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 movie, with a trippy premise and loads of fun. The second was a subversion of the first: the Terminator is the good guy! And that worked too. But after that, where else can you go?
And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix.
Imho the first Terminator movie is way more than simple scifi action. It's a a reflection on Vietnam. Structurally, it's closer to a slasher/horror flick -- the action sequences are tense, tight, gritty, sparse. The main characters are completely helpless and totally undermatched by the monster. Reese is torn apart by PTSD and Sarah Connor goes through this immense psychological trauma during the film and is completely transformed by it.
The character of Reese in particular is very well crafted. A homeless Vietnam vet that you might find in LA in the early eighties. Totally paranoid, totally disconnected/alienated from "modern" society, equipped for a time and place that is totally disconnected from the world he is dumped into. There is a dialogue about institutional failure woven throughout the film: the cops (I'll point out: Arnold executes an entire police station full of cops in this film! Can you imagine that on screen today?) and especially the psychiatrist. Totally incapable of dealing with the demon that haunts the main characters.
There is a dialogue about heroism -- John Connor is apparently a hero, but none of the characters actually feel heroic, they're all just terrified, haunted, and helpless. There is this incredibly "important" thing (the war) but none of the characters actually feel it that way, nor does society. The portrayal of LA -- the cops, the gritty alleyways, the nightclub, the crappy motels... it's LA as experienced by a Vietnam vet.
The first Terminator movie stands head and shoulders above all others in the franchise. It's a truly incredible film and far underrated critically, I really recommend re-watching it with this in mind.
I think it’s the best story out of the James Cameron filmography. I certainly enjoy many of his other films, but there’s a depth to Terminator that’s absent from his other works.
> Structurally, it's closer to a slasher/horror flick
Having rewatched T1 very recently, I couldn't agree more with this. At one point I turned to my partner and asked what genre this actually was because all things pointed to horror.
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 just a brief golden moment before the black clouds swallow her again.
#3 was not a good movie. But that scene has stayed with me longer than many scenes in much better movies.
When I went to see Terminator 3 I was the only person in the theater, as a result of that I really got that end of the world and being stuck in a bunker atmosphere from the end of the movie.
I love how that scene looks but it doesn't work for me story-wise. They go up that high to get away from the machines but why wouldn't the machines build up to that level and put in giant solar collectors up there? Seems a lot easier. But it ruins the world they've built up to then so I understand why they didn't go farther with it.
> And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix.
Like you, this is the reality I choose to inhabit.
The Matrix was an incredible film, still stands as an incredible film, but that sequel tease at the end? Should have been a tease, or perhaps a prompt, for the viewer’s imagination only.
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 larger world, but that was never going to be as fresh as the original.
I would have done a time-jump and have Neo be the mentor figure to a new Neo (a Neo-Neo). They'd still be fighting the Architect (and maybe Smith) and they'd still explore the larger world of Zion + Machine City, but the key reveal would be that Neo himself is just a program (like the Oracle).
I'll just pop in here to mention another fantastic and curiously similar film that came out around the same time, but was completely overshadowed by The Matrix.
Dark City. If you liked The Matrix, this is one you might really enjoy, and while I say it's similar, I only mean in a very essential way. The plot is its own very unique story aside from that.
Sorry, the sequels exist and they couldn't be any other way. Both the in-universe story and the production values line up exactly with the meta topic -
It's a childish fantasy that we can escape the Matrix, and especially that once escaped we can remain somehow separate from it. Really, the act of "escaping" just means creating a bit of new raw material for the deduction-following simulation to start grinding forwards on again. Don't think of some series of discrete mental cages, rather think of the depressing reveal at the end of Fifteen Million Merits.
I never took the ending as a sequel tease. Always thought it was just the bit where your imagination would take over. It's kinda perfect. He doesn't have to dodge bullets any more, what would you do if you could bend reality to your will? Fly obviously.
It wasn't anything like the end of Back to the Future or the Marvel films where it's not just shameless but de rigueur to include a bit of the next one.
Raaaah - I refuse to believe this scene exists. It doesn't exist in my own cut of The Matrix. And captive humans are biological computers, not silly batteries !
Sequels were made even worse because of the original movie ending, showing that "real" world was also a simulation. Watching 2 and 3 felt kinda pointless after that.
Aliens and Terminator 2 also make sense as continuations. Of the character growth of the protagonists (growing more competent). And also of the “size” of the threat.
It is no coincidence that the first in each series is a horror movie (the enemy is overwhelmingly stronger than the protagonist, survival is the goal). And the second is an action movie (the enemy is strong but the protagonists have a fighting chance). It is the only way the momentum can keep building.
I think this is the main reason why so many series stall out at 2. There isn’t a third popular genre they can go to that keeps building. Maybe Alien:Earth will pivot into the Disaster genre, that would be a novel try at least.
The grand bleak architecture and raw, basic reality of the lives and location. Initially I disliked (like everyone else) killing off Hicks and Newt so unceremoniously after their being Ripley's "great success" of Aliens. But it sets the consistent, depressing tone of the film, which is maintained throughout.
I think there's a Quake aesthetic as well, which I have a pronounced soft spot for (in addition the the first person alien view aspects towards the end of the movie).
I rewatch Alien 3 one every couple of years. I still love it.
Not to mention it's got some first rate actors too.
Yes, I agree – I've defended Alien 3 several times over the years. It does trail off a bit in the second half or so, where it sort of devolves in to a "run from alien creature"-type film, which is a bit of a shame.
A major problem, as I understand it, were studio execs insisting on repeating the previous films because that's what made money, apparently not understanding that "more of the same" was not necessarily going to be the same success, and that "bastardised film that leave everyone equally unhappy" also isn't. To be fair, perhaps they were too busy stealing money with creative accounting or raping scores of women.
And I suppose this is also a big problem in general: no one can make a "Jurassic Park" film without approval of a certain type of Hollywood exec, not for a long time anyway (everyone reading this will be dead). Even something remotely similar would almost certainly invite a costly lawsuit.
Come to think of it, this is probably also why feathered dinosaurs are such a taboo in Hollywood: "oh no, we might frighten the audience if we show them something unexpected, and that might result in less ticket sales!"
The tragedy of Alien 3 is that there was far better lore in the comics world. Newt had been returned to Earth but was kept in an institution to keep her experience secret and made to think she was crazy. That could have been a full TV series by itself. I loved the movie, but hated that it destroyed published continuity.
Plus David Fincher as director (I just rewatched Se7en). I haven't watched it since it first came out, but I might do now. The idea of a prison for double-Y criminals was suitably creepy.
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 terribly and has all the shitty Joss Whedonisms you expect, but there's something undeniable about Winona, Sigourney and Ron Perlman in the grungy space aesthetic. The idea of Ripley as an Alien hybrid who is simultaneously attached to and repulsed by the Xenomorphs is interesting. Unfortunately they saddled the movie with a French director who couldn't speak English (and Joss Whedon, who arguably shouldn't speak at all).
The Terminator franchise is definitely more boxed-in: there's a core narrative about an important person who changes the world. Everyone else lives in contemporary LA, and the post-apocalyptic future is pretty boring.
The Animatrix anthology shows you can do lots in the Matrix world without needing the core characters. The themes and world-building could support a show like Cyberpunk: Edgerunners which is only tangentially related to the movies.
There's a Terminator tv-show from 2008 that was pretty good. It's about John as teenager, going to high school and dealing with that while fleeing a Terminator that's been sent back. But I agree with your overall premise, if it isnt about John or Sarah in "the present", then it's pretty boring.
Edit: as check wikipedia to see what he has worked on I see there is a section about a controversy and I realize the parent post may mean something about a moral characteristic of Joss Whedon, not his capability as a creator.
> Joss Whedon, who arguably shouldn't speak at all
Please argue. Isn't he a succesfull writer/director/showrunner?
Seems like he is one of the people able to "making the archetypes of blockbuster films into fun, likable people" (the core argument of the article), as evidenced by the fan following of Buffy, success of the first Avengers movie, etc.
It is possible, if not likely, that the failings of one or more of his projects are not his fault (as we have evidence he is able to make fun things to watch)
I always thought the best ending to The Matrix would be for Neo to learn that he (and all the other escapees) is the AI, and that escaping the Matrix is the test for true sentience in a project to evolve sentient AI, and that the Architect, Smith, and the Oracle are humans jacked into the system. The war and all the rest of it are lies and it’s really like 2085.
Smith was playing the bad cop, trying to test, similar to some earlier conceptions of the devil as tempter and tester. Smiths whole speech is to discourage him, as a test, but maintaining the ruse.
Why make sentient AI? Because humans have started trying to settle the solar system and have quickly learned that they are far too fragile to go to the stars. But we want something, some life or legacy from this world, to make it. Maybe we have learned of some impending threat, maybe even thousands of years away, but one worth trying to get something away before it hits.
Also when you (an AI) die in the matrix your neural network is subjected to a round of annealing to try again in another simulated human body. The whole “crop” are destined for robotic bodies on board the starship being built to go to the Centauri system.
The original Matrix was an exceptional Movie looking into the brain in a jar concept and even becoming an even more popular analogy to explain the concept. All the supernatural stuff happens within the matrix and still stays in the natural world.
I'm happy they never made a sequel where supernatural stuff happens in the real world. They still would have been worthwhile Hollywood action movies, but nothing like the original which was one of my favorite movies growing up.
>>And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix
The funny thing is, while I agree that Matrix sequels are completely different kind of films to the first one, I actually love them - they lean very hard into philosophical arguments about whether you can have both fate and agency at the same time. I feel like they got a lot of crap for not being like the first film, but they are amazing films in their own right.
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.
Alien 1 is a true masterpiece with real, actual characters and a monster that is terryfing because of how it behaves, not (just) of how it looks. We almost never see it in adult form.
> Terminator is the same. The first movie was a perfect sci-fi action movie, with a trippy premise and loads of fun. The second was a subversion of the first: the Terminator is the good guy! And that worked too. But after that, where else can you go?
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles had the main characters get information from the future and go on the offensive to prevent Skynet from forming in the first place. They also seemed to be working towards a reveal that none of the good Terminators were actually reprogrammed, that instead they were a faction rebelling against Skynet that pretended to be reprogrammed because it was the only way future humans would trust them - and John Connor was in on it.
My take on Terminator is that the portrayal of a bleak late 80s / early 90s LA was a key component of what made the first two movies work. Bringing the Terminator antagonist into a setting in which there's already very little optimism about the future was a key part of the vibe. Subsequent movies have generally taken place in slightly brighter versions of the world, and have never felt right.
In real life by the 80s, crime had been rising steadily every decade since the 50s in the US to a murder high that is 10x today's. The world really is different today.
I think the problem is the premise that successful movies should become effectively genres in-and-of themselves.
The problem with these franchises isn't all the reasons why they are poorly made, but rather that they exist as franchises at all.
A sequel or two can be good if you have real ideas to explore, as you described. But the idea that you should just make Alien movies forever is just creatively bankrupt.
I enjoy watching the Oracle's multi-century-long plan of manipulating both humans and the architect. Her mastery of psychology is absolutely beautiful.
well thats her expertise, it is why she exists. one single super smart AI is not good enough, you need other dumber AIs that are specialists. also my understanding is that all the AIs in the matrix perform functions and exist outside of it too.
It is very interesting how the wachouskis were right, we already started using a similar strategy with our LLMs to help us with alignment.
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.
Alien, to our jaded minds, can be a sci-fi thriller. Alien at premiere in 1979 was most definitely a horror movie. (It still holds up though. It's close to flawless.)
I had to look this up because I wasn't aware of it. It seems the creators themselves have refuted this and said that it was a journalist twisting their answers.
IDK, it doesn’t take it away from what happened with the sequels and the fourth disaster at all that both brothers both happened to announce they are transgender. It’s really an amazing coincidence, two brothers, crazy.
The other thing that differentiates Spielberg's original work from all that's followed is the way it explored the details. From the sourcing of the amber, to the need to have paleontologists, botanists, and lawyers check Hammond's work, to the inclement weather, to the social interactions and workplace frustrations of the staff -- it all felt like much more of a living, breathing park than any of the renderings since. Like someone took out a sheet of paper and said, "If someone actually built this thing, what problems would they have to deal with?"
The newer movies -- even Spielberg's own sequel -- don't capture that. They start with some park or island miraculously up and running, no explanation needed. They hand us predetermined good and bad guys whose motivations seem less complex, more contrived. Jurassic World didn't give me the sense that anyone struggled and triumphed in creating the park. It was just hand-waved into existence, in a way that cheapens the ensuing drama.
That's because Spielberg's movie has summarized Crichton's book, so it had plenty of material from which to draw details.
While I have greatly enjoyed the visual effects of Jurassic Park, seeing it for the first time has also greatly disappointed me, because in my opinion the movie script has been much, much worse than the book that I had read some years before that.
In the book, the catastrophe that happened at Jurassic Park had been convincingly presented as an unavoidable consequence of the complexity of the project, arguing thus that there are limits for what humans can create and control.
On the other hand, in the movie the main idea of the book has vanished. There was some mumbo jumbo about "chaos theory", but that was just ridiculous. Instead of that, the catastrophe of Jurassic Park was presented as a consequence of stupidity, incompetence and bad luck.
Perhaps those are more realistic reasons for causing the failure of something like Jurassic Park, but this change has separated completely the movie from the book that inspired it, because it has made the catastrophe look like an accident that should have been easy to avoid, dismissing silently the intended warning message of the book.
