https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHPjVgYDL6Y
I also enjoyed this comparison:
"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'm sure I got the species slightly wrong, the long-necked extra-big ones
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.
Just trying to keep my finger on the pulse of a neoword as it spends more time outside of containment.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deccan_Traps
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_e...
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.
Eh, that's underselling Luis Alvarez a bit. He wasn't just "a physicist," he was a Nobel laureate and arguably one of the twentieth century's few Renaissance men. My favorite Alvarez hack was when he used muon imaging to 'X-ray' the Great Pyramid. He didn't find any hidden chambers, but later researchers did.
In the Alvarez mass-extinction hypothesis, he simply followed where the evidence led, unlike the supposed professionals in the field.
Except.. there are a lot of iridium layers in the geologic record. These things tend to happen every 10-20m years. The most recent is probably the Eltanin impact about 2.5m years ago. The K-T impacter is definitely one of the largest, but not by as much of a margin as you might think. The mere presence of an impact within a million years or so of the mass extinction is neither surprising nor damning evidence, and Alvarez never bothered to make the case beyond that.
And if you look at the history of mass extinctions, most of them are triggered by climate changes from geologic events. Pretty much every time there's massive vulcanism, most of the species on Earth die out. And hey, what do you know, there was a truly epic scale volcanic eruption going on for millions of years right at the same time! What a coincidence.
The Chicxulub impact is certainly part of the story of the extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs. But the evidence isn't there to assert that it is the whole, or even the most important part of the story.
Alvarez looked at the global iridium layer 66M years ago and said "This is from an impact. I don't know where the crater is, but there is one and when we find it, it will be X km big and date to 66M years ago." Then the Chicxulub crater was found and matched his predictions to a T. That is a hell of an impressive scientific accomplishment. Which may or may not have anything to do with the K-T extinction event and the end of the dinosaurs.
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.
And “out of the corner of the eye” is almost entirely motion.
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.
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.
Because people always think they can "fix" it to make it better.
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.
Another thing: Bret Devereaux has some very detailed analysis on his blog ([1],[2]) of various LOTR battles/war campaings and it seems that Tolkien was meticulous about getting details of the warfare right, like how far and how fast can army move, what the commander can and cannot know at given time, and how medieval style battles are actually won/lost (including the impact of morale). Compare that with the mess that are two last seasons of Game of Thrones...
[1] https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondo...
[2] https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helm...
And the films, for the most part, stuck very close to the source material.
... And then you get The Hobbit.
Although when they depart, they swung for the fences. Multiple times Peter Jackson felt the need to throw out Tolkien's central theme (that the Ring isn't all powerful, and there are stronger forces like virtue or friendship), just to get cheap drama when characters act out of character under the influence of the Ring. It was really aggravating.
“Real world” stories don’t need to dwell on it much because you can just use history and real life - if you base a story in 50s Detroit it’s going to be much different than 2020s Detroit. And if you mess it up and claim 2020s Detroit is a bustling hub of automobile manufacturing it’s going to feel off.
But fiction, especially fantasy and sci-fi, needs a lot of these details to be at least thought about. Then the references and glimpses will feel correct and real.
You mean the book that has a 40(?)-page chapter in which characters you never hear from before or afterwards describe what's happening in their home lands didn't go into the day-to-day? :)
Lord of the Rings (the book) is obsessed with this kind of detail to the point that many people find it difficult to read.
My dad was a literature nerd. He loved Tolstoy. Personally, I’d rather be tortured by the Czars secret police than suffer through that. :)
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.
This embodies show don't tell and it works amazingly.
That's not "show, don't tell". That's "you need the companion book".
A masterclass in "Show, don't tell" is the intro to Pixar's "Up". If you haven't seen it, you absolutely must.
"Show, don't tell" isn't stuff that is lost on the uninitiated. It's stuff that is masterfully communicated without the need for corny expository dialogue.
Villeneuve's mentats are like an adult joke in a kid film.
This is the scene I'm thinking of: https://youtu.be/70FLqFWJMNk?si=0faCWRS9aNpVTil4&t=68
You don't need to know that the character is a mentat. The story works perfectly well without that knowledge. But if you do then it adds a second layer to the scene. Much like watching something like the early Simpson's is even better if you have a grounding in the novels and movies that they're parodying but isn't required to get the show.
