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.
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.
Whether or not you enjoy the stories, the action scenes and visuals in the sequels were groundbreaking use of CGI in action films. Around the same time the LotR trilogy came out which did something similar.
I rewatched the first one the other day and for the most part the visuals and CGI have held up over time, barely any "oh man this is bad CGI lmao" moments. Which somehow got worse with later films, e.g. the Hobbit having a lot of "this is obviously cgi lmao what is this".
I think the main trick is that they set out to make the best and most impressive movie(s) they could with every tool available -- practical effects, old-school camera angle tricks to make the hobbits look small, hordes of extras and well-crafted props, as well as groundbreaking CGI.
Same with Jurassic Park, come to think about it -- there's famously more animatronic dinosaurs in that movie than CGI.
As opposed to relying on one shiny new tool to take care of everything. I think with The Hobbit they got over-enamoured with the notion that you can do anything with CGI.
More recently, Andor is a good example with its mix of CGI and massive sets; The Mandalorian is a bad example with its over-reliance on the "Volume" LED stage.
> As opposed to relying on one shiny new tool to take care of everything. I think with The Hobbit they got over-enamoured with the notion that you can do anything with CGI.
But the visuals are The Hobbit's main selling point. People hate it because of the writing.
It does, most notably perhaps for things like the Ents and large parts of the battle in RoTK (e.g. Army of the Dead, Oliphaunts). It just did so much practically that it's one of those films where it might be a bit difficult to delineate if you aren't looking closely, similar to films like Fury Road.
Matrix 4 did not do much of anything with, well, anything.
Maybe except for the meta-commentary in the first act where the lead character is hesitant to make a pointless sequel to a popular franchise, but is forced to by his corporate abusers.
I thought the first act was clever. In fact, I kind of wish the entire movie was just neo sitting in a therapist office trying to unpack what happened to him and you never know if he is just a crazy person or real. Then you get action sequences from flashbacks or whatever. After the first act matrix 4 stops being a movie and just becomes a collection of unrelated scenes.
The Wachowskis weren't forced to, they, as humans, have the power to say "nu-uh". But I suppose they were made an offer they couldn't refuse.
Or worse: WB owned the franchise and were going to make a sequel with or without them (or the actors). I'm sure the franchise will get a "hard" reboot at some point.
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.
> 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 really feel for the Wachoskis. They couldn't not do a sequel, but they had nowhere to go--The Matrix was already perfect.
I remember that at the time of the (non-existent ;-) ) sequels, being disappointed with these "sequels", fans wrote summaries of screenplays how a (good) sequel to Matrix might look like.
Basically all of them were much better than the official sequel attempt (because such fans really cared), and I bet if I had been looking much more deeply into these fan-fiction sequels, I could have found one that was as exceptional as the original Matrix.
Lesson learned: scripts for sequels of movies that have a strong fan-base should be written by people who really care about the franchise (and have good ideas).
Except that there is something called "Intellectual Property" and "copyright" that makes any attempt to use fan fiction a libility and open to endless litigation.
J. Michael Straczynski (of _Babylon V_ fame, and many others) immediately blocks anyone who tries to ptch him ideas, and he's not the only one:
But as a franchise owner, you can have a look into such fan(fiction) forums to recognize writing talents who do care about the franchise and which you might want to hire to work on a screenplay for a sequel.
I thought the "real" world could have been another simulation after Neo "used the force" in the squiddies in the tunnels - when he then passes out and ends up mentally in the train station thing.
Idea being that even those who thought they'd escaped, were still actually within the Matrix.
That was my thought at the time. Or maybe even that the real world we actually live in is a simulation, and that by learning to control one, Neo learned to control the other.
That would have been a way better explanation than what we got. In fact, I don't think I ever understood how Neo could control the machines in the real world.
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.
My head canon was essentially that the nutrient connectors in the back of people's necks also had a weak wireless near range communication port to the computers wireless net. Why, because sometimes malfunctions and accidents can happen and people get detached and they need to be findable.
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.
My head cannon when I watched it for first time, it's the Neo bend reality abilities in the Matrix are really the matrix simulation, reflecting some kind of SPI habitability that he have in the real world but never know how to use. However, your idea sounds better, but would make it like another "Level 13" or "Existence"
The first act of the latest (fourth) movie was actually brilliant. I could watch a whole movie about Neo doubting the reality, his paranoia and his sessions with psychiatrist, etc (no Hugo Weaving is a downer, though). But once they logged off the matrix, it all kinda fell apart.