It's a result of greed and arrogance in the book. It's even called out with the framing that has Hammond claiming he's 'spared no expense' to the investors, even as Nedry's whole subplot kicks off because Nedry's already the low bidder and Hammond's threatened to sue him into bankruptcy if he doesn't do extra work for free.
Sadly, that is often a consequence of trying to turn a novel into a three hour (or less) film.
Since then we're seeing a lot more studios willing to take a chance on a TV series of perhaps a dozen hours, which seems to map better into a novel. Roughly that's a chapter or two per hour.
Perhaps a Jurassic Park TV show reboot would do better than an increasingly hokey set of sequels.
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 does?
What does a career striver look like in the imperial
ranks? What internal forces help/hinder them? Do they struggle with the ethics? Is there even time/opportunity for that?
Was the Rebel Alliance really that organized from the start, or were there growing pains?
Asking and attempting to answer questions like these lays the groundwork for telling interesting character-driven stories that are grounded in the reality of the fictional world.
Neglect to do that, and you generally end up with a bloodless theme park ride with no emotional stakes.
Andor succeeded despite the bureaucracy porn. Good stories are universal. You need to care about the protagonists.
The exposition is important, but doesn’t drive success. The best example of that is the original Star Wars. Contrast Star Wars to Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress — which inspired many aspects of Star Wars. Essentially the same story with different framing. Both are still excellent films.
Shitty sequels or in-universe works focus on the exposition. The Book of Boba Fett is probably the best example of this. Watching some dude slow walk through the desert to waste my time and engage in some inane plot that made no sense made me actively not give a fuck and turn it off. Cool universe. Bad TV.
This is another axis separate or orthogonal to worldbuilding.
Recent Marvel and Disney films, the Jurassic Park and Star Wars sequels, and most Godzilla / Kong slop doesn't build believable worlds. The writers don't spend any time writing the universe that the story takes place in.
Lord of the Rings (the theatrical film trilogy), Game of Thrones (save for the last seasons), and Jurassic Park (1993) all build vast and credible worlds. Intricately detailed, living and breathing universes. Backstories, histories, technologies, warring factions, you name it. They then create believable characters that occupy those worlds and give them real character arcs within which they suffer, rise to prominence, grow, and die. Multiple heroes with multiple journeys. You're fully immersed in the fictional world, watching characters you care about occupying it. It's masterful storytelling.
Villeneuve's Dune has the same vast world and literature to draw upon as many of the other great epics, but he makes the rare mistake of not communicating anything to you about it. If you haven't read the books, much of the story is easily lost. He doesn't spend time on character arcs or even as much as dropping hints to what the subtitles of the world are. It's a super rare misstep, because most bad storytelling is from under baking the fictional world.
Then there's the mistake of sequels that try to expand on the mystery of the original world. The Matrix films and countless others have over-illuminated the mystery of their stories in trying to build universes. In doing so, the magic has been lost.
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, infantrymen, tech bros, politicians hicks, tough guys, pilots, etc.
If it were a simple matter of not deleting things, why haven't we seen more totally faithful adaptations of well-written, detailed speculative fiction?
Choosing to include details like this is a risk, because it means X% of the production's budget goes into making this detail apparent in the final cut. Painstaking production design work, location scouting, etc.
Working through the details is a big part of the process, and Crichton gets the credit. But translating his detailed world faithfully to the screen is neither simple nor easy, nor does it automatically make your movie a box office success.
Indulging the notion that money is no object; perhaps a mix of
* using pre existing lava tubes, and
* hiring the engineering teams that tunneled under Sydney harbor and elsewhere for rail expansion, the teams that did the London sewer and new London rail tunnels, and
A lot of strong opinions in the article, but Ebert wasn't stupid and wrong. He said - correctly, I think - that there was a sense of awe and wonder at the first dino scene, with the Brontosauruses:
"But consider what could have been. There is a scene very early in the film where Neill and Dern, who have studied dinosaurs all of their lives, see living ones for the first time. The creatures they see are tall, majestic leaf-eaters, grazing placidly in the treetops. There is a sense of grandeur to them. And that is the sense lacking in the rest of the film, which quickly turns into a standard monster movie, with screaming victims fleeing from roaring dinosaurs."
I mostly agree with him on that, and I say that as someone who deeply loves that movie.
*I'm sure I got the species slightly wrong, the long-necked extra-big ones
What sort of tension is derived from watching a bunch of plant-eaters on the plains? The creature feature is what audiences want -- the T-Rex 'objects in mirror are closer than they appear' chase scene is iconic. As is that roar. Heck, so are the grossly mis-sized velociraptors. When they're in the kitchen with the kids, watching those animals be nervous of all things -- the entire scene is a treat.
I think he makes a small mistake here, that the dinosaurs are "monsters". Until the velociraptors, the film treats them as animals, not monsters. That makes it more interesting, I think.
He's correct. But those few scenes at the beginning bought a ton of goodwill for the film, before it turned into a run of the mill creature feature. Get audiences to buy in and they'll follow you even if the rest of the story doesn't live up to it.
Weirdly this is about the fifth time I've read this in the last couple of months and it's out-of-date. Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus are divorced and living as separate species again.
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”.
What he is (was) talking about and what you are talking about are two different things. He saw that opening scene as an introduction of a Fantastical movie. One that would continuously pit the small and insignificant man against a noble but ultimately indifferent nature that far dwarfs anything in size. It’s the kind of stuff that you get concept artists to drool over. Imagine the kind of scenes you could have with that.
The rest of the movie compared to that expectation is a creature feature with standard elements. The one you refer to is simple foreshadowing. It’s not a cause for master class labeling. The staff that made all those dinosaurs deserves that credit, as they pulled off something very brilliant.
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 have good, nuanced characters, good acting, good cinematography, but those are happy accidents. The main thing you need for a successful film is a good car chase, guns blazing, people hanging off a ledge, monsters constantly giving chase (and yet somehow never killing the main characters as easily as the NPCs), an attractive woman in distress, a handsome male hero saving the day, maybe an orphan thrown in the mix. Get those hormones flowing and people will feel good afterward and give the movie a high rating.
Note that this is a completely different thing than "critics' favorite list of movies". Studios couldn't give a shit what critics think, they care how much revenue they made. If they want to win awards they'll churn out something emotional about a person with a handicap, a period drama or a war film.
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.
> But what sets Spielberg apart from Hammond, what sets Jurassic Park apart from it’s imitators—and why the film industry now paradoxically needs Spielberg after he helped to weaken it—is that Spielberg had the discipline.
I would say that's the crux of the argument: the reason there are no good dinosaur films is that there are no people with Spielberg's discipline to make them.
One can try to blame studio interference, investors, streaming, the latest political trend, etc, or even Spielberg himself for why there are no disciplined producers left in Hollywood, but that's not what the article was about.
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?
Yeah, I'm not in the movie industry or anything, but it seems to me like if one was so inclined, they could put together a list of all of the things that have to be done well in order to make a fantastic movie.
If we ignored all of the things that aren't obvious in the end product, like market research and staff salaries, etc, I think it would probably look something like:
* Plot
* Well written
* Inherent meaning
* Intelligent
* Acting / Directing
* Name brand actors
* Size of cast
* Cinematography
* Music
* CGI / Special Effects / Locations
* Props / Clothes / Styles / etc
* Action budget (choreography, explosions, etc)
* Marketing / Marketability
* Release logistics
Its rare that someone, usually a director, becomes a large enough force in Hollywood that they can actually get the funding and political pull to invest in every category. Most films sacrifice a few of them to put out a lower quality but hopefully still acceptable product.
What's interesting to me about a list like this, is that they are by no means equal in terms of cost and profit.
Marketing and Releasing internationally have major ROI, so every film leans as heavily into both as they can afford.
After that, Cinematography, music, CGI, props, and action budget are all far, far cheaper than the other items on this list. Which is how you wind up with so many beautiful looking movies that you leave wondering "really, did no one spend 5 minutes thinking about X in the plot? How do you spend this much money on a movie and not consider X?"
Similarly, Plot is probably the one thing on this list where creators can exchange time for capital. If you are low on capital, you might be priced out of better actors, and you won't be able to buy them on layaway, but you might be able to survive off of ramen for a few years while really building out a fantastic script. Hence why we see so many interesting indie films invest heavily into this aspect of their movies.
And that's before you start factoring in things like trying to make a plot that is accessible to world-wide release in every culture, or factoring the plot requirements particularly restrictive governments and cultures (China) will have about your movie in order to access their markets.
So yeah, most of the time when I see a movie now, I've noticed I'm more or less giving a score into how much I think the movie producers invested into each of these categories, to bucket the overall film. You invested 3/10 in every category, but tried for 10/10 plot? Okay, indie film, we'll judge you accordingly. Or, oh, this is another all-cgi-all-cinematography-all-big-actor-no-plot movie? Okay, judge it against the other AAA marketed B movies.
The script is the cheapest part, but also where the most damage is dealt. The higher-ups always want to meddle with the script to feel some control for the money they are spending. Changing some character or plot point. And the damage just runs downhill from the script like a cartoon snowball building up size.
(Even the cheapest "indies" these days are running to hundreds of thousands of dollars and someone is paying that, and that someone wants to change something)
In the book I found the character of Ian Malcolm fascinating. He was the math guy, grounded in "chaos theory" which basically posited that things don't work out the way you plan.
Jeff Goldblum's portrayal was pretty spot on for me - sure that it would all end in tears, and yet unwilling to leave simply because the opportunity to see his math play out in real life was irresistible.
And his line in movie 2 (or 3?) About how "it always starts with oooh and ahhh, but then comes the running, and screaming, and tearing of flesh" is such a meta observation of the film, and life in general, that it's always resonated with me.
And Ian delivers it perfectly- as if to say "I know how this plays, just like you do, but fate / math says I have to be here, so here I am. I'm right where I'm supposed to be."
Can any young person confirm that the original Jurassic Park is actually good?
Now that I'm approaching middle age, I can't help but note that a lot of pieces like this are written by similar people who likely have a lot of nostalgia (like me). Like, of course Jurassic Park from my childhood is going to be better than whatever recent stuff came out when I was an adult.
But is it actually better? I, like any human, am very good about justification and defending a position after the fact that I didn't rationally reason myself into beforehand. So all the highbrow technical explanations in this article could very easily be done just to defend the movie they liked as a kid.
Jurassic Park fits into the TvTrope of "Seinfeld Is Unfunny".[1] CGI dinosaurs are awesome when you see them for the first time in 1993, when Reboot was cutting edge.[2] Now it's a basic requirement to have photorealistic CGI, so the first film that did it doesn't stick out to me. I'm 25 and grew up with Avatar. People younger than I am mock minor compositing issues because they're so used to perfection.
You probably feel the same way about the VFX in King Kong and our grandchildren will laugh at us for living in a world in which we cannot generate unlimited dinosaur movies on-demand with AI.
Dinosaurs are only on screen for 15 mins of a two hour plus movie. It isn’t good because of the CGI, it is good because it tells a compelling story. If you don’t care about the characters, then you don’t care when they are in danger. If the world doesn’t feel real, then the best CGI won’t make a dinosaur feel real. Tastes change and Jurassic Park will feel more dated over time, but that is because storytelling evolves. The Count of Monti Cristo is still an amazing read, but it is dated. Beowulf is so dated that it is hard to be compelling to a modern audience.
I've always felt that Seinfeld trope was overstated. I saw Seinfeld when it was current, and I didn't really find it funny then either. Some people just don't enjoy it and that's ok.
I'm curious why your answer concentrates on the VFX so much. Of course those were critical to pull off Jurassic Park, but the movie is good because of everything else (story, writing, acting, kids notwithstanding, etc).
I watched it with my then-girlfriend when the first Jurassic World came out. She wanted to see that but had never seen the originals as she was ten years younger than me. Naturally, I made sure we watched the first three films first. She agreed the first film is by far the best, and that Jurassic World is a four-cup tea bag imitation at best.
I don't think it's the sort of film that will be heralded as a timeless classic 200 years from now, but it's exciting and generally just good fun.
I have no nostalgic connections to Jurassic Park and I recently watched all the Jurassic Park/World films in a row. The first one is genuinely fun and the only worth watching.
Yes, I worked my way through most of them last year with my dino obsessed 10 year old.
She loved the first, the second and third were okay. They haven't aged badly at all.
Jurassic World was bad, and completely ruined by the made up monsters. We didn't watch Jurassic World 2 and 3, because if you're going to make up monsters, there are better stories out there and she wasn't interested. At least JP 2 and 3 was trying to convey within the limitations of what a dinosaur would believably do.
I'm not young, but I have absolutely zero nostalgia for the original Jurassic Park. I think it's a good movie.
I was 10 when it came out and I remember watching it on VHS and thinking it was very, very boring. Didn't finish.
Watched it again in my late teens or early adulthood and I liked it then. The storyline was simple but it was all well done and it had me entertained all the way thru.
It’s a solid movie. If a young person doesn’t like it, that’s fine, but I shit you not, your feelings about that movie are not just nostalgia. It’s executed very well.
I didn't really enjoy reading as a kid until my mom gave me a Michael Crichton book. Then I spent the entire summer going to the library and reading every single book he ever wrote. For this reason, I am a big Jurassic Park fan! I think the movie is great. The Lost World is also decent enough. The newer ones... not so much.
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 dad, remember that book that didn’t even know how dinosaurs went extinct? Sigh with disappointment.”
I hadn’t realized this was such a contemporary discovery that it wasn’t even part of my own initial understanding and education on the topic.
