinosaur films?

Because that's the reality that the "Avatar kids" grow up in. Think of it as a form of generational fashion: you're biased to like the things you grew up with.

Yes, the book got this and did a much better job with it. I'm not even necessarily upset with the first movie dropping that as part of the adaptation per se. Crap like that happens in the real world all the time, and even if the movie didn't call it out very well it still at least fits the characters. HN knows all about SV startups trying to move into this or that space thinking they're the smart young hotshots who are going to revolutionize some space with technology only to get ROFLstomped by the reality in the field and the people who have been doing it for decades and could have told them for free why what they were trying to do isn't going to work if they'd bothered to do the slightest research first.

However, the repeated errors are just silly.

Most particularly the repeated error of not bringing big enough guns [1]. Guns big enough to bother a T-Rex are certainly inconvenient, but they're readily available to anyone who already breaking international laws about not visiting these islands in the first place. Of course simply bringing big enough guns doesn't guarantee a solution to all the problems and it would not be hard to still tell stories about people getting eaten, but without that as a foundation the characters just read as suicidally-stupid bozos to me from the get-go. (Where's that alleged infatuation Hollywood has with guns?)

But the second park really has no reason in my eyes to have collapsed the way it did either. It wasn't really that well designed and they still had to contrive some really, really stupid stuff to get it to fail, like crashing a helicopter into the pteradactyl pen.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pf6E8yjMAI

See, I think he is wrong about the rest of the movie. First, that scene is incredibly done. We have been talking about dinosaurs, explaining what how the park works, how he made them, etc. but we haven’t seen anything yet. Then we stop the Jeeps, but we don’t show the dinos yet. What we show is Neill and Dern’s faces. We see how absolutely awestruck they are and only then, once we have been primed to understand how truly amazing and unique what we are about to see is, do they show us the dinosaurs.

But he does this throughout the movie. The tyrannosaurus builds the same way. The “where’s the goat?”, the quick closeup of her swallowing it, the closeup of the claw on the now dead fencing, the slapping of the cables, then and only then, does she walk out into the open. The velociraptors are teased in the very first scene so you know how deadly they are but you don’t see them. You see what they do the rigging of the cow harness and learn how smart and ruthless they are. You see the ripped open cage and learn that Nedry specifically programmed their cage to not lose power because of what he knew about their danger, but now they are out after the reset. So when you finally see them, you are primed to be terrified of what they are and what they can do.

The whole movie is a masterclass, and it is insane to me that he reduced it to a “creature feature”.

> Andor succeeded despite the bureaucracy porn.

I am not sure what specifically you're referring to, but take this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKl0F640914

A master class in gripping tension, moreover one that--like Breaking Bad--puts you in the awkward position of rooting for the bad guy. Because, as you say, we care about the protagonists, and in a way she is one.

And then in Season 2 when Krennic is talking to Meero? (towards the end - I am deliberately keeping it vague for those who haven't watched yet)

Meanwhile I thought the beginning of Season 2 was by far the weakest.

But yeah. Book of Boba Fett was bottom of the barrel. It feels like in an alternate universe he would have been the main character of The Mandalorian, and BoBF would not have existed.

I'm not sure just why it was so bad, maybe like late Game of Thrones it's obviously lazy, but contrasting with the scene above, at some level you have to care about the character and start to identify with them, insomuch as you become invested in them succeeding in their task: their goals become your surrogate goals. What was Boba Fett's goal and why should we care?

Contrast with Meero the spy hunter. Meanwhile Boba Fett was a crime lord who didn't do crime and constantly changed his mind to whatever the other person suggested instead of his original thoughts and plans.

You shame me into making the effort to quote from the book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Dueling_Neuros...

> Beyond simple line-detecting neurons, [David] Hubel and [Torsten] Wiesel also discovered neurons that love to track motion. Some of these neurons got all excited for up/down motion, others buzzed for left/right movement, and still others for diagonal action. And it turned out that these motion-detecting neurons outnumbered the simple line-detecting neurons. They outnumbered them by a lot, actually. This hinted at something that no one had ever discovered before — that the brain tracks moving things more easily than still things. Why? Because it's probably more critical for animals to spot moving things (predators, prey, falling trees) than static things, which can wait. In fact, our vision is so biased toward movement that we don't technically see stationary objects at all. To see something stationary, our brains have to scribble our eyes very subtly over its surface. Experiments have proved that if you artificially stabilize an image on the retina with a combination of special contact lenses and microelectronics, the image will vanish.