I wanted the Merovingian’s gang to be another group of humans with a different perspective on self-actualization. That could’ve been a cool third movie.
There are numerous, I just read an article recently(than I can't locate now) where a guy watched and reviewed about 6 fan edits. There's gotta be one out there for ya.
The problem is that 2 and 3 both fail to capitalize on their more interesting elements. Everything with Smith could've been so much more then what we got (seriously, an AI which probably has never left the Matrix gets downloaded into a real human body and this has...no serious ramifications or crisis for it's identity? Just do the "sees itself as Hugo Weaving thing" and let Hugo Weaving do that on camera because he absolutely could've).
They could have gone back to something not unlike what happened with power wrangling at OpenAI where OpenAI goes on later to build the machines that take over. In this world it is not LLMs but maybe more robotic like intellegence. Robot assistants. Kind of completely different. Maybe someone there sees the future and tries to prevent it but just narrowly fails. While not that fun it would be nice to see the Matrix situation explained how it got to that.
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.
I'm sure those will quietly end with anti-hero architect reflecting on his brilliance, marveling is his creation, reminiscing on the Ex Machina clip "that's the history of Gods" getting up, checking his phone to confirm his invitation to Lighthaven for the evening. Pan shot => Knowing smile, humble words out the door... audience sits up, tears glistening, "that could be me? A God." they internalize. Roll credits.
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.]
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.
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!"
Remember "48 Hours" with Eddy Murphy and Nick Nolte, that was a huge unexpected hit? The studio decided to do a sequel, "Another 48 Hours". Murphy and Nolte went on Jay Leno to promote it. They said that they analyzed everything in the original movie to see what worked and what didn't. Then they amped up everything that worked in the sequel.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'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 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.
We also have the mix of both where they make an amazing show based on novels then ruin the entire world with terrible writing when the source material runs dry.
GoT still blows me away. You had about as close to an infinite budget as you can get in television, access to some of the best writers on the planet, as well as general guidance from Martin, and yet somehow you end up with season 8 (and 7, and to a lesser extent 6). It wouldn’t surprise me if Winds of Winter never gets published due in part to the TV series’ writing, which is to me the biggest loss.
I think the hate that the last seasons get are mainly due to people's expectations of how the several arcs should "wrap up". I have yet to read any compelling argument or point of view why the last seasons were terrible. They were rushed, but that doesn't equate to bad.
For me, it was the appearance of plot armor (starting with the end of season 5) that ruined the show.
Up to that point, you had a sense that anyone could die, no matter how important.
Seasons 6+ are full of meh tropes like last-second reversals, people popping out of water when they evidently should've drowned, the impossibly bullshit "blind girl kills trained assassin" moment, the WWE style end of the walkers, etc.
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.
> Good stories are universal. You need to care about the protagonists.
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 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.
The book and movie didn’t (and was better for it - The Annualized Return of The Kings Fields would be dry reading) but Tolkien clearly did (both in his notes and in his thoughts). If I want these people to live here and go to the bar here, where would they have to work, and what kind of work would it entail?
“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.
Most people get tripped up in the descriptions of flora and landscapes or the poetry; The Council of Elrond is one of the easier parts and moves along quickly.
I disagree. It does not dwell on economy, or technology, but at least we have pretty good overview of social fabric and power structures: how kings get to power, how they make decisions, how they raise armies, how they deal with allies, etc.
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...
It didn't dwell on it, but Tolkien was incredibly meticulous about consistency, distances, travel times, how politics works in his universe, and logistics.
And the films, for the most part, stuck very close to the source material.
> And the films, for the most part, stuck very close to the source material.
Although when they depart, they swung for the fences. Multiple times Peter Jackson felt the need to throw out Tolkien's central theme (that the Ring isn't all powerful, and there are stronger forces like virtue or friendship), just to get cheap drama when characters act out of character under the influence of the Ring. It was really aggravating.
There is an unofficial version of The Hobbit called the “m4 book edit” floating around that removes most of the extraneous junk. It’s vastly better than the theatrical versions.
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.
> [Dune] makes the mistake of not communicating anything to you about it. If you haven't read the books, much of the story is easily lost.