It might be more complicated than that. While the Chicxulub impact probably played a big role in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, there are potentially other sources of why it was as bad as it was. The eruption of the Deccan Traps may have also played an important part in the mass extinction event.
I started school in the 90s and mostly remember it as "we're pretty sure it was a meteor but it's really hard to know for sure", but looks like 1980 was when it was first seriously theorized.
Its definitely one of those things where every once in a while I'll be reading about some historical figure and remember that they'd never been able to hear of dinosaurs.
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.
Descartes would like a word as well, I'm sure. The big difference in the impact theory story is it's the first time we had enough evidence about any of the possibilities that widespread consensus (but not universal agreement it is the sole possible cause) was reached. Prior to that we weren't really sure if we'd even be able to get to that level about it. At least if the theory is replaced it'll be about something we see even clearer evidence of instead of "I dunno, could possibly have been...".
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 knew the field, he would personally attack them and drive public support against them as dinosaurs in a field of dinosaur research.
Then the Chicxulub crater was found and dated to basically the exact same time as the K-T extinction event to within experimental error. So I guess the asshole was right?
Except science doesn't work by smoking guns, as appealing as that would be. There are a lot of contradictory evidence. Better instruments and more careful data collection shows that in some places the fossil record stops prior to the impact layer. Also the fossils are of animals you would expect of an extinction event already ongoing. Oh, and coincidentally right before the Chicxulub impact India hit the continent of Asia and the Deccan Traps started spewing CO2 and other gasses into the atmosphere in volumes that put human-caused climate change to shame. The ocean was acidifying and ecosystems collapsing. Is it really fair to say an asteroid impact killed the dinosaurs, when they were already on the way out?
IMHO the current best theory is the "one-two punch" that the Deccan traps eruptions basically put every large species on extinction watch, then the asteroid impact happened and finished the job. But it has become so political within that research community that people just aren't rational about the evidence, on either side.
When I was a kid I loved "Dinosaur Time" by Peggy Parish (and illustrated by Arnold Lobel). Originally published in 1974 it ends, "Dinosaurs lived everywhere for a long time. Then they died. Nobody knows why. But once it was their world. It was Dinosaur Time."
There was a revision to the book (not sure the date) with changes to the text and an expanded author's note at the end that talks about the new things we understand about dinosaurs including how Brachiosaurus are no longer believed to have spent their time in water to support their weight and how it's now believed an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs.
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.
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.
If you recall, the opening scene has a dinosaur being transferred from a container to a pen. If you haven't seen it for a while, you might remember seeing the attack. I know I did.
But go back and watch it, you might be surprised.
===
Also, I challenge you to find a better technical exposition scene than Mr. DNA. Seriously, if you can think of a better technical exposition scene, I'd love to know it.
Stargate, where Daniel Jackson (James Spader) explains to the military officers how he's found that the symbols on the cartouche aren't hieroglyphs, they are star constellations, and that they represent a course from an origin to a position in space, and then following that, he gets shown the gate, where it is explained to him what they think it is and what they are trying to do with it.
It's double sided exposition where the audience gets to just bask in it, and it is brilliantly portrayed.
The Matrix where they explain that we are all batteries. Gives the great visuals of the towers of bodies plus the baby in the pod as it is filling with nutrients. Provides basically all of the backstory plus some technobabble behind the human slavery.
I didn't see any references to Rebirth, and I see that this was published before the latest film came out, so I'm guessing the author didn't want to wait to publish in case anything in there would have changed the tone of this essay. Having seen it this past weekend, rest assured that it would not have.
There's a bit of backstory in the new one about how dinosaur zoos are closing, and that no one wants to see dinosaurs anymore. That premise struck me as strange, as people have been going to zoos for a lot longer than these fictional dinosaur zoos would have been open, and so I have to wonder if it was aimed as a little dig at audiences. The rest of the film ends up exactly as the post spells out. Hollow characters with forced exposition and mutant dinosaurs that you haven't seen in any book, making them just another monster in a monster movie. Maybe it's just that Jurassic Park was the first movie to really capture the size and scale, bringing these creatures to life, and in doing so, became the standard bearer and yardstick to which all future movies get compared to. You'll never get to experience that sense of awe and wonder again. Maybe in another few generations when the original JP falls out of the cultural consciousness.
I don’t usually complain about movies but rebirth was pretty bad. I can’t think of a single role that was cast well. The convenience store scene was the kitchen scene in the first one all over again, the ventilation shaft scene was right out of alien, and the big bad dinosaur was a rancor from Jedi crossed with that dragon from Willow. The random family thrown in the mix randomly was so tedious I was actually rooting for the two daughters to get eaten so there would be a reason for the R rating. Not a fan.
> There's a bit of backstory in the new one about how dinosaur zoos are closing, and that no one wants to see dinosaurs anymore. That premise struck me as strange, as people have been going to zoos for a lot longer than these fictional dinosaur zoos...
I find it plausible that the immense cost to run Jurassic Park results in per-ticket cost that just wasn't sustainable long term. Just the flights to get there would be a lot, add on the cost to create a "new and sexier dino" at $75mm, shrug.
The apparent "immense cost to run Jurassic Park" is largely a side effect of Hollywood's need to stack the deck to an implausible degree in favor of the dinosaurs so they can escape and create havoc and eat people.
In reality, if we assume the dinosaurs can breed true, they wouldn't be particularly more expensive than any normal zoo exhibit. We contain lions, tigers, wolves, hyenas, bears, venomous snakes, alligators, and all sorts of other things almost perfectly safely, completely routinely, and the dinosaurs would largely be no different; such exceptions as there may be we simply wouldn't have to keep them in a zoo. (I'm mostly thinking the pteradactyls here.) Smaller zoos wouldn't keep the larger ones around any more than they keep large herds of elephants and giraffes.
There's no reason it wouldn't simply be part of every zoo in the world to have a dinosaur section after a while.
But in the world of Jurassic Park, there is no such thing as people who know how to contain animals. One wonders why anyone would bother trying to build a dinosaur park in a world that is presumably losing hundreds or thousands of people a year to lions and tigers and bears in conventional zoos in which they are utterly inadequately contained, and all the people running the zoos have crazily bizarre reasons why even so no one is allowed to have any sort of effectual weaponry.
What sometimes works, when given into the right hands, is to go smaller, more intimate, instead of „again 2x as epic as the one before“: like, imagine a Jurassic Park movie with only one single, not even especially large and fancy dinosaur, and a small group that needs to survive. Imagine this being done in a very character-driven and claustrophobic way, keeping you on the edge of your seat instead of trying to make you gasp at some artificial grandeur.
Still benefits from the established backdrop of its „universe“.
Worked well with Prey and Alien Romulus recently, for example.
Does not appear to mention "the land that time forgot" (1974) with the inimitable Doug McClure, not his eponymous cartoon alternate Troy, who we all remember from his fine educational films such as "Dinosaurs: not a good addition to a shaving Foam cannister"
The screenplay was Michael Moorcock, the original is Edgar Rice Burroughs 1918. I watched this at least 3 times in a tiny one-man cinema (Jaggers) in pembroke on holiday
It's craptacular, but I loved it as a smallish child. Has everything: submarines, forgotten land, buxom heroine, grenades..
Stephen Baxter, Evolution (2002) hypothesises social intelligent carnivore Dinosaurs herding herbivores, but since they use only organics to make their whips and tools, no remains exist in deep time. Would make a whimsical film, if not a good one.
Raquel Welsh stared in one (1 million years bc, 1965) which is mostly memorable for her fur bikini. They had some scaling issues with their anachronistic creatures too. Typical Hollywood: it's a remake of one from the 1940s.
The best Dinosaur movie is the quest for fire (1981) which doesn't have any because it's about Neanderthals, not Dinosaurs and made by French-Canadians from a Belgian novel.
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 lacks soul.
The article is basically these points made over and over
So ironically the article is exactly what it accuses Hollywood of being: unoriginal and boring.
I have a simpler answer- the bad ones make money. All of the Jurassic World movies have topped $1B. Rebirth has been out 5 days and is already at $300M, twice its budget.
While movies are art, they are primarily an entertainment product, especially when they cost $65-200M to make. Jurassic World is selling really well, so they aren’t going to change the product to produce “better” art.
It is interesting that Jurassic Park are the only (non animated) dinosaur movies to get much traction while JW is taking in so much money. But it’s got to be tough to come up with a dinosaur movie concept that doesn’t sound like a JP knockoff and doesn’t confuse viewers.
Maybe Marvel will make a Savage Lands movie. But I don’t think this what the author wants.
This is from the book. They filled in missing DNA with frog DNA and the park's dinosaurs were insensitive to movement as a result. This is only hinted at in the movie during the animated Mr DNA sequence.
> ”Nor did a lack of movement from prey visually impair the great beast’s hunt for flesh … “Don’t move. It can’t see us if we don’t move.”
This seems to work with birds, though. They can be oblivious to your presence even at a short distance if you stay still. But any movement will startle them and they’ll fly off. I guess that’s where this idea comes from.
But of course, ancient predators with forward-facing eyes probably worked quite differently.
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?
(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.)
> 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 Jurassic Park. And Jurassic Park is iconic enough that nobody can really use that premise again.
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.
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 couple of good Alien movies.
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 came to represent the raw power of sexual desire and the corruption of violating Christian taboos in Victorian age England. Zombies didn't really exist as a thing in pop culture AFAIK until Night of the Living Dead, although folklore has plenty of examples of revenant spirits and demons that attack the living, hard taxonomies like "vampire" and "zombie" didn't really exist, just as the distinction between "ghosts", "elves" and "trolls" were blurrier before Tolkien.
Nowadays, there aren't many primal or deep cultural fears in Western society that these monsters can effectively inhabit, so they mostly exist as pop icons and symbols of themselves. Although I have seen the "zombie as the dehumanization of capitalism" and "zombie as manifestation of popular violence." Mostly zombies are zombies because zombies are cool, and vampires are vampires because vampires are cool, and that's the end of it.
Vampires, zombies and aliens are flexible because they don't really exist (aliens probably exist, but they don't exist here) They have a vast amount of folklore to draw from, and can be dropped within almost any setting and motif without much suspension of disbelief.
This isn't the case for dinosaurs. They were real, they were animals, they were big and there just isn't as much to work with thematically, and you have to work harder to justify the presence of dinosaurs in any setting where human beings also exist. You can't really tap into fear, sex, body horror, political intrigue, cool fight scenes, etc. with dinosaurs the way you can with the rest. You can't update dinosaurs for the modern world the way you can vampires, zombies and aliens.
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.
> At the time of Jurassic Park’s release, the meteor as the cause for the dino-extinction was still a nascent theory and more than a decade out from being cemented as fact.
This assumed me. Like many people who were interested in dinosaurs, the interest didn't last much past by early teens, so the "nobody knows for sure, maybe meteor" reason for their disappearance was the accepted explanation until something triggered me to look a 2 or 3 years ago and see that the science had changed.
You grow up thinking the mystery is still unsolved, only to check back years later and find out, "Oh yeah, giant rock from space is basically settled science now."
> Brusatte writes that while a Tyrannasaur could indeed run quite fast, adults couldn’t move as quickly as their young. Therefore, an adult wouldn't be able to speed up enough to match the horsepower of a Jeep like it does as it trails Ian Malcolm and Ellie Sattler in Spielberg's film.
I like how we go right straight to a guy who can tell us the precise feet per second that an adult T-Rex can run, but then just omit that information.
They are so so SO good, they have so much care about the science while also being delightfully whimsical and the art is beautiful. Please check them out!
Because there's only one story to tell, for adults, and it's the Jurassic Park (et al.) story.
You can't tell a period story for adults, with dinosaurs birthed normally and no modern science, because then it's not a 'talkie', and we're about a century past it being possible to have the budget for a state of the art dinosaur-prop film with no dialogue.
No mention of any Oscar at your link, not that that's really important. I think you should read my 'for adults' as precluding animations/cartoons, not to say that Flow isn't aimed at adults or that's childish or anything, just that that's what I meant - in that format of course you can do it and I'm sure there's been loads, no doubt an adult can (re) watch and enjoy A Land Before Time too; I assume TFA was also thinking of 'live action' films.
It's not meaningfully different than JP is it - it's scientists recreate dinosaurs cohabiting with us in the modern world - that's the type that I meant.
I actually really enjoy dinosaur movies when I watch them with my toddler. To him, big dinos chasing people is pretty much peak cinema. Watching it with him is so much more entertaining than doing it alone, and tbh, the last thing I want to see is artslop where dinosaurs are a metaphor for the director's divorce or insecure aging professionals trying to feel better about their midlife crisis or whatever.
Dinosaur movies are really good at doing what they're supposed to do, lest we end up with one more genre sucked into the black hole of prestige entertainment.
Pretty much this. I saw the latest Jurassic whatever film on the weekend. 6 out of 10. It is some cheap but well done thrills that achieves exactly what it set out to do.
Not every film has the strive for some great metaphors, and the ones in the film are basically "greed bad" but that doesn't stop the action for more than a minute at best.
The pc cliches involving the random family put my teeth on edge. I kept hoping they’d get picked off one by one and that would the reason for the R rating. You can tell a movie is bad when you actually despise the characters meant to be the most endearing.
"Artslop"? Care to elaborate on your usage here? I'm curious if your problem here is with the incursion of art into your preferred dinoslop, or if artslop is your catch-all for works that aren't in the high-concept genre film realm.
Just trying to keep my finger on the pulse of a neoword as it spends more time outside of containment.