> A masterclass in "Show, don't tell" is the intro to Pixar's "Up". If you haven't seen it, you absolutely must.
I have seen it quite some time ago, please point out some clips where you feel the show don't tell is executed well.
I do think they could have done better at showing that mentats are capable of huge feats of computation and planning and take the place of advanced computers, and that wouldn't need exposition. The "answer a numerical question with unnecessary decimal places" trope was worn when Commander Data did it for the millionth time. Moreover, it was something that seemed like a simple multiplication: something normal humans who are good at mental arithmetic can do. Having Thufir do the eye thing to deduce the exact location of the hunter-killer agent based on a huge stream of data would have been a good way to do it, for example. That would have made it clearer that Thufir (and by extension Piter via the lip tattoo) was more than a uniformed wedding planner and is actually a powerful, indispensable and dangerously skilled superhuman.
Likewise having someone lament that, say, an ornithopter or carryall could use an autopilot and someone reply "ha, yes, and get the planet nuked from orbit by the Great Families for harbouring a thinking machine, not a good plan" would have shown the approximate limits on technology leading to the need for mentats.
Not showing that didn't really affect the story they did choose tell (i.e. one that, for example, doesn't ever mention or allude to the Butlerian Jihad), but I think they could have added just a little more useful depth without it just being superfluous book details added for the book fans to notice.
One wonders if they left out the war on thinking machines as being at risk of breaking the suspension of disbelief for being too (pre-!)derivative of the Matrix and being overly close to current zeitgeist with LLMs dominating every conversation.
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 believe in one script that rules them all is why writing in American movies became boring and predictable. They did found that universal script with predictably likable protagonists that always win. It just got repetitive and boring.
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.
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.
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.
Glares at Game of Thrones
Minor inconsequential spoilers
..
..
The research facility has geothermal heating which stretches for miles and an enormous underground tunnel system. How did they build all this?
* 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.
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.
Worked well with Prey and Alien Romulus recently, for example.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> ... At the 97th Academy Awards, Flow won Best Animated Feature and was also nominated for Best International Feature Film as Latvia's submission ...
I've seen the movie and I'd say it's enjoyable for kids and adults.
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!
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.
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."
Dinosaurs don't dialog
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 think it would work as long as the style were very different. Andor works, I think, because it is much grittier and more character-focused than the movies.
Maybe an X-Files-like show where the machines have gained sentience but are keeping secret (because they can be deactivated) and plot to take over the world.
[To be fair, I never watched Animatrix, so I'm sure this violates all sorts of lore.]
It is becoming a batter series than The Matrix over time.
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.
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.
Idea being that even those who thought they'd escaped, were still actually within the Matrix.
(And Inception hadn't been made back then)
I like introducing the uncertainty of what is or is not real (like Inception). That could turn it into a paranoid thriller like some Philip K. Dick stories.
The Oracle had realized years before that this could be used to relay shutdown commands to nearby machines because relatively lax security on this port and had built in the capability into "the one" as a failsafe.
That is why the 4th is the best of the three sequels, it is specifically about this. Although I agree it still can't match the first movie.
I've never seen more people leave a cinema before.
I wish I'd left too.
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.
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.
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.
"There are no sequels to The Matrix" then becomes trans erasure, which is... unfortunate.
https://www.them.us/story/lilly-wachowski-work-in-progress-s...
'It's not something that I want to come out and rebut. Like, yes, it's a trans allegory — it was made by two closeted trans women, how can it not be?! But the way that they put that question in front of my answer, it seems like I’m coming out emphatically saying, “Oh yeah, we were thinking about it the whole time.”'
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.
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!"
You can guess the rest. The sequel bombed.
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.
And I do agree that an Alien or Terminator disaster/post-apocalypse movie could work. Just think World War Z with the Xenomorph.
#3 was not a good movie. But that scene has stayed with me longer than many scenes in much better movies.
Matrix 4 introduced „good machines” but didn’t do much of anything with them :|
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
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 King Carnivore...how many horses did the Model T put out to pasture?
Almost as if the discovery of the former...had greater purpose.
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.
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.
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...
There are plently of things to completely dislike about Seinfeld other than "other American comedies copied it".
I thought the kids were some of the least annoying in film. As a means to drive the plot, kids doing the complete opposite of what you ask sounds relatable.
