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Why are there no good dinosaur films?

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Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#231

Post by interloxia »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #202
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?

In my opinion, this is the reason: > Still, these disaster-monster films do need people at the end of the day. A movie with only dinosaurs is just a kids’ film and the dinosaurs are talking to each other. If it's not a kid's movie with talking dinosaurs, then it has to either be a time travel movie where humans go back to the dinosaur era, or else a movie where dinosaurs are resurrected in the modern era like Jurassi…

The series Terra Nova (2011) tried the back in time approach.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#232

Post by dudeinjapan »

Title: Oedipus Rex

Director: Woody Allen

Tagline: "He's 65 million years old and still not over his mother."

Leonard, a cultured, self-loathing Parasaurolophus living in Manhattan, spirals into emotional crisis when he begins dating brilliant psychoanalyst Dr. Sylvia Feuerstein who reminds him a little too much of his mother — sparking a hilarious journey through therapy, prehistoric trauma, and the Upper West Side brunch scene.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#233

Post by doubleg72 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #229
ggambetta wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#234

Post by windward »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #202
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?

In my opinion, this is the reason: > Still, these disaster-monster films do need people at the end of the day. A movie with only dinosaurs is just a kids’ film and the dinosaurs are talking to each other. If it's not a kid's movie with talking dinosaurs, then it has to either be a time travel movie where humans go back to the dinosaur era, or else a movie where dinosaurs are resurrected in the modern era like Jurassi…

Non-verbal creatures don't make very good antagonists on their own. Jurassic Park's premise makes it a story about human folly, but the time travel setup would make them a distraction from a moral quandary that we're already very accustomed to.

On the other hand, zombie movies get a lot of this for free. Hell is full, there is no rest, humans are the real bastards.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#235

Post by bigDinosaur »

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

It does, most notably perhaps for things like the Ents and large parts of the battle in RoTK (e.g. Army of the Dead, Oliphaunts). It just did so much practically that it's one of those films where it might be a bit difficult to delineate if you aren't looking closely, similar to films like Fury Road.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#237

Post by iainmerrick »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #102
adastra22 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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). Eh, that's underselling Luis Alvarez a bit. He wasn't just "a physicist," he was a Nobel laureate and arguably one of the twentieth century's few Renaissance men. My favorite Alvarez hack was when he use…

"The guy"? There were two guys, Luis Alvarez and his son Walter Alvarez, a geologist. It wasn't just a case of a famous physicist meddling in a field he knew nothing about.

Edit to add: checking Wikipedia, I see that chemists Frank Asaro and Helen Michel are also credited as part of the core team, although it still gets called the "Alvarez hypothesis".

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#238

Post by tmtvl »

Sharlin wrote: post #199
bombcar wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because dinosaurs aren’t human-sized. Zombies are so it’s easier to make it “feel” like a fair fight. Dinosaurs are big so it’s either a tanks and machine guns bloodfest or humans being torn apart. IMO a really good dinosaur movie would start with the premise that they never died out, so we grew up alongside them.

(Obligatory nitpick that they indeed never died out and we did grow up alongside them. And even back then, most dinosaurs weren’t giants. But I’m not sure that a movie featuring only, say, dinos smaller than an elephant, or a tiger, would work. People want to see the charismatic gigafauna.)

Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds is technically a dinosaur film.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#239

Post by billfruit »

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…

On some YouTube video related to Jurassic Park, I read a youtube comment, from a teacher, they said they shown the film to their class of 10 year olds and they were in such an awe of the secene where all the sea the Brontosaurus in the open meadow, the teacher said they had a hard time convincing the students that there isn't really an Island off Costa Rica with dinosaurs in it.

Re: Why are there no good dinosaur films?

#240

Post by mnky9800n »

pferde wrote: post #224
Ralfp wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are flying over the cloudbs because thats only way to avoid defenses of the Machine City. Matrix 4 introduced „good machines” but didn’t do much of anything with them :|

Matrix 4 did not do much of anything with, well, anything. Maybe except for the meta-commentary in the first act where the lead character is hesitant to make a pointless sequel to a popular franchise, but is forced to by his corporate abusers.

I thought the first act was clever. In fact, I kind of wish the entire movie was just neo sitting in a therapist office trying to unpack what happened to him and you never know if he is just a crazy person or real. Then you get action sequences from flashbacks or whatever. After the first act matrix 4 stops being a movie and just becomes a collection of unrelated scenes.
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