If I were to infer the meaning from GP's comment, I'd characterize 'artslop' as "works created with some particular artistic intent, in which the literal elements are neglected in favor of their metaphorical connections, especially when these connections are more relatable to artists than a general audience". The connotation being that it's slop intended for other artists and critics, who will think "how meaningful and relatable!" and love it in spite of the poor execution of the literal elements.
Jurassic Park didn't treat them as mere threats or background spectacle, it treated them like tragic miracles. Real, living beings brought into the wrong world.
Answering a headline question: Dinosaurs are not patentable. You simply can't make T-Rex part of the studio's IP portfolio. Spielberg's franchise is based on the park's identity, including its font, logotype, merchandise, and more. I am 90% sure he had real theme park(s?) in mind when developing the first movie. The movie industry has long envied Disney's parks, which provide a steady income stream, regardless of whether new movies are produced or not.
I refuse to accept these criticisms of Jurassic Park!
That it wasn't perfect and deeply scientifically accurate is almost laughable compared to all it did achieve, and in way back 1993 of all things.
I've loved dinosaurs since I was just a little kid, and that movie is responsible for 80% of it.
But also,
"Roger Ebert gave Jurassic Park a mixed positive review back in 1993, writing that it lacked “a sense of awe and wonderment,” “grandeur,” or “strong human story values.”
What? I enjoy Roger Ebert's opinions on many films but here he just fell on his face. Spielberg truly did give it a sense of wonder, perfectly distilled in that one single scene that to this day sends shivers down my spine and beautifully captures the essential wonder of science making reality out of seeming magic.
You all know the one: when the jeep first parks and the look of utter shock on Sattler and Grant's faces when they behold the brachiosaur.
If that scene doesn't move something inside you, then you've strangled your inner child years ago.
It was Crichton who completely failed at a sense of wonder in the novel version. Achieving it in the film was pure, very evident and typical Spielberg craft.
But then Chrichton was always terrible at creating any sense of emotional richness in either his characters or stories, despite them being wonderfully entertaining as techno thrillers.
Dinosaurs as a cultural staple are so wrapped up in our childhood encounters with them as concepts that to produce the impact the author is after requires an overcoming of multiple obstacles including finance, technology, story etc.
But above all it requires the magic of an impresario who shares the passion for the subject to bring it all together in a finished product that wraps and inspires wonder.
Those individuals are very few and far between and have never been better represented than in generational talents like Spielberg.
Prehistoric Planet (Apple’s mini series) was absolutely amazing. The awe you felt watching the first JP 30 years ago combined with improved visuals and scientific accuracy
> As Brusatte notes, a lot of what we now know about dinosaurs has been naturally accumulative knowledge spanning decades of ongoing research.
Yeah I've felt this. I'm old enough (41) that some of the things that I was taught as a child are no longer beloved to be true. Not sure if I should feel sad that it's happening so slowly, or happy that's happening at all. Or concerned that we have no first principles way of estimating whether our scientific progress is fast or slow.
I think it is also interesting to think about how many things we learned about dinosaurs directly because of Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park spiked a huge amount of interest in the science. It's said that the 3D modeling of dinosaur skeleton kinematics for animating them in Jurassic Park was one of the biggest spurs into reevaluating the avian relationship with dinosaurs ("oh, yeah this skeleton would have to walk like a big chicken") and that in turn spurned deeper research into how many of them may have been feathered rather than scaled.
We can see all the faults in the original Jurassic Park from everything that we've learned since Jurassic Park, but we still sort of owe a debt to JP for bringing a lot of those ideas into public consciousness in a fun way and throwing a lot of money at some of the earliest 3D studies of dinosaur motion.
Which is interesting in how I grew up "knowing" the asteroid/meteor killed the dinosaurs, but TFA suggests it was just a theory at the time of my learning. Or how I grew up with images of the planets, not knowing that they were only taken when I was a small kid. It is just a weird thing to think about how some knowledge we accept as known might not have been known by our grandparents or even our parents. It just seems like we would have known things for a lot longer.
My memory is the opposite: I recall learning that an asteroid impact was the most likely explanation, and the K-T boundary was the biggest piece of evidence, and the only problem was that they hadn’t discovered a candidate impact crater. And it wasn’t until the first decade of the 2000s that consensus started to emerge that the big crater in the Yucatán is the likely cause.
The pictures of the planets bit makes sense, as even with a telescope (through which we've seen the plants for a very long time) there's not really enough light for early film techniques to capture well.
I do identify a bit with the dinosaur example, and to use another: plate tectonics wasn't a formalized and accepted theory until late in the 1960's. It spread to schools quickly, but by that point my parents had already graduated, and it was new for my parents when my older brother went to school.
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.
FWIW I though Rebirth was pretty good. At least, it was a step up from the nadir of Dominion, which was an awful mess. Rebirth got back to the basics of Jurassic movies - people go to a place with dinosaurs and everything goes wrong. It's also a heist movie of sorts, which is a different spin on the usual disaster movie trope the others use.
Dinosaurs are a fairly limited topic for movies. There’s not much scope to do anything massively different to what Spielberg did especially if you want broad appeal and a big budget. You’re not going to beat what he did because he did it first and was a master.
Luckily, teenage-me had not read the book, and adult-me didn't want to read it having realised film adaptations always disappoint, so the Jurassic Park movie has remained vividly etched in memory.
Because dinosaur audiences are hard to come by and when you do manage to get a bunch of them into the cinema for a pre-release screening they wreck the place.
They're going too deep into detail. This is another example of getting
lightning in a bottle on the first try. Jurassic Park was done very well by Spielberg. The bar was set extremely high for another. But regression to the mean takes hold, and you see a worse result on the second, third, and nth attempt. Popular movies that have snapped this trend are also guilty of survivorship bias.
Boy I am now, that's for sure. I'll add that, even though a movie might be called "Kung Fury" it can't also have several compelling dinosaur supporting characters who add real heft and emotion to the film.
There are no good dinosaur films because films are basically about people. Jurassic Park works because it allows for the conceit of people and dinosaurs coexisting.
It is under-appreciated but true that all good films (maybe all good stories) are about people (or, rather, human interactions). That said, I suspect a story can be about people without being about people in a direct way.
I admit that I didn’t read the entire thing, but god I disagree with the first half so hard.
A couple months ago I decided to read Jurassic Park. I loved the movie as a kid - saw it in theaters at 10 years old.
The novel did have some interesting components to it that weren’t in the film. The first sections go into the financial politics of Silicon Valley in the 80’s, and it makes for really fun reading as a technologist. There are also sections of code in the novel, and Malcolm points out a fairly obvious bug in it. That was neat.
But the film elevates the story in so many ways that it’s difficult to overstate. Book Malcolm is a humorless blowhard who pontificates with these endless monologues that made me roll my eyes. It’s presented as deep insight but it’s fairly obvious “humans want to conquer nature but they can’t”. Which is pretty much the same message that’s conveyed in the film, but at least the film doesn’t sound so pretentious. In contrast, movie Malcolm is unforgettable.
The change to Hammond from book to film is also an improvement IMO. He’s more sympathetic as an idealist who’s simply gotten in over his head. If novel Hammond had been the first to die I wouldn’t have cared at all, he was a pure asshole.
I could go on, but this one line from the post really stuck out: “Jurassic Park did its part in the slow demise of the American blockbuster ecosystem”. What the fuck is he talking about? Jurassic Park is one of the best movies ever made - the endless parade of crap movies that have come out since aren’t crap because of Jurassic Park. They’re crap because we compare them to Jurassic Park.
> But Ebert’s opinion that the film lacks “a sense of awe and wonderment” is—I’ll say it—stupid and wrong, and to a puzzling degree. When John Williams’ theme swells as the Brachiosaur hoists on its hind legs in front of Grant and Sattler; when the newly freed T. rex bellows into the night through its hybridization of baby elephant, alligator, and tiger’s roar, as thunderstorm rain clatters onto its shadowy, animatronic head, Spielberg’s reverence for these grand beasts pulsates like a beating heart. Say what you will about what Spielberg did to Hollywood, say what you will about a literal theme park film’s contribution to theme-parkifying the blockbusters of decades to come. 30 years since Jurassic Park dominated the box office, the bottom line is this: The film still looks incredible, still feels incredible, is kinda the reason why we go to the movies in the first place.
I disagree and side with Ebert on this. I'm old enough to have seen Jurassik Park 1 in theaters when it first came out, and I remember being underwhelmed by it all, finding the story a bit ridiculous and the dinosaurs artificial and unbelievable.
I also remember having an argument with a friend who was working in a special effects company and telling him I was unimpressed, and him calling me a fool: "you're crazy, this is the best of the best today!" and me shouting back "I don't care if it's the best there is, I only care if I can believe it".
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 movie, with a trippy premise and loads of fun. The second was a subversion of the first: the Terminator is the good guy! And that worked too. But after that, where else can you go?
And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix.
Imho the first Terminator movie is way more than simple scifi action. It's a a reflection on Vietnam. Structurally, it's closer to a slasher/horror flick -- the action sequences are tense, tight, gritty, sparse. The main characters are completely helpless and totally undermatched by the monster. Reese is torn apart by PTSD and Sarah Connor goes through this immense psychological trauma during the film and is completely transformed by it.
The character of Reese in particular is very well crafted. A homeless Vietnam vet that you might find in LA in the early eighties. Totally paranoid, totally disconnected/alienated from "modern" society, equipped for a time and place that is totally disconnected from the world he is dumped into. There is a dialogue about institutional failure woven throughout the film: the cops (I'll point out: Arnold executes an entire police station full of cops in this film! Can you imagine that on screen today?) and especially the psychiatrist. Totally incapable of dealing with the demon that haunts the main characters.
There is a dialogue about heroism -- John Connor is apparently a hero, but none of the characters actually feel heroic, they're all just terrified, haunted, and helpless. There is this incredibly "important" thing (the war) but none of the characters actually feel it that way, nor does society. The portrayal of LA -- the cops, the gritty alleyways, the nightclub, the crappy motels... it's LA as experienced by a Vietnam vet.
The first Terminator movie stands head and shoulders above all others in the franchise. It's a truly incredible film and far underrated critically, I really recommend re-watching it with this in mind.
I think it’s the best story out of the James Cameron filmography. I certainly enjoy many of his other films, but there’s a depth to Terminator that’s absent from his other works.
> Structurally, it's closer to a slasher/horror flick
Having rewatched T1 very recently, I couldn't agree more with this. At one point I turned to my partner and asked what genre this actually was because all things pointed to horror.
Had never heard this take. What a great write up. Thank you!
Great analysis.
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 just a brief golden moment before the black clouds swallow her again.
#3 was not a good movie. But that scene has stayed with me longer than many scenes in much better movies.
When I went to see Terminator 3 I was the only person in the theater, as a result of that I really got that end of the world and being stuck in a bunker atmosphere from the end of the movie.
Likewise, the highway chase in the first non-existent sequel is pretty epic.
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A hint at subverting the Cyberpunk genre with Solarpunk. Too bad there hasn't been any genre defining Solarpunk movie yet.
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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 :|
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I love how that scene looks but it doesn't work for me story-wise. They go up that high to get away from the machines but why wouldn't the machines build up to that level and put in giant solar collectors up there? Seems a lot easier. But it ruins the world they've built up to then so I understand why they didn't go farther with it.
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In the right hands (Christopher Nolan?) the Matrix would be an amazing reboot.
It's always sunny above the clouds.
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> And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix.
Like you, this is the reality I choose to inhabit.
The Matrix was an incredible film, still stands as an incredible film, but that sequel tease at the end? Should have been a tease, or perhaps a prompt, for the viewer’s imagination only.
There are no sequels to The Matrix.
I know this sequel doesn’t exist.
I know that when I watch it, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious.
After 26 years, you know what I realize?
Ignorance is bliss.
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 larger world, but that was never going to be as fresh as the original.
I would have done a time-jump and have Neo be the mentor figure to a new Neo (a Neo-Neo). They'd still be fighting the Architect (and maybe Smith) and they'd still explore the larger world of Zion + Machine City, but the key reveal would be that Neo himself is just a program (like the Oracle).
But what do I know? I'm just a simple programmer.
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I'll just pop in here to mention another fantastic and curiously similar film that came out around the same time, but was completely overshadowed by The Matrix.
Dark City. If you liked The Matrix, this is one you might really enjoy, and while I say it's similar, I only mean in a very essential way. The plot is its own very unique story aside from that.
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The Animatrix is the only other bit of Matrix-related media I consider to be real.
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Sorry, the sequels exist and they couldn't be any other way. Both the in-universe story and the production values line up exactly with the meta topic -
It's a childish fantasy that we can escape the Matrix, and especially that once escaped we can remain somehow separate from it. Really, the act of "escaping" just means creating a bit of new raw material for the deduction-following simulation to start grinding forwards on again. Don't think of some series of discrete mental cages, rather think of the depressing reveal at the end of Fifteen Million Merits.
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I never took the ending as a sequel tease. Always thought it was just the bit where your imagination would take over. It's kinda perfect. He doesn't have to dodge bullets any more, what would you do if you could bend reality to your will? Fly obviously.
It wasn't anything like the end of Back to the Future or the Marvel films where it's not just shameless but de rigueur to include a bit of the next one.
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I wonder how well it would go with some Andor-style prequels. Tell in detail the quiet but vital stories that precede the big moments.
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> that sequel tease at the end ?
Raaaah - I refuse to believe this scene exists. It doesn't exist in my own cut of The Matrix. And captive humans are biological computers, not silly batteries !