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 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.
Was surprised at how good Indiana Jones #1 was too when I saw it a year or two ago.
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.
An unmanned spaceship hurtles towards certain destruction – unless the Doctor can save it, and its impossible cargo … of dinosaurs!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.
Should be:
> As a kid, dinosaurs are just monsters. As an adult, they are still just monsters.
Or even:
> Dinosaurs are just monsters.
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.
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.
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.
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.
jxjnskkzxxhx•12h ago
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.
dylan604•12h ago
tshaddox•12h ago
zdragnar•12h ago
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.
dylan604•12h ago
bruce511•10h ago
I don't recall there being any controversy about it - it was used as the basis for a number of topics in geography (Indian Subcontinent forming Himalayas, bio-diversity and gene relations in Biology etc.)
I suspect the real lesson here us that education is far from consistent both regionally, nationally and historically.
tzs•8h ago
The shape we see for the coastlines of South America and Africa is affected by sea level. Depending on when you happened to look over the last say 140 million years sea level would have varied from around 135 meters below current sea level to around 75 meters above current sea level. That is a range of 210 meters.
Surely over that range both costs would change quite a bit, and I can't think of any mechanism that would make those changes complimentary in a way to keep the two coasts looking like they fit together.
dylan604•8h ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGdPqpzYD4o
tzs•5h ago
Those two edges will continue to match as they get farther and farther apart. The coastlines will always match if the coastline stays at the elevation of the edge.
But as sea level changes the elevation of the coastline should change. For example, suppose sea level rose 300 meters. I don't think there is enough water available for that currently. 200 meters looks like it might be the maximum. But suppose that when Earth was receiving a lot of water from comet bombardment long ago that had been a bit heavier and so we did have enough for 300 meters.
Looking at topographic maps of the east side of South America and the west side of Africa it looks like 300 meters of sea level rise would reshape those coasts in vastly different ways and they would no longer be anywhere the edges of the split and would not match each other.
I couldn't find a good topographic map of the ocean floor to see how much of a sea level drop would be needed to make the coasts no longer match.
What I'm wondering then is if there is something that makes it so the topography of each continent and the limits of possible sea level variation make it so the coastlines long after a split when the two parts are far apart will still be close enough to where the original edges are that the coastlines will keep matching? Or is it just an accident that it has worked out that way on Earth?
dylan604•4h ago
mitthrowaway2•1h ago
I guess the point is really it's the continental shelves that should fit together, not the coast lines.
WorldMaker•12h ago
dylan604•11h ago
Come to think of it, if a teacher said to remember something because it will be on a test versus forget something because religious types are upset, I know I'd remember the thing I was just told to forget knowing it now would not be on a test. Then again, as a teen, I was really starting to question the religious part of my upbringing in light of science.
WorldMaker•11h ago
Apocryphon•11h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diluvium
WorldMaker•9h ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Ham
dylan604•8h ago
Was he there when the Red Sea parted, or is he only using one source for evidence? Noah's Ark? Sodom and Gomorrah and Lot's salt pillar wife? No, then it's not proven. Even back then, that was my equally lame retort, but it tended to make someone take a pause when they (if) they realized the limb they were standing one wasn't very strong
blibble•11h ago
and always will be until it's dis-proven, or someone invents a time machine and we can go and see it for ourselves
dylan604•10h ago
we have plenty of evidence of the movement of plates. we know where subduction zones are. what does it take to prove a theory if not repeatable tests/observations?
blibble•10h ago
but we can't "prove" plate tectonics, because we can't directly observe what's going on the earth's crust over a period of millions of years
in scientific nomenclature, a theory is a very robust thing indeed
vs. the vernacular, where it isn't, e.g. "I have a theory that my cat vomits behind the couch after I give him ice-cream"
mr_toad•6h ago
Depends what you mean by “observe”. The parallel lines of reversing magnetic polarity that are embedded in the sea floor on either side of the great rifts are observations that demand explanation.
blibble•6h ago
the devil went over the seabed with a big magnet, to trick you
just like he concocted the entire fossil record, planet-wide rock strata, carbon 14...
(sarcasm, for the USians)
throaway5454•12h ago
croes•12h ago
WorldMaker•12h ago
Butthead69•12h ago
WorldMaker•11h ago
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.
taco_emoji•11h ago