Counterpoint: my wife. I took her into Dune knowing nothing at all about it, besides how excited I was to see it, and she got everything. Like, seriously, everything. She's a super intelligent and intuitive person, and Villeneuve is one of her favorite directors so she's maybe the ideal audience member.
It might be fair say that the exposition is too subtle for a general audience to pick up, but it's certainly there. I refuse to hold that against the film, though. The usual state of Hollywood movies is to browbeat an audience with heavy-handed explanations, so I love it that Villeneuve makes you pay attention and think and remember and put together clues to understand everything that's going on. It's sophisticated filmmaking, dammit, and there's not enough of that around - especially in big-budget / sci-fi / franchise films.
In my opinion that's what makes Villeneuve's so great. For example, I think almost any other director would have had an info dump about what Mentat's are in the Dune universe, motivations and they they are important. Instead in Villeneuve's version, you simply see the results. For those watching the film without the context you simply chalk it up to a weird and wonderful way that the universe works. For those that have read the book, you get to do the information dump about Mentat's on your poor unexpecting wife who's watching the film with you.
This embodies show don't tell and it works amazingly.
> 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.
The films don't really give themselves a need to explain the mentats beyond "they're good at maths".
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.
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.
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
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
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.
> 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".
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...".
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.
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.
The short TL;DR is that the guy who came up with the asteroid theory knew basically nothing about paleontology and paleoclimate, was way outside of his depth (he was a physicist that worked on the Manhattan project).
Eh, that's underselling Luis Alvarez a bit. He wasn't just "a physicist," he was a Nobel laureate and arguably one of the twentieth century's few Renaissance men. My favorite Alvarez hack was when he 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.
"The guy"? There were two guys, Luis Alvarez and his son Walter Alvarez, a geologist. It wasn't just a case of a famous physicist meddling in a field he knew nothing about.
Edit to add: checking Wikipedia, I see that chemists Frank Asaro and Helen Michel are also credited as part of the core team, although it still gets called the "Alvarez hypothesis".
Except the evidence didn't lead there. The fossil record is not consistent with sudden mass extinction. We have examples of sudden mass extinction events in Earth's history. The K-T boundary doesn't look like those. There were and still are many different lines of evidence pointing in incongruent directions. Alvarez pointed at layer of iridium and said "it must be a cosmic strike; it cannot be anything else" and derided anyone who still bothered publishing evidence to the contrary.
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.
I wouldn't be qualified to take sides in this particular pissing match, but still, the point stands. Alvarez was "directionally correct", and the existing researchers were not. He moved the field forward, while they did not.
It remains to be seen. To this day there still isn't any conclusive further evidence beyond "there was an impact event that closely coincides with the dinosaur extinction." Which is, don't get me wrong, very strong evidence. But the Deccan Traps are also just as much a smoking gun, which is why I proclaimed above that the one-two punch theory is the most reasonable. They both contributed to one of Earth life's most epic die offs.
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.
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.
> 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."
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.
It's actually an explicit plot point in the original book that the containment is insufficient because Hammond thinks he's a big brain brilliant genius who can do all this stuff from scratch better than any boring old normal zookeepers. The movie lost that in translation as part of the attempt to make him a kindly grandfather making bad decisions instead of a two-faced showman who's completely full of himself.
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.
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.
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.
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 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’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.
> ”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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I had a teacher get in trouble for discussing plate tectonics in the 1990s, in a public school. Turns out it still upsets a lot of religious groups and also was tied to some peculiar schools of climate change denialists in the 90s. I still don't entirely know how denying plate tectonics was useful for climate change denial that decade, I just remember how weird it was for the teacher to suggest to forget a whole science lecture because people didn't want us to know it. Come to think of it, that probably also was around the time we watched Jurassic Park in class.
Did the Streisand Effect kick in making you (and/or other students) unable to forget it? "Whoa, teacher says to forget it, so I'm really going to remember it now!"
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.
That effect certainly kicked in for me. Led me down several science rabbit holes at a precocious age that I don't think I would have if it was test required.
On the religious side, I know several megachurches in my city got directly infected by Ken Ham [1] himself. (A person to which I have negative respect, including his massive wastes of state tax incentives that affect my own tax dollars.) One of his schticks was the the "Earth is only 6000 years old because the bible says so". I spent a lot of time in High School (private, years after the public school incident above) rolling my eyes through arguments using another of his schticks used to "combat" things like tectonic theory, the simplistic argument fallacy "Were you there?" I still have so much hate for that anti-science tactic.