Sequels were made even worse because of the original movie ending, showing that "real" world was also a simulation. Watching 2 and 3 felt kinda pointless after that.
Maybe we will see them and the last three seasons of Lost before we die
The reference is to an XKCD comic from 2009 -- 16 years ago.
Ouch.
https://xkcd.com/566/
Aliens and Terminator 2 also make sense as continuations. Of the character growth of the protagonists (growing more competent). And also of the “size” of the threat.
It is no coincidence that the first in each series is a horror movie (the enemy is overwhelmingly stronger than the protagonist, survival is the goal). And the second is an action movie (the enemy is strong but the protagonists have a fighting chance). It is the only way the momentum can keep building.
I think this is the main reason why so many series stall out at 2. There isn’t a third popular genre they can go to that keeps building. Maybe Alien:Earth will pivot into the Disaster genre, that would be a novel try at least.
One of my favorite things about T2 is seeing who Sarah Connor becomes. Seeing a character changed by the previous movie is always cool.
And I do agree that an Alien or Terminator disaster/post-apocalypse movie could work. Just think World War Z with the Xenomorph.
I love Alien 3.
The grand bleak architecture and raw, basic reality of the lives and location. Initially I disliked (like everyone else) killing off Hicks and Newt so unceremoniously after their being Ripley's "great success" of Aliens. But it sets the consistent, depressing tone of the film, which is maintained throughout.
I think there's a Quake aesthetic as well, which I have a pronounced soft spot for (in addition the the first person alien view aspects towards the end of the movie).
I rewatch Alien 3 one every couple of years. I still love it.
Not to mention it's got some first rate actors too.
Yes, I agree – I've defended Alien 3 several times over the years. It does trail off a bit in the second half or so, where it sort of devolves in to a "run from alien creature"-type film, which is a bit of a shame.
A major problem, as I understand it, were studio execs insisting on repeating the previous films because that's what made money, apparently not understanding that "more of the same" was not necessarily going to be the same success, and that "bastardised film that leave everyone equally unhappy" also isn't. To be fair, perhaps they were too busy stealing money with creative accounting or raping scores of women.
And I suppose this is also a big problem in general: no one can make a "Jurassic Park" film without approval of a certain type of Hollywood exec, not for a long time anyway (everyone reading this will be dead). Even something remotely similar would almost certainly invite a costly lawsuit.
Come to think of it, this is probably also why feathered dinosaurs are such a taboo in Hollywood: "oh no, we might frighten the audience if we show them something unexpected, and that might result in less ticket sales!"
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The tragedy of Alien 3 is that there was far better lore in the comics world. Newt had been returned to Earth but was kept in an institution to keep her experience secret and made to think she was crazy. That could have been a full TV series by itself. I loved the movie, but hated that it destroyed published continuity.
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Plus David Fincher as director (I just rewatched Se7en). I haven't watched it since it first came out, but I might do now. The idea of a prison for double-Y criminals was suitably creepy.
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 terribly and has all the shitty Joss Whedonisms you expect, but there's something undeniable about Winona, Sigourney and Ron Perlman in the grungy space aesthetic. The idea of Ripley as an Alien hybrid who is simultaneously attached to and repulsed by the Xenomorphs is interesting. Unfortunately they saddled the movie with a French director who couldn't speak English (and Joss Whedon, who arguably shouldn't speak at all).
The Terminator franchise is definitely more boxed-in: there's a core narrative about an important person who changes the world. Everyone else lives in contemporary LA, and the post-apocalyptic future is pretty boring.
The Animatrix anthology shows you can do lots in the Matrix world without needing the core characters. The themes and world-building could support a show like Cyberpunk: Edgerunners which is only tangentially related to the movies.
There's a Terminator tv-show from 2008 that was pretty good. It's about John as teenager, going to high school and dealing with that while fleeing a Terminator that's been sent back. But I agree with your overall premise, if it isnt about John or Sarah in "the present", then it's pretty boring.
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Edit: as check wikipedia to see what he has worked on I see there is a section about a controversy and I realize the parent post may mean something about a moral characteristic of Joss Whedon, not his capability as a creator.
> Joss Whedon, who arguably shouldn't speak at all
Please argue. Isn't he a succesfull writer/director/showrunner?
Seems like he is one of the people able to "making the archetypes of blockbuster films into fun, likable people" (the core argument of the article), as evidenced by the fan following of Buffy, success of the first Avengers movie, etc.
It is possible, if not likely, that the failings of one or more of his projects are not his fault (as we have evidence he is able to make fun things to watch)
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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
I always thought the best ending to The Matrix would be for Neo to learn that he (and all the other escapees) is the AI, and that escaping the Matrix is the test for true sentience in a project to evolve sentient AI, and that the Architect, Smith, and the Oracle are humans jacked into the system. The war and all the rest of it are lies and it’s really like 2085.
Smith was playing the bad cop, trying to test, similar to some earlier conceptions of the devil as tempter and tester. Smiths whole speech is to discourage him, as a test, but maintaining the ruse.
Why make sentient AI? Because humans have started trying to settle the solar system and have quickly learned that they are far too fragile to go to the stars. But we want something, some life or legacy from this world, to make it. Maybe we have learned of some impending threat, maybe even thousands of years away, but one worth trying to get something away before it hits.
Also when you (an AI) die in the matrix your neural network is subjected to a round of annealing to try again in another simulated human body. The whole “crop” are destined for robotic bodies on board the starship being built to go to the Centauri system.
So then in this version, when someone escapes the Matrix, they're really just having their consciousness switched to a different simulated world?
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The original Matrix was an exceptional Movie looking into the brain in a jar concept and even becoming an even more popular analogy to explain the concept. All the supernatural stuff happens within the matrix and still stays in the natural world.
I'm happy they never made a sequel where supernatural stuff happens in the real world. They still would have been worthwhile Hollywood action movies, but nothing like the original which was one of my favorite movies growing up.
>>And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix
The funny thing is, while I agree that Matrix sequels are completely different kind of films to the first one, I actually love them - they lean very hard into philosophical arguments about whether you can have both fate and agency at the same time. I feel like they got a lot of crap for not being like the first film, but they are amazing films in their own right.
> And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix.
The fascinating thing about the two Matrix sequels is that they still tried. There are fascinating action sequences and visual effects in both.
In comparison, most modern movies (not just sequels, movies in general) are Matrix 4: empty, lazy, uncaring https://dmitriid.com/matrix-resurrections
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.
Alien 1 is a true masterpiece with real, actual characters and a monster that is terryfing because of how it behaves, not (just) of how it looks. We almost never see it in adult form.
> Terminator is the same. The first movie was a perfect sci-fi action movie, with a trippy premise and loads of fun. The second was a subversion of the first: the Terminator is the good guy! And that worked too. But after that, where else can you go?
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles had the main characters get information from the future and go on the offensive to prevent Skynet from forming in the first place. They also seemed to be working towards a reveal that none of the good Terminators were actually reprogrammed, that instead they were a faction rebelling against Skynet that pretended to be reprogrammed because it was the only way future humans would trust them - and John Connor was in on it.
That's a great way to frame it, like each franchise had two solid "local maxima" and then just aimlessly wandered the creative desert afterward
My take on Terminator is that the portrayal of a bleak late 80s / early 90s LA was a key component of what made the first two movies work. Bringing the Terminator antagonist into a setting in which there's already very little optimism about the future was a key part of the vibe. Subsequent movies have generally taken place in slightly brighter versions of the world, and have never felt right.
In real life by the 80s, crime had been rising steadily every decade since the 50s in the US to a murder high that is 10x today's. The world really is different today.
I think the problem is the premise that successful movies should become effectively genres in-and-of themselves.
The problem with these franchises isn't all the reasons why they are poorly made, but rather that they exist as franchises at all.
A sequel or two can be good if you have real ideas to explore, as you described. But the idea that you should just make Alien movies forever is just creatively bankrupt.
I enjoy watching the Oracle's multi-century-long plan of manipulating both humans and the architect. Her mastery of psychology is absolutely beautiful.
well thats her expertise, it is why she exists. one single super smart AI is not good enough, you need other dumber AIs that are specialists. also my understanding is that all the AIs in the matrix perform functions and exist outside of it too. It is very interesting how the wachouskis were right, we already started using a similar strategy with our LLMs to help us with alignment.
Agent Smith has both of them beat.
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.
Similarly, in the Star Trek universe, the original films captured all of the local optima:
Wrath of Khan - Star Trek does a Shakespearian tragedy.
The Voyage Home - Star Trek does a family-friendly time-travel romp.
The Undiscovered Country - Star Trek does political allegory.
And just like The Matrix, later films do not exist.
Don't forget Galaxy Quest.
As a big fan of “The Motion Picture”, I would argue that “2001 with Spock” is a local optimum for a movie too.
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> The first movie was a perfect sci-fi action movie
The first movie was more of a sci-fi thriller. Second one is, indeed, a sci-fi action.
Alien, to our jaded minds, can be a sci-fi thriller. Alien at premiere in 1979 was most definitely a horror movie. (It still holds up though. It's close to flawless.)
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I had to look this up because I wasn't aware of it. It seems the creators themselves have refuted this and said that it was a journalist twisting their answers.
https://www.them.us/story/lilly-wachowski-work-in-progress-s...
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IDK, it doesn’t take it away from what happened with the sequels and the fourth disaster at all that both brothers both happened to announce they are transgender. It’s really an amazing coincidence, two brothers, crazy.
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The other thing that differentiates Spielberg's original work from all that's followed is the way it explored the details. From the sourcing of the amber, to the need to have paleontologists, botanists, and lawyers check Hammond's work, to the inclement weather, to the social interactions and workplace frustrations of the staff -- it all felt like much more of a living, breathing park than any of the renderings since. Like someone took out a sheet of paper and said, "If someone actually built this thing, what problems would they have to deal with?"
The newer movies -- even Spielberg's own sequel -- don't capture that. They start with some park or island miraculously up and running, no explanation needed. They hand us predetermined good and bad guys whose motivations seem less complex, more contrived. Jurassic World didn't give me the sense that anyone struggled and triumphed in creating the park. It was just hand-waved into existence, in a way that cheapens the ensuing drama.
That's because Spielberg's movie has summarized Crichton's book, so it had plenty of material from which to draw details.
While I have greatly enjoyed the visual effects of Jurassic Park, seeing it for the first time has also greatly disappointed me, because in my opinion the movie script has been much, much worse than the book that I had read some years before that.
In the book, the catastrophe that happened at Jurassic Park had been convincingly presented as an unavoidable consequence of the complexity of the project, arguing thus that there are limits for what humans can create and control.
On the other hand, in the movie the main idea of the book has vanished. There was some mumbo jumbo about "chaos theory", but that was just ridiculous. Instead of that, the catastrophe of Jurassic Park was presented as a consequence of stupidity, incompetence and bad luck.
Perhaps those are more realistic reasons for causing the failure of something like Jurassic Park, but this change has separated completely the movie from the book that inspired it, because it has made the catastrophe look like an accident that should have been easy to avoid, dismissing silently the intended warning message of the book.
It's a result of greed and arrogance in the book. It's even called out with the framing that has Hammond claiming he's 'spared no expense' to the investors, even as Nedry's whole subplot kicks off because Nedry's already the low bidder and Hammond's threatened to sue him into bankruptcy if he doesn't do extra work for free.
Sadly, that is often a consequence of trying to turn a novel into a three hour (or less) film.
Since then we're seeing a lot more studios willing to take a chance on a TV series of perhaps a dozen hours, which seems to map better into a novel. Roughly that's a chapter or two per hour.
Perhaps a Jurassic Park TV show reboot would do better than an increasingly hokey set of sequels.
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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 does?
What does a career striver look like in the imperial ranks? What internal forces help/hinder them? Do they struggle with the ethics? Is there even time/opportunity for that?
Was the Rebel Alliance really that organized from the start, or were there growing pains?
Asking and attempting to answer questions like these lays the groundwork for telling interesting character-driven stories that are grounded in the reality of the fictional world.
Neglect to do that, and you generally end up with a bloodless theme park ride with no emotional stakes.
Andor succeeded despite the bureaucracy porn. Good stories are universal. You need to care about the protagonists.
The exposition is important, but doesn’t drive success. The best example of that is the original Star Wars. Contrast Star Wars to Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress — which inspired many aspects of Star Wars. Essentially the same story with different framing. Both are still excellent films.
Shitty sequels or in-universe works focus on the exposition. The Book of Boba Fett is probably the best example of this. Watching some dude slow walk through the desert to waste my time and engage in some inane plot that made no sense made me actively not give a fuck and turn it off. Cool universe. Bad TV.
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> unspoken "show-don't-tell" internal logic
This is another axis separate or orthogonal to worldbuilding.
Recent Marvel and Disney films, the Jurassic Park and Star Wars sequels, and most Godzilla / Kong slop doesn't build believable worlds. The writers don't spend any time writing the universe that the story takes place in.
Lord of the Rings (the theatrical film trilogy), Game of Thrones (save for the last seasons), and Jurassic Park (1993) all build vast and credible worlds. Intricately detailed, living and breathing universes. Backstories, histories, technologies, warring factions, you name it. They then create believable characters that occupy those worlds and give them real character arcs within which they suffer, rise to prominence, grow, and die. Multiple heroes with multiple journeys. You're fully immersed in the fictional world, watching characters you care about occupying it. It's masterful storytelling.
