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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?

#341

Post by marcosdumay »

joshmarinacci wrote: post #128
nicce wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The remaining questions are around if the impact was enough to trigger the extinction

Well, in the sense that we can never be sure of anything, yeah. But it not being enough is a really extraordinary idea.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#342

Post by IAmBroom »

krapp wrote: post #255
GMoromisato wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a great question! There are also many good vampire movies. All I can think of is that zombies and vampires are so deeply engrained in our stories that they are merely part of the setting and the real movie is about something else. It's like saying why are there so many movies set in New York? If this theory is correct, then it also explains why we can have lots of alien invasion movies but only a coup…

In preindustrial societies, "vampires and zombies" (which didn't really exist per se before being codified in modern media) represented fear of disease, death and the unknown and occult aspects of the natural world, and embodied pervasive fears of hidden Satanic influence on the community, of both cultural and physical corruption. After Bram Stoker essentially codified the vampire for the Western world, they also cam…

Your point about vampires and zombies being modern isn't true.

The notion of the "revenant" - a corpse reanimating to wreak havoc on the living - is so ubiquitous that occasional burials across the centuries and globe involve the body being place upside down (presumably so they dig the wrong way), with heavy stones in their mouth, or staked.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#344

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#347

Post by staticman2 »

aredox wrote: post #322
triceratops wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't you buy the idea from whatever forum poster?

Because you have to find and pay everyone who had the same idea . The alternatve is to do "cleanroom writing": you don't interact, therefore if you write something similar, you can argue you independently invented it. I had the same problem in a scientific research lab where collaboration with another lab runs the risk of not being able to patent an idea, because if the other team had the same idea or anything close…

It's not that you have to pay everyone with the same idea, it's that it opens you up to claims you copied fanfiction writers you never copied.

If I somehow recreated Lord of the Rings from scratch, without having known about Lord of the Rings, it wouldn't be copyright infringement because I never copied Lord of the Rings.

The issue is nobody would ever believe me when I said I coincidentally recreated Lord of the Rings from scratch. The court would conclude I copied Tolkien's books without permission.

If you admit to reading fanfiction, it reduces your credibility when you claim you independently came up with the same ideas as fanfiction authors.

This increases your litigation risk, but there's no black or white rule that you need to pay every fanfiction author or anything like that.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#348

Post by tuna74 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #259
iainmerrick wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main trick is that they set out to make the best and most impressive movie(s) they could with every tool available -- practical effects, old-school camera angle tricks to make the hobbits look small, hordes of extras and well-crafted props, as well as groundbreaking CGI. Same with Jurassic Park, come to think about it -- there's famously more animatronic dinosaurs in that movie than CGI. As opposed to rel…

> As opposed to relying on one shiny new tool to take care of everything. I think with The Hobbit they got over-enamoured with the notion that you can do anything with CGI. But the visuals are The Hobbit's main selling point. People hate it because of the writing.

The parts of the Hobbit movies that have actual sets, locations and people in costume looks really good. The problem is that the CGI is just too much in most places.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#350

Post by codeduck »

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 remember the first time Brontosaurus was Brontosaurus.
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