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
plate tectonics is a good one. I definitely remember my mom telling me as a kid how South America and Africa look like they fit together, and my dad talking about Pangea being the name when the pieces were fit together. it wasn't until much later that I realized that my parents were not taught this in school, but my dad just kept up with current events much more. It is weird to think that something is so new that even your parents were not taught it.
Obviously it will vary by location and age. But I was in high school in the early 80s, and plate tectonics & Pangea were already in our text books.
(And in my country it takes forever for stuff to make it into textbooks.)
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.
Is the coastlines of South America and Africa looking like they fit together actually because of plate tectonics, or is it just a coincidence?
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.
I'm familiar with that. We see that shortly after a split the edges of the two sides of the split match, as we would expect. As they separate water fills the gap so those matching edges and now also matching coastlines.
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?
I really do not know what you are getting with all of those words. Put simply, if the continents were puzzle pieces, would you not attempt to put South America and Africa together? QED
I think they're wondering whether that's a lucky coincidence, or whether it would still be true with different sea levels (such as during the ice ages, when sea levels were lower).
I guess the point is really it's the continental shelves that should fit together, not the coast lines.
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?
> we can't directly observe what's going on the earth's crust over a period of millions of years
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Whether or not you enjoy the stories, the action scenes and visuals in the sequels were groundbreaking use of CGI in action films. Around the same time the LotR trilogy came out which did something similar.
I rewatched the first one the other day and for the most part the visuals and CGI have held up over time, barely any "oh man this is bad CGI lmao" moments. Which somehow got worse with later films, e.g. the Hobbit having a lot of "this is obviously cgi lmao what is this".
I think the main trick is that they set out to make the best and most impressive movie(s) they could with every tool available -- practical effects, old-school camera angle tricks to make the hobbits look small, hordes of extras and well-crafted props, as well as groundbreaking CGI.
Same with Jurassic Park, come to think about it -- there's famously more animatronic dinosaurs in that movie than CGI.
As opposed to relying on one shiny new tool to take care of everything. I think with The Hobbit they got over-enamoured with the notion that you can do anything with CGI.
More recently, Andor is a good example with its mix of CGI and massive sets; The Mandalorian is a bad example with its over-reliance on the "Volume" LED stage.
> As opposed to relying on one shiny new tool to take care of everything. I think with The Hobbit they got over-enamoured with the notion that you can do anything with CGI.
But the visuals are The Hobbit's main selling point. People hate it because of the writing.
I didn’t think lotr used cgi
It does, most notably perhaps for things like the Ents and large parts of the battle in RoTK (e.g. Army of the Dead, Oliphaunts). It just did so much practically that it's one of those films where it might be a bit difficult to delineate if you aren't looking closely, similar to films like Fury Road.
the actor that played gandalf ian mckellen? had a minor breakdown on set after he was made to stand on a greenscreen for multiple days.
It does, absolutely everywhere? Down to fully CGI characters like Gollum.
They are flying over the cloudbs because thats only way to avoid defenses of the Machine City.
Matrix 4 introduced „good machines” but didn’t do much of anything with them :|
Matrix 4 did not do much of anything with, well, anything.
Maybe except for the meta-commentary in the first act where the lead character is hesitant to make a pointless sequel to a popular franchise, but is forced to by his corporate abusers.
I thought the first act was clever. In fact, I kind of wish the entire movie was just neo sitting in a therapist office trying to unpack what happened to him and you never know if he is just a crazy person or real. Then you get action sequences from flashbacks or whatever. After the first act matrix 4 stops being a movie and just becomes a collection of unrelated scenes.
The Wachowskis weren't forced to, they, as humans, have the power to say "nu-uh". But I suppose they were made an offer they couldn't refuse.
Or worse: WB owned the franchise and were going to make a sequel with or without them (or the actors). I'm sure the franchise will get a "hard" reboot at some point.
> WB owned the franchise and were going to make a sequel with or without them
This is 100% what was going to happen. The film basically tells you this in its meta-commentary.
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.
> 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.
> I really feel for the Wachoskis. They couldn't not do a sequel, but they had nowhere to go--The Matrix was already perfect.
I remember that at the time of the (non-existent ;-) ) sequels, being disappointed with these "sequels", fans wrote summaries of screenplays how a (good) sequel to Matrix might look like.
Basically all of them were much better than the official sequel attempt (