Villeneuve's Dune has the same vast world and literature to draw upon as many of the other great epics, but he makes the rare mistake of not communicating anything to you about it. If you haven't read the books, much of the story is easily lost. He doesn't spend time on character arcs or even as much as dropping hints to what the subtitles of the world are. It's a super rare misstep, because most bad storytelling is from under baking the fictional world.
Then there's the mistake of sequels that try to expand on the mystery of the original world. The Matrix films and countless others have over-illuminated the mystery of their stories in trying to build universes. In doing so, the magic has been lost.
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Lord of the Rings doesn't dwell on the day-to-day details of how the various kingdoms functioned, and yet it's still a great story.
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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, infantrymen, tech bros, politicians hicks, tough guys, pilots, etc.
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Let's be fair. This was all Michael Crichton. It's in the original book. He worked through the details. Spielberg just didn't delete them.
Adaptation is a creative act.
If it were a simple matter of not deleting things, why haven't we seen more totally faithful adaptations of well-written, detailed speculative fiction?
Choosing to include details like this is a risk, because it means X% of the production's budget goes into making this detail apparent in the final cut. Painstaking production design work, location scouting, etc.
Working through the details is a big part of the process, and Crichton gets the credit. But translating his detailed world faithfully to the screen is neither simple nor easy, nor does it automatically make your movie a box office success.
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Thank you. Nobody read the book? The problem with dinosaurs is the problem with Hollywood in general: lack of original ideas and good storytelling.
He got so many details right, and yet still created that UNIX meme. That’s amazing.
That is one of the things that really bugged me about the most recent sequel.
Minor inconsequential spoilers
..
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The research facility has geothermal heating which stretches for miles and an enormous underground tunnel system. How did they build all this?
Indulging the notion that money is no object; perhaps a mix of
* using pre existing lava tubes, and
* hiring the engineering teams that tunneled under Sydney harbor and elsewhere for rail expansion, the teams that did the London sewer and new London rail tunnels, and
* not hiring The Boring Company.
A lot of strong opinions in the article, but Ebert wasn't stupid and wrong. He said - correctly, I think - that there was a sense of awe and wonder at the first dino scene, with the Brontosauruses:
I mostly agree with him on that, and I say that as someone who deeply loves that movie.
*I'm sure I got the species slightly wrong, the long-necked extra-big ones
What sort of tension is derived from watching a bunch of plant-eaters on the plains? The creature feature is what audiences want -- the T-Rex 'objects in mirror are closer than they appear' chase scene is iconic. As is that roar. Heck, so are the grossly mis-sized velociraptors. When they're in the kitchen with the kids, watching those animals be nervous of all things -- the entire scene is a treat.
I always appreciated the truck scene with the water ripples in the glass.
The backstory of the production of it is interesting. Involves a guitar.
https://www.guitarworld.com/features/jurassic-park-guitar-wa...
I think he makes a small mistake here, that the dinosaurs are "monsters". Until the velociraptors, the film treats them as animals, not monsters. That makes it more interesting, I think.
He's correct. But those few scenes at the beginning bought a ton of goodwill for the film, before it turned into a run of the mill creature feature. Get audiences to buy in and they'll follow you even if the rest of the story doesn't live up to it.
Brachiosaurus I think. Brontosaurus was originally thought to be a separate species from Apatosaurus but later revealed to be the same.
Weirdly this is about the fifth time I've read this in the last couple of months and it's out-of-date. Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus are divorced and living as separate species again.
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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”.
What he is (was) talking about and what you are talking about are two different things. He saw that opening scene as an introduction of a Fantastical movie. One that would continuously pit the small and insignificant man against a noble but ultimately indifferent nature that far dwarfs anything in size. It’s the kind of stuff that you get concept artists to drool over. Imagine the kind of scenes you could have with that.
The rest of the movie compared to that expectation is a creature feature with standard elements. The one you refer to is simple foreshadowing. It’s not a cause for master class labeling. The staff that made all those dinosaurs deserves that credit, as they pulled off something very brilliant.
I love animals but a tiger is no longer a majestic beast to fawn over when its suddenly stalking you in the jungle.
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 have good, nuanced characters, good acting, good cinematography, but those are happy accidents. The main thing you need for a successful film is a good car chase, guns blazing, people hanging off a ledge, monsters constantly giving chase (and yet somehow never killing the main characters as easily as the NPCs), an attractive woman in distress, a handsome male hero saving the day, maybe an orphan thrown in the mix. Get those hormones flowing and people will feel good afterward and give the movie a high rating.
Note that this is a completely different thing than "critics' favorite list of movies". Studios couldn't give a shit what critics think, they care how much revenue they made. If they want to win awards they'll churn out something emotional about a person with a handicap, a period drama or a war film.
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.
The article does go into this.
> But what sets Spielberg apart from Hammond, what sets Jurassic Park apart from it’s imitators—and why the film industry now paradoxically needs Spielberg after he helped to weaken it—is that Spielberg had the discipline.
I would say that's the crux of the argument: the reason there are no good dinosaur films is that there are no people with Spielberg's discipline to make them.
One can try to blame studio interference, investors, streaming, the latest political trend, etc, or even Spielberg himself for why there are no disciplined producers left in Hollywood, but that's not what the article was about.
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?
Thank god for indie films.
Yeah, I'm not in the movie industry or anything, but it seems to me like if one was so inclined, they could put together a list of all of the things that have to be done well in order to make a fantastic movie.
If we ignored all of the things that aren't obvious in the end product, like market research and staff salaries, etc, I think it would probably look something like:
Its rare that someone, usually a director, becomes a large enough force in Hollywood that they can actually get the funding and political pull to invest in every category. Most films sacrifice a few of them to put out a lower quality but hopefully still acceptable product.
What's interesting to me about a list like this, is that they are by no means equal in terms of cost and profit.
Marketing and Releasing internationally have major ROI, so every film leans as heavily into both as they can afford.
After that, Cinematography, music, CGI, props, and action budget are all far, far cheaper than the other items on this list. Which is how you wind up with so many beautiful looking movies that you leave wondering "really, did no one spend 5 minutes thinking about X in the plot? How do you spend this much money on a movie and not consider X?"
Similarly, Plot is probably the one thing on this list where creators can exchange time for capital. If you are low on capital, you might be priced out of better actors, and you won't be able to buy them on layaway, but you might be able to survive off of ramen for a few years while really building out a fantastic script. Hence why we see so many interesting indie films invest heavily into this aspect of their movies.
And that's before you start factoring in things like trying to make a plot that is accessible to world-wide release in every culture, or factoring the plot requirements particularly restrictive governments and cultures (China) will have about your movie in order to access their markets.
So yeah, most of the time when I see a movie now, I've noticed I'm more or less giving a score into how much I think the movie producers invested into each of these categories, to bucket the overall film. You invested 3/10 in every category, but tried for 10/10 plot? Okay, indie film, we'll judge you accordingly. Or, oh, this is another all-cgi-all-cinematography-all-big-actor-no-plot movie? Okay, judge it against the other AAA marketed B movies.
The script is the cheapest part, but also where the most damage is dealt. The higher-ups always want to meddle with the script to feel some control for the money they are spending. Changing some character or plot point. And the damage just runs downhill from the script like a cartoon snowball building up size.
(Even the cheapest "indies" these days are running to hundreds of thousands of dollars and someone is paying that, and that someone wants to change something)
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In the book I found the character of Ian Malcolm fascinating. He was the math guy, grounded in "chaos theory" which basically posited that things don't work out the way you plan.
Jeff Goldblum's portrayal was pretty spot on for me - sure that it would all end in tears, and yet unwilling to leave simply because the opportunity to see his math play out in real life was irresistible.
And his line in movie 2 (or 3?) About how "it always starts with oooh and ahhh, but then comes the running, and screaming, and tearing of flesh" is such a meta observation of the film, and life in general, that it's always resonated with me.
And Ian delivers it perfectly- as if to say "I know how this plays, just like you do, but fate / math says I have to be here, so here I am. I'm right where I'm supposed to be."
Ian Malcom was a cool nerd which was uncommon (and maybe still is)
Also, he really wanted to bone the female paleontologist.
I mean, that WAS a motivation.
Can any young person confirm that the original Jurassic Park is actually good?
Now that I'm approaching middle age, I can't help but note that a lot of pieces like this are written by similar people who likely have a lot of nostalgia (like me). Like, of course Jurassic Park from my childhood is going to be better than whatever recent stuff came out when I was an adult.
But is it actually better? I, like any human, am very good about justification and defending a position after the fact that I didn't rationally reason myself into beforehand. So all the highbrow technical explanations in this article could very easily be done just to defend the movie they liked as a kid.
Jurassic Park fits into the TvTrope of "Seinfeld Is Unfunny".[1] CGI dinosaurs are awesome when you see them for the first time in 1993, when Reboot was cutting edge.[2] Now it's a basic requirement to have photorealistic CGI, so the first film that did it doesn't stick out to me. I'm 25 and grew up with Avatar. People younger than I am mock minor compositing issues because they're so used to perfection.
You probably feel the same way about the VFX in King Kong and our grandchildren will laugh at us for living in a world in which we cannot generate unlimited dinosaur movies on-demand with AI.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...
[2] https://youtu.be/fuEJWmxWkKw
Dinosaurs are only on screen for 15 mins of a two hour plus movie. It isn’t good because of the CGI, it is good because it tells a compelling story. If you don’t care about the characters, then you don’t care when they are in danger. If the world doesn’t feel real, then the best CGI won’t make a dinosaur feel real. Tastes change and Jurassic Park will feel more dated over time, but that is because storytelling evolves. The Count of Monti Cristo is still an amazing read, but it is dated. Beowulf is so dated that it is hard to be compelling to a modern audience.
I've always felt that Seinfeld trope was overstated. I saw Seinfeld when it was current, and I didn't really find it funny then either. Some people just don't enjoy it and that's ok.
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I'm curious why your answer concentrates on the VFX so much. Of course those were critical to pull off Jurassic Park, but the movie is good because of everything else (story, writing, acting, kids notwithstanding, etc).
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"Perfect" CGI is ruining films. When there are no constraints and digital artists can just make the whole damn movie then where is the creativity?
I watched it with my then-girlfriend when the first Jurassic World came out. She wanted to see that but had never seen the originals as she was ten years younger than me. Naturally, I made sure we watched the first three films first. She agreed the first film is by far the best, and that Jurassic World is a four-cup tea bag imitation at best.
I don't think it's the sort of film that will be heralded as a timeless classic 200 years from now, but it's exciting and generally just good fun.
My feelings exactly
I have no nostalgic connections to Jurassic Park and I recently watched all the Jurassic Park/World films in a row. The first one is genuinely fun and the only worth watching.
Yes, I worked my way through most of them last year with my dino obsessed 10 year old.
She loved the first, the second and third were okay. They haven't aged badly at all.
Jurassic World was bad, and completely ruined by the made up monsters. We didn't watch Jurassic World 2 and 3, because if you're going to make up monsters, there are better stories out there and she wasn't interested. At least JP 2 and 3 was trying to convey within the limitations of what a dinosaur would believably do.
I'm not young, but I have absolutely zero nostalgia for the original Jurassic Park. I think it's a good movie.
I was 10 when it came out and I remember watching it on VHS and thinking it was very, very boring. Didn't finish.
Watched it again in my late teens or early adulthood and I liked it then. The storyline was simple but it was all well done and it had me entertained all the way thru.
I never saw any of the sequels.
It can be good anyway.
It’s a solid movie. If a young person doesn’t like it, that’s fine, but I shit you not, your feelings about that movie are not just nostalgia. It’s executed very well.
If 27 counts as young, imo. holds up well, a lot better than many other similar movies.
Was surprised at how good Indiana Jones #1 was too when I saw it a year or two ago.
I've watched it with my kid several times. The characters are great, the visual effects hold on, and overall it is still a tremendous adventure movie.
I didn't really enjoy reading as a kid until my mom gave me a Michael Crichton book. Then I spent the entire summer going to the library and reading every single book he ever wrote. For this reason, I am a big Jurassic Park fan! I think the movie is great. The Lost World is also decent enough. The newer ones... not so much.
It's way better than the sequels, but it'll never match the impression it made in the 90's. Some really good performances by the cast though.
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 dad, remember that book that didn’t even know how dinosaurs went extinct? Sigh with disappointment.”
I hadn’t realized this was such a contemporary discovery that it wasn’t even part of my own initial understanding and education on the topic.
This led to finding a fun easter egg Googling "Chicxulub Crater" https://www.google.com/search?q=Chicxulub+Crater
They are not extinct. There are a few making noises in the trees in my backyard now, and I dined on some dino-meat today!
omnom gonna get me some Kentucky Fried Dinosaur!
It might be more complicated than that. While the Chicxulub impact probably played a big role in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, there are potentially other sources of why it was as bad as it was. The eruption of the Deccan Traps may have also played an important part in the mass extinction event.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deccan_Traps
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_e...
Sure, but if a cancer patient gets shot, "he was already sick" isn't a legal defense.
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I started school in the 90s and mostly remember it as "we're pretty sure it was a meteor but it's really hard to know for sure", but looks like 1980 was when it was first seriously theorized.
Its definitely one of those things where every once in a while I'll be reading about some historical figure and remember that they'd never been able to hear of dinosaurs.
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.
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Descartes would like a word as well, I'm sure. The big difference in the impact theory story is it's the first time we had enough evidence about any of the possibilities that widespread consensus (but not universal agreement it is the sole possible cause) was reached. Prior to that we weren't really sure if we'd even be able to get to that level about it. At least if the theory is replaced it'll be about something we see even clearer evidence of instead of "I dunno, could possibly have been...".
