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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?

#451

Post by thaumasiotes »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #227
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 really feel for the Wachoskis. They couldn't not do a sequel, but they had nowhere to go--The Matrix was already perfect. I remember that at the time of the (non-existent ;-) ) sequels, being disappointed with these "sequels", fans wrote summaries of screenplays how a (good) sequel to Matrix might look like. Basically all of them were much better than the official sequel attempt (because such fans really cared),…

> I bet if I had been looking much more deeply into these fan-fiction sequels, I could have found one that was as exceptional as the original Matrix.

> Lesson learned: scripts for sequels of movies that have a strong fan-base should be written by people who really care about the franchise (and have good ideas).

It seems like the lesson there is "if you make 2000 independent attempts at something, you'll probably get a better best result than if you make 1".

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#452

Post by thaumasiotes »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #172
vkou wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't dwell on it, but Tolkien was incredibly meticulous about consistency, distances, travel times, how politics works in his universe, and logistics. And the films, for the most part, stuck very close to the source material. ... And then you get The Hobbit.

> And the films, for the most part, stuck very close to the source material. Although when they depart, they swung for the fences. Multiple times Peter Jackson felt the need to throw out Tolkien's central theme (that the Ring isn't all powerful, and there are stronger forces like virtue or friendship), just to get cheap drama when characters act out of character under the influence of the Ring. It was really aggravat…

> Multiple times Peter Jackson felt the need to throw out Tolkien's central theme (that the Ring isn't all powerful, and there are stronger forces like virtue or friendship)

Is that the theme? The ring wasn't beaten by the power of virtue or friendship. It was beaten by itself.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#453

Post by krapp »

IAmBroom wrote: post #342
krapp wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I know. I thought I mentioned that in my comment but I guess I wasn't clear.

The modern archetypes of vampires and zombies as they currently appear in media and popular culture are modern in origin. Yes, undead spirits and revenants and the like appear throughout folklore, but all (or very nearly all) modern depictions of vampires originate with Bela Lugosi and Bram Stoker, or pop culture references proceeding from that (such as White Wolf games) and all modern zombies in media originate with Night of the Living Dead.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#454

Post by shusaku »

euparkeria wrote: post #65

I still cannot understand how good movies with dinosaurs are so rare. There are dozens of great movies with zombies, and the concept is very simple: people running from the infected. Why running from dinosaurs is different?

I was thinking about this too while reading the article, and I thought that maybe the problem is that there’s only some many believable premises to get human characters in Dinosaur world. I think if you write a film where they are revived by scientists, everyone says it’s too derivative. Time travel? You get stuck with paradoxes.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#455

Post by [deleted] »

adastra22 wrote: post #83
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.

It'll be settled when the generation of researchers who fought over it retire/die off. The short TL;DR is that the guy who came up with the asteroid theory knew basically nothing about paleontology and paleoclimate, was way outside of his depth (he was a physicist that worked on the Manhattan project). He then made some pretty wild claims given the evidence that was available. When criticized by people who actually k…

[deleted]

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#456

Post by quickthrowman »

adastra22 wrote: post #160
CamperBob2 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be qualified to take sides in this particular pissing match, but still, the point stands. Alvarez was "directionally correct", and the existing researchers were not. He moved the field forward, while they did not.

It remains to be seen. To this day there still isn't any conclusive further evidence beyond "there was an impact event that closely coincides with the dinosaur extinction." Which is, don't get me wrong, very strong evidence. But the Deccan Traps are also just as much a smoking gun, which is why I proclaimed above that the one-two punch theory is the most reasonable. They both contributed to one of Earth life's most e…

Interesting, thank you for the nuanced perspective. How does the K-T event match up with the P-T event caused by the Siberian Traps?

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#457

Post by kbelder »

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 way back when I was in the 5th grade, I read an old book my school had about the planets, and it talked about how some astronomers are looking for a ninth planet, one even further away than Neptune.

Kind of funny, that now due to astronomer's shenanigans, we're back in the same position.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#458

Post by nicce »

marcosdumay wrote: post #408
nicce wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not actually that big of coincidence. We tend to forgot the scale of these things. I remember reading that dinosaurs were already in decline for 2-3 million years. So if asteroids like that hit once per 100 million years, odds are not that small. Maybe 3% give or take.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#459

Post by gamblor956 »

quacked wrote: post #111
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…

I highly disagree that Andor feels highly detailed or lived-in; it's like acting school charades level depictions of rural people, imperial bureaucrats, high society parties, etc. This is especially bad in season 2. I agree from a writing standpoint these are very interesting lines to follow, but the execution is just severely lacking. I don't think the writers have really ever met or spent time with farmers, infantr…

The portrayal of farmers, soldiers, and politicians were fairly realistic based on the hicks, farmers, soldiers, and politicians I have met.

I can't comment on the tough guys or pilots though.

Season 2 was let down by compressing 4 seasons of material in to 12 episodes. They did this because (a) Disney wasn't willing to give more money for more seasons and (b) Diego Luna would have been too old to credibly play Andor in a season or two.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#460

Post by thaumasiotes »

staticman2 wrote: post #347
aredox wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Rin…

> 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.

What do you mean? They believed Terry Goodkind; why not you?

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