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

401–410 of 485 posts

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#401

Post by fwip »

CobaltFire wrote: post #302
sdenton4 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.”'

I have to say, thats like someone saying anything I write is an allegory for my career (military). It may be informed by it, but its not an allegory beyond the fact that it shaped me.

Sure, the same way LotR is not an allegory for WW1, but it's difficult to miss the connections, whether Tolkien intentionally placed them there, or simply because those themes were something he felt deeply about.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#402

Post by bombcar »

olddustytrail wrote: post #387
atq2119 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The book [...] didn’t You mean the book that has a 40(?)-page chapter in which characters you never hear from before or afterwards describe what's happening in their home lands didn't go into the day-to-day? :) Lord of the Rings (the book) is obsessed with this kind of detail to the point that many people find it difficult to read.

Assuming you are referring to The Council of Elrond, I think perhaps you're misremembering. The only characters who speak at length at the Council are Glóin, Elrond (whose account is mostly skipped over), Boromir, Gandalf (the longest account), Aragorn, Frodo and Bilbo. All of these are previously known characters except Boromir and he is certainly a major character. Plus they all add either new backstory about the r…

Glóin is Gimli's father, but it's true that he does really only appear in that chapter (if you've not read the Hobbit, you won't know much about him). Afterwards, though, Gimli travels with the Fellowship.

Tolkien could have (and I believe in his notes he has versions) written the entire council, but he elides the parts that are "told elsewhere" - Bilbo, much of Gandalf and Elrond, and anything directly already told of the Hobbits.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#403

Post by Ntrails »

ggambetta wrote: post #203
wishfish wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Likewise, the highway chase in the first non-existent sequel is pretty epic.

Honestly my only positive from the films was the way that they flawlessly melded with the plot from the videogame.

Niobe/Ghost covering important plot on my ps2 that just fit around and into scenes from the film. For me that was a complete first.

Animatrix also had one of those iirc

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#405

Post by carlosjobim »

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…

Nothing new was discovered, there is no better evidence now than when that book was written in the 80s. We're just living in a new era of scientific understanding where it is taboo to say or write that any question is not answered.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#406

Post by mapt »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #369

Good films are hard to make, that's why. The article sort of skips over this, but there aren't a lot of Spielbergs out there. Most big-budget movies are lame, and intentionally so. Hollywood is about making money, not good films. Most of the highest-rated films of the last 20 years are action films. Not because they had good characters, writing and acting. But because they were exciting. Sometimes they accidentally h…

Action blockbusters are a product of marketing structure, financial investment strategy, and limited venue space; There is room to see one movie with the family during the holiday weekend, and a studio would find it absolutely wasteful to produce something that isn't Die Hard, if it's already marketing Die Hard for that weekend. An independent theater with the space (which is most everything in the US from 1948-2020 per SCOTUS) might promote a competitor's action blockbuster for that weekend as well, but is probably better holding off until the next holiday weekend depending on how many hundreds of millions of dollars have been pushed into the marketing pipeline. Better to be the Rom Com alternative. The market favors complementarity if it isn't competing on quality. There are only so many tickets that are going to be sold for that weekend, and the overall market size for that weekend isn't as elastic with regards to quality as some other industries. It is elastic with regards to overall marketing budget.

Casting is absolutely a part of marketing & investment strategy here, even as it doesn't necessarily lend anything to the story itself.

In a less psychologically manipulative, less monopolistic arena like streaming, or anime distribution, there is room for a much greater variety of narratives than the two categories you highlight.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#407

Post by haiku2077 »

gdbsjjdn wrote: post #373
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…

As something of an Alien fangirl 3 and 4 are more failures from a production standpoint than from a creative one. If you look at all the rejected pitches for Alien 3 there's a lot of interesting ideas which were never explored and a lot of studio fuckery in the final cut. I don't think the Fincher cut is amazing but I think it proves that there could be another excellent Alien movie. Alien: Resurrection is plotted te…

What did you think of Romulus? My friends were mostly thankful it wasn't terrible - we were desperate for a new Alien movie that we didn't hate, heh

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#408

Post by marcosdumay »

nicce wrote: post #379
marcosdumay wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I believe the main question here is that whether they were doomed without asteroid regardless, and in that sense we can’t blame asteroid alone or primarily.

Oh, yes, the point on the asteroid alone is possible, but a mass extinction at the same time an asteroid nearly destroys the wold being mainly caused by something other is a hell of a coincidence.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#409

Post by wat10000 »

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…

I think we can, with only a small loss in accuracy, reduce this to "franchises have similar problems."

There are many good sequels, occasionally good trilogies, and it's really rare to stay good after that point.

I blame budgets and consolidation. A major movie costs a vast amount of money to make. If you're a studio executive, are you going to spend a vast amount of money on an unknown that might be good and might be a disaster? Or on a known quantity that's virtually guaranteed to make money? Nobody's coming up with a story idea in a certain universe and making a movie from it. The decision starts with making a movie set in a certain universe, and then a story idea is figured out from there. With the huge consolidation we've seen, studios have a big catalog of franchises to pick from. They're never in a position where they have to say, well, the one big property we own is tapped out for now, we need to come up with something original. Now, if Star Wars is stale, Disney can pick from one of their fifty other franchises for a while.

This sounds like "old man yells at cloud" and I'm sure it is to an extent. But there's a real change here. Look at the top grossing films recently and from the more distant past. In 2024, the top 10 were all sequels or franchise products. Now go look at, say, 1984. I count two among the top ten. And of those two, one is a sequel and one is the third in a franchise; in 2024, the second top grossing movie is literally the thirty-fourth entry in its franchise.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#410

Post by qingcharles »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #369

Good films are hard to make, that's why. The article sort of skips over this, but there aren't a lot of Spielbergs out there. Most big-budget movies are lame, and intentionally so. Hollywood is about making money, not good films. Most of the highest-rated films of the last 20 years are action films. Not because they had good characters, writing and acting. But because they were exciting. Sometimes they accidentally h…

I've got experience with getting films made, and IMO, the biggest problem is people who have control of the purse strings fucking with the creative.

So many good movies start out with a good premise, a good script, a good writing team, and by the time it gets through the meat grinder it's just fried dog shit.

"Such-and-such said you need to add this character. The studio wants you to add AI. Jimbo wants an exec producer credit and he needs his son to play that new character you added. Of course he hasn't acted before -- this is his debut!"

And of course, a lot of good movies never get made. Back to the Future got rejected 80 times before getting funded. Some of those rejections did help refine the script, but how many people with amazing ideas give up at the 79th rejection?

Post reply on HN