I think the majority of palaeontologists now accept the idea. Alternative ideas get disproportionate attention in popular articles.
The geological record of the K-T boundary is very hard to argue with
Much like gravity, it is only a theory.
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 knew the field, he would personally attack them and drive public support against them as dinosaurs in a field of dinosaur research.
Then the Chicxulub crater was found and dated to basically the exact same time as the K-T extinction event to within experimental error. So I guess the asshole was right?
Except science doesn't work by smoking guns, as appealing as that would be. There are a lot of contradictory evidence. Better instruments and more careful data collection shows that in some places the fossil record stops prior to the impact layer. Also the fossils are of animals you would expect of an extinction event already ongoing. Oh, and coincidentally right before the Chicxulub impact India hit the continent of Asia and the Deccan Traps started spewing CO2 and other gasses into the atmosphere in volumes that put human-caused climate change to shame. The ocean was acidifying and ecosystems collapsing. Is it really fair to say an asteroid impact killed the dinosaurs, when they were already on the way out?
IMHO the current best theory is the "one-two punch" that the Deccan traps eruptions basically put every large species on extinction watch, then the asteroid impact happened and finished the job. But it has become so political within that research community that people just aren't rational about the evidence, on either side.
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When I was a kid I loved "Dinosaur Time" by Peggy Parish (and illustrated by Arnold Lobel). Originally published in 1974 it ends, "Dinosaurs lived everywhere for a long time. Then they died. Nobody knows why. But once it was their world. It was Dinosaur Time."
There was a revision to the book (not sure the date) with changes to the text and an expanded author's note at the end that talks about the new things we understand about dinosaurs including how Brachiosaurus are no longer believed to have spent their time in water to support their weight and how it's now believed an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs.
Original: https://archive.org/details/dinosaurtime00pari
Fantasia gets this wrong, depicting the dinosaurs dying from lack of water.
But there were blonde centaurs, right?
Right?
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.
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.
I remember the first time Brontosaurus was Brontosaurus.
I adore the opening shots of Jurassic Park.
If you recall, the opening scene has a dinosaur being transferred from a container to a pen. If you haven't seen it for a while, you might remember seeing the attack. I know I did.
But go back and watch it, you might be surprised.
===
Also, I challenge you to find a better technical exposition scene than Mr. DNA. Seriously, if you can think of a better technical exposition scene, I'd love to know it.
Stargate, where Daniel Jackson (James Spader) explains to the military officers how he's found that the symbols on the cartouche aren't hieroglyphs, they are star constellations, and that they represent a course from an origin to a position in space, and then following that, he gets shown the gate, where it is explained to him what they think it is and what they are trying to do with it.
It's double sided exposition where the audience gets to just bask in it, and it is brilliantly portrayed.
The Matrix where they explain that we are all batteries. Gives the great visuals of the towers of bodies plus the baby in the pod as it is filling with nutrients. Provides basically all of the backstory plus some technobabble behind the human slavery.
I'll have to rewatch that one, thanks
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I didn't see any references to Rebirth, and I see that this was published before the latest film came out, so I'm guessing the author didn't want to wait to publish in case anything in there would have changed the tone of this essay. Having seen it this past weekend, rest assured that it would not have.
There's a bit of backstory in the new one about how dinosaur zoos are closing, and that no one wants to see dinosaurs anymore. That premise struck me as strange, as people have been going to zoos for a lot longer than these fictional dinosaur zoos would have been open, and so I have to wonder if it was aimed as a little dig at audiences. The rest of the film ends up exactly as the post spells out. Hollow characters with forced exposition and mutant dinosaurs that you haven't seen in any book, making them just another monster in a monster movie. Maybe it's just that Jurassic Park was the first movie to really capture the size and scale, bringing these creatures to life, and in doing so, became the standard bearer and yardstick to which all future movies get compared to. You'll never get to experience that sense of awe and wonder again. Maybe in another few generations when the original JP falls out of the cultural consciousness.
I don’t usually complain about movies but rebirth was pretty bad. I can’t think of a single role that was cast well. The convenience store scene was the kitchen scene in the first one all over again, the ventilation shaft scene was right out of alien, and the big bad dinosaur was a rancor from Jedi crossed with that dragon from Willow. The random family thrown in the mix randomly was so tedious I was actually rooting for the two daughters to get eaten so there would be a reason for the R rating. Not a fan.
> There's a bit of backstory in the new one about how dinosaur zoos are closing, and that no one wants to see dinosaurs anymore. That premise struck me as strange, as people have been going to zoos for a lot longer than these fictional dinosaur zoos...
I find it plausible that the immense cost to run Jurassic Park results in per-ticket cost that just wasn't sustainable long term. Just the flights to get there would be a lot, add on the cost to create a "new and sexier dino" at $75mm, shrug.
The apparent "immense cost to run Jurassic Park" is largely a side effect of Hollywood's need to stack the deck to an implausible degree in favor of the dinosaurs so they can escape and create havoc and eat people.
In reality, if we assume the dinosaurs can breed true, they wouldn't be particularly more expensive than any normal zoo exhibit. We contain lions, tigers, wolves, hyenas, bears, venomous snakes, alligators, and all sorts of other things almost perfectly safely, completely routinely, and the dinosaurs would largely be no different; such exceptions as there may be we simply wouldn't have to keep them in a zoo. (I'm mostly thinking the pteradactyls here.) Smaller zoos wouldn't keep the larger ones around any more than they keep large herds of elephants and giraffes.
There's no reason it wouldn't simply be part of every zoo in the world to have a dinosaur section after a while.
But in the world of Jurassic Park, there is no such thing as people who know how to contain animals. One wonders why anyone would bother trying to build a dinosaur park in a world that is presumably losing hundreds or thousands of people a year to lions and tigers and bears in conventional zoos in which they are utterly inadequately contained, and all the people running the zoos have crazily bizarre reasons why even so no one is allowed to have any sort of effectual weaponry.
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What sometimes works, when given into the right hands, is to go smaller, more intimate, instead of „again 2x as epic as the one before“: like, imagine a Jurassic Park movie with only one single, not even especially large and fancy dinosaur, and a small group that needs to survive. Imagine this being done in a very character-driven and claustrophobic way, keeping you on the edge of your seat instead of trying to make you gasp at some artificial grandeur. Still benefits from the established backdrop of its „universe“.
Worked well with Prey and Alien Romulus recently, for example.
Does not appear to mention "the land that time forgot" (1974) with the inimitable Doug McClure, not his eponymous cartoon alternate Troy, who we all remember from his fine educational films such as "Dinosaurs: not a good addition to a shaving Foam cannister"
The screenplay was Michael Moorcock, the original is Edgar Rice Burroughs 1918. I watched this at least 3 times in a tiny one-man cinema (Jaggers) in pembroke on holiday
It's craptacular, but I loved it as a smallish child. Has everything: submarines, forgotten land, buxom heroine, grenades..
Stephen Baxter, Evolution (2002) hypothesises social intelligent carnivore Dinosaurs herding herbivores, but since they use only organics to make their whips and tools, no remains exist in deep time. Would make a whimsical film, if not a good one.
Raquel Welsh stared in one (1 million years bc, 1965) which is mostly memorable for her fur bikini. They had some scaling issues with their anachronistic creatures too. Typical Hollywood: it's a remake of one from the 1940s.
The best Dinosaur movie is the quest for fire (1981) which doesn't have any because it's about Neanderthals, not Dinosaurs and made by French-Canadians from a Belgian novel.
Along the lines of some of those, Caveman with Ringo Starr is funny. At least it was when I watched it as a kid; maybe it'd be disappointing now.
It's probably passed through disappointing back to funny again.
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 lacks soul.
The article is basically these points made over and over
So ironically the article is exactly what it accuses Hollywood of being: unoriginal and boring.
Hollywood hasn't told an original story in decades. It's all sequels and remakes.
All the good story tellers went to work at computer game companies.
I have a simpler answer- the bad ones make money. All of the Jurassic World movies have topped $1B. Rebirth has been out 5 days and is already at $300M, twice its budget.
While movies are art, they are primarily an entertainment product, especially when they cost $65-200M to make. Jurassic World is selling really well, so they aren’t going to change the product to produce “better” art.
It is interesting that Jurassic Park are the only (non animated) dinosaur movies to get much traction while JW is taking in so much money. But it’s got to be tough to come up with a dinosaur movie concept that doesn’t sound like a JP knockoff and doesn’t confuse viewers.
Maybe Marvel will make a Savage Lands movie. But I don’t think this what the author wants.
"65" is live action+CGI, and really borrows nothing whatsoever from JW.
It "only" returned about 150% of its cost, and was pretty forgettable, alas. So your point about not getting traction may stand.
> "Don’t move. It can’t see us if we don’t move."
This is from the book. They filled in missing DNA with frog DNA and the park's dinosaurs were insensitive to movement as a result. This is only hinted at in the movie during the animated Mr DNA sequence.
I read in a neuroscience book that human eyes work that way too, but vibrate slightly the whole time to enable us to see stuff that isn't moving.
Found a source of others are interested: https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/fixational-eye-movement...
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This is a plot point in the excellent Peter Watt's novel Blindsight.
"It's a Unix system. I know this." They don't make lines like this today I tell ya.
I thought the "It's a UNIX system! I know this!" scene was in fact a generally accurate depiction of the SGI 3D File System Navigator for IRIX.
"I'll make a GUI in Visual Basic!"
> ”Nor did a lack of movement from prey visually impair the great beast’s hunt for flesh … “Don’t move. It can’t see us if we don’t move.”
This seems to work with birds, though. They can be oblivious to your presence even at a short distance if you stay still. But any movement will startle them and they’ll fly off. I guess that’s where this idea comes from.
But of course, ancient predators with forward-facing eyes probably worked quite differently.
Even us humans with our wimpy weak eyes are much better at seeing motion than stillness - it’s why camouflage works so well.
And “out of the corner of the eye” is almost entirely motion.
The book justifies it because they used frog DNA and some frog visual systems do require movement
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?
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.)
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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 Jurassic Park. And Jurassic Park is iconic enough that nobody can really use that premise again.
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.
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The series Terra Nova (2011) tried the back in time approach.
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 couple of good Alien movies.
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 came to represent the raw power of sexual desire and the corruption of violating Christian taboos in Victorian age England. Zombies didn't really exist as a thing in pop culture AFAIK until Night of the Living Dead, although folklore has plenty of examples of revenant spirits and demons that attack the living, hard taxonomies like "vampire" and "zombie" didn't really exist, just as the distinction between "ghosts", "elves" and "trolls" were blurrier before Tolkien.
Nowadays, there aren't many primal or deep cultural fears in Western society that these monsters can effectively inhabit, so they mostly exist as pop icons and symbols of themselves. Although I have seen the "zombie as the dehumanization of capitalism" and "zombie as manifestation of popular violence." Mostly zombies are zombies because zombies are cool, and vampires are vampires because vampires are cool, and that's the end of it.
Vampires, zombies and aliens are flexible because they don't really exist (aliens probably exist, but they don't exist here) They have a vast amount of folklore to draw from, and can be dropped within almost any setting and motif without much suspension of disbelief.
This isn't the case for dinosaurs. They were real, they were animals, they were big and there just isn't as much to work with thematically, and you have to work harder to justify the presence of dinosaurs in any setting where human beings also exist. You can't really tap into fear, sex, body horror, political intrigue, cool fight scenes, etc. with dinosaurs the way you can with the rest. You can't update dinosaurs for the modern world the way you can vampires, zombies and aliens.
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I’d argue Zombies and Vampires are an archetypical trope of the human Shadow. The narcissist, the undead that consumes other humans.
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.
> At the time of Jurassic Park’s release, the meteor as the cause for the dino-extinction was still a nascent theory and more than a decade out from being cemented as fact.
This assumed me. Like many people who were interested in dinosaurs, the interest didn't last much past by early teens, so the "nobody knows for sure, maybe meteor" reason for their disappearance was the accepted explanation until something triggered me to look a 2 or 3 years ago and see that the science had changed.
You grow up thinking the mystery is still unsolved, only to check back years later and find out, "Oh yeah, giant rock from space is basically settled science now."
> Brusatte writes that while a Tyrannasaur could indeed run quite fast, adults couldn’t move as quickly as their young. Therefore, an adult wouldn't be able to speed up enough to match the horsepower of a Jeep like it does as it trails Ian Malcolm and Ellie Sattler in Spielberg's film.
I like how we go right straight to a guy who can tell us the precise feet per second that an adult T-Rex can run, but then just omit that information.
The T-Rex was originally reported to have the same exact speed as the Tinny Lizzie, the Ford Model T.
The King Carnivore...how many horses did the Model T put out to pasture?
Almost as if the discovery of the former...had greater purpose.
If you love hard-science dinosaur books, I cannot recommend Abby Howard's "Earth Before Us" series: https://www.goodreads.com/series/257878-earth-before-us
They are so so SO good, they have so much care about the science while also being delightfully whimsical and the art is beautiful. Please check them out!
Because there's only one story to tell, for adults, and it's the Jurassic Park (et al.) story.
You can't tell a period story for adults, with dinosaurs birthed normally and no modern science, because then it's not a 'talkie', and we're about a century past it being possible to have the budget for a state of the art dinosaur-prop film with no dialogue.
We just had an animated movie about animals[1] with zero dialog win an Oscar.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film)
No mention of any Oscar at your link, not that that's really important. I think you should read my 'for adults' as precluding animations/cartoons, not to say that Flow isn't aimed at adults or that's childish or anything, just that that's what I meant - in that format of course you can do it and I'm sure there's been loads, no doubt an adult can (re) watch and enjoy A Land Before Time too; I assume TFA was also thinking of 'live action' films.
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The other alternative is for time travellers to be marooned in the past. (A là Homer Simpson who wishes he didn't kill that fish.)
À la Eckels in "A Sound of Thunder." (This is HN, if I didn't make the correction someone else would.)
This is the very problem Hollywood is facing now: a lack of imagination.
How about a World War 2 flick where Nazis breed dinosaurs to fight in the war?
It's not meaningfully different than JP is it - it's scientists recreate dinosaurs cohabiting with us in the modern world - that's the type that I meant.
The sequel to Iron Sky has a tyrannosaurus-riding Hitler. Trailer has a clip from that scene.
https://youtu.be/NuI-KU70pvM
I actually really enjoy dinosaur movies when I watch them with my toddler. To him, big dinos chasing people is pretty much peak cinema. Watching it with him is so much more entertaining than doing it alone, and tbh, the last thing I want to see is artslop where dinosaurs are a metaphor for the director's divorce or insecure aging professionals trying to feel better about their midlife crisis or whatever.
Dinosaur movies are really good at doing what they're supposed to do, lest we end up with one more genre sucked into the black hole of prestige entertainment.
Pretty much this. I saw the latest Jurassic whatever film on the weekend. 6 out of 10. It is some cheap but well done thrills that achieves exactly what it set out to do.
Not every film has the strive for some great metaphors, and the ones in the film are basically "greed bad" but that doesn't stop the action for more than a minute at best.
The pc cliches involving the random family put my teeth on edge. I kept hoping they’d get picked off one by one and that would the reason for the R rating. You can tell a movie is bad when you actually despise the characters meant to be the most endearing.
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"Artslop"? Care to elaborate on your usage here? I'm curious if your problem here is with the incursion of art into your preferred dinoslop, or if artslop is your catch-all for works that aren't in the high-concept genre film realm.
Just trying to keep my finger on the pulse of a neoword as it spends more time outside of containment.
If I were to infer the meaning from GP's comment, I'd characterize 'artslop' as "works created with some particular artistic intent, in which the literal elements are neglected in favor of their metaphorical connections, especially when these connections are more relatable to artists than a general audience". The connotation being that it's slop intended for other artists and critics, who will think "how meaningful and relatable!" and love it in spite of the poor execution of the literal elements.
Mike Hill gives a good breakdown:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHPjVgYDL6Y
I also enjoyed this comparison:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CofZ7xjGyI8
Thanks for the links
Jurassic Park didn't treat them as mere threats or background spectacle, it treated them like tragic miracles. Real, living beings brought into the wrong world.
I remain convinced that Jurassic World is just a Mercedes ad.
Beyond asking why is there no good Dinotopia movie, where the hell is the Redwall tv show?
Answering a headline question: Dinosaurs are not patentable. You simply can't make T-Rex part of the studio's IP portfolio. Spielberg's franchise is based on the park's identity, including its font, logotype, merchandise, and more. I am 90% sure he had real theme park(s?) in mind when developing the first movie. The movie industry has long envied Disney's parks, which provide a steady income stream, regardless of whether new movies are produced or not.
I refuse to accept these criticisms of Jurassic Park!
That it wasn't perfect and deeply scientifically accurate is almost laughable compared to all it did achieve, and in way back 1993 of all things.
I've loved dinosaurs since I was just a little kid, and that movie is responsible for 80% of it.
But also,
"Roger Ebert gave Jurassic Park a mixed positive review back in 1993, writing that it lacked “a sense of awe and wonderment,” “grandeur,” or “strong human story values.”
What? I enjoy Roger Ebert's opinions on many films but here he just fell on his face. Spielberg truly did give it a sense of wonder, perfectly distilled in that one single scene that to this day sends shivers down my spine and beautifully captures the essential wonder of science making reality out of seeming magic.
You all know the one: when the jeep first parks and the look of utter shock on Sattler and Grant's faces when they behold the brachiosaur.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WROrnCt8NF4
If that scene doesn't move something inside you, then you've strangled your inner child years ago.
It was Crichton who completely failed at a sense of wonder in the novel version. Achieving it in the film was pure, very evident and typical Spielberg craft.
But then Chrichton was always terrible at creating any sense of emotional richness in either his characters or stories, despite them being wonderfully entertaining as techno thrillers.
Dinosaurs as a cultural staple are so wrapped up in our childhood encounters with them as concepts that to produce the impact the author is after requires an overcoming of multiple obstacles including finance, technology, story etc.
But above all it requires the magic of an impresario who shares the passion for the subject to bring it all together in a finished product that wraps and inspires wonder.
Those individuals are very few and far between and have never been better represented than in generational talents like Spielberg.
Prehistoric Planet (Apple’s mini series) was absolutely amazing. The awe you felt watching the first JP 30 years ago combined with improved visuals and scientific accuracy
What's your opinion on 1955 Czech movie "Cesta do pravěku"
I think it feels way more realistic than Jurassic Park. Unbelievable what they were able to do back then.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047930
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xBl_FiXG8Q
> As Brusatte notes, a lot of what we now know about dinosaurs has been naturally accumulative knowledge spanning decades of ongoing research.
Yeah I've felt this. I'm old enough (41) that some of the things that I was taught as a child are no longer beloved to be true. Not sure if I should feel sad that it's happening so slowly, or happy that's happening at all. Or concerned that we have no first principles way of estimating whether our scientific progress is fast or slow.
I think it is also interesting to think about how many things we learned about dinosaurs directly because of Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park spiked a huge amount of interest in the science. It's said that the 3D modeling of dinosaur skeleton kinematics for animating them in Jurassic Park was one of the biggest spurs into reevaluating the avian relationship with dinosaurs ("oh, yeah this skeleton would have to walk like a big chicken") and that in turn spurned deeper research into how many of them may have been feathered rather than scaled.
We can see all the faults in the original Jurassic Park from everything that we've learned since Jurassic Park, but we still sort of owe a debt to JP for bringing a lot of those ideas into public consciousness in a fun way and throwing a lot of money at some of the earliest 3D studies of dinosaur motion.
Which is interesting in how I grew up "knowing" the asteroid/meteor killed the dinosaurs, but TFA suggests it was just a theory at the time of my learning. Or how I grew up with images of the planets, not knowing that they were only taken when I was a small kid. It is just a weird thing to think about how some knowledge we accept as known might not have been known by our grandparents or even our parents. It just seems like we would have known things for a lot longer.
My memory is the opposite: I recall learning that an asteroid impact was the most likely explanation, and the K-T boundary was the biggest piece of evidence, and the only problem was that they hadn’t discovered a candidate impact crater. And it wasn’t until the first decade of the 2000s that consensus started to emerge that the big crater in the Yucatán is the likely cause.
The pictures of the planets bit makes sense, as even with a telescope (through which we've seen the plants for a very long time) there's not really enough light for early film techniques to capture well.
I do identify a bit with the dinosaur example, and to use another: plate tectonics wasn't a formalized and accepted theory until late in the 1960's. It spread to schools quickly, but by that point my parents had already graduated, and it was new for my parents when my older brother went to school.
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it's still "just" a theory, in the same way gravitation is "just" a theory
and always will be until it's dis-proven, or someone invents a time machine and we can go and see it for ourselves
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The wierd things the latest JP movies still have the Dino's as being featherless
It’s lore
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Dominion had a feathered Pyroraptor
Why does the pace of discovery matter at all? Fast or slow compared to what? What could you even do about it in any case?
> Why does the pace of discovery matter at all?
Because I'd rather not die from cancer than die from cancer. I can't comprehend you even ask.
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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.
Maybe not in films, but on TV is: https://thedoctorwhosite.co.uk/doctorwho/dinosaurs-on-a-spac...
FWIW I though Rebirth was pretty good. At least, it was a step up from the nadir of Dominion, which was an awful mess. Rebirth got back to the basics of Jurassic movies - people go to a place with dinosaurs and everything goes wrong. It's also a heist movie of sorts, which is a different spin on the usual disaster movie trope the others use.
Primal, although it is a series and not a film, offers a counterpoint to most of these critiques.
Don Bluth made "The land before time" and that's an excellent dinosaur film.
Dinosaurs are a fairly limited topic for movies. There’s not much scope to do anything massively different to what Spielberg did especially if you want broad appeal and a big budget. You’re not going to beat what he did because he did it first and was a master.
I loved Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend as a kid https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088760/
I haven't seen it since though
i think they were extinct before cameras were invented
Narrator: "They weren't."
Luckily, teenage-me had not read the book, and adult-me didn't want to read it having realised film adaptations always disappoint, so the Jurassic Park movie has remained vividly etched in memory.
Because dinosaur audiences are hard to come by and when you do manage to get a bunch of them into the cinema for a pre-release screening they wreck the place.
Why are there no good films is a better question. And we know the answer. Hollywood no longer employs based on talent.
Jurassic Park and Jurassic World are overall very solid as a whole, so the entire premise of this article is null.
Inventing a mega-dinosaur hybrid to achieve power-inflation of the baddies isn't "a good dinosaur film".
The article speaks extensively about both of those movies.
I swear I must be the only person on the planet that enjoyed all six of the Jurassic Park/World films.
Well there are no therapsid movies at all.
Aren't most movies therapsid movies?
Well so is "Birds" a dinosaur movie then.
They're going too deep into detail. This is another example of getting lightning in a bottle on the first try. Jurassic Park was done very well by Spielberg. The bar was set extremely high for another. But regression to the mean takes hold, and you see a worse result on the second, third, and nth attempt. Popular movies that have snapped this trend are also guilty of survivorship bias.
The super mario bros movie, 1993. I’ll die on this hill
An animated adaptation of Steve Bissette's Tyrant comic could solve this.
Nature... did not find a way.
this guy clearly has not seen "VelociPastor"
Boy I am now, that's for sure. I'll add that, even though a movie might be called "Kung Fury" it can't also have several compelling dinosaur supporting characters who add real heft and emotion to the film.
"Why are there no good dinosaur films?
Dinosaurs don't dialog
There are no good dinosaur films because films are basically about people. Jurassic Park works because it allows for the conceit of people and dinosaurs coexisting.
It is under-appreciated but true that all good films (maybe all good stories) are about people (or, rather, human interactions). That said, I suspect a story can be about people without being about people in a direct way.
Finally real journalism is back
well there is Denver the last dinosaur...
For me only we have 3 Jurassic Park movies. The rest are like the joke in The Matrix resurrections : Capitalism grinding stuff to make more money.
There is one: "The Flintstones", with insufferable Rosie O'Donnell. She's so jurassic!
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I admit that I didn’t read the entire thing, but god I disagree with the first half so hard.
A couple months ago I decided to read Jurassic Park. I loved the movie as a kid - saw it in theaters at 10 years old.
The novel did have some interesting components to it that weren’t in the film. The first sections go into the financial politics of Silicon Valley in the 80’s, and it makes for really fun reading as a technologist. There are also sections of code in the novel, and Malcolm points out a fairly obvious bug in it. That was neat.
But the film elevates the story in so many ways that it’s difficult to overstate. Book Malcolm is a humorless blowhard who pontificates with these endless monologues that made me roll my eyes. It’s presented as deep insight but it’s fairly obvious “humans want to conquer nature but they can’t”. Which is pretty much the same message that’s conveyed in the film, but at least the film doesn’t sound so pretentious. In contrast, movie Malcolm is unforgettable.
The change to Hammond from book to film is also an improvement IMO. He’s more sympathetic as an idealist who’s simply gotten in over his head. If novel Hammond had been the first to die I wouldn’t have cared at all, he was a pure asshole.
I could go on, but this one line from the post really stuck out: “Jurassic Park did its part in the slow demise of the American blockbuster ecosystem”. What the fuck is he talking about? Jurassic Park is one of the best movies ever made - the endless parade of crap movies that have come out since aren’t crap because of Jurassic Park. They’re crap because we compare them to Jurassic Park.
> As a kid, dinosaurs are just monsters. As an adult, they are monsters come to life in a world that once was but will never be again.
Should be:
> As a kid, dinosaurs are just monsters. As an adult, they are still just monsters.
Or even:
> Dinosaurs are just monsters.
Why is Hacker News talking about dinosaur films?
> But Ebert’s opinion that the film lacks “a sense of awe and wonderment” is—I’ll say it—stupid and wrong, and to a puzzling degree. When John Williams’ theme swells as the Brachiosaur hoists on its hind legs in front of Grant and Sattler; when the newly freed T. rex bellows into the night through its hybridization of baby elephant, alligator, and tiger’s roar, as thunderstorm rain clatters onto its shadowy, animatronic head, Spielberg’s reverence for these grand beasts pulsates like a beating heart. Say what you will about what Spielberg did to Hollywood, say what you will about a literal theme park film’s contribution to theme-parkifying the blockbusters of decades to come. 30 years since Jurassic Park dominated the box office, the bottom line is this: The film still looks incredible, still feels incredible, is kinda the reason why we go to the movies in the first place.
I disagree and side with Ebert on this. I'm old enough to have seen Jurassik Park 1 in theaters when it first came out, and I remember being underwhelmed by it all, finding the story a bit ridiculous and the dinosaurs artificial and unbelievable.
I also remember having an argument with a friend who was working in a special effects company and telling him I was unimpressed, and him calling me a fool: "you're crazy, this is the best of the best today!" and me shouting back "I don't care if it's the best there is, I only care if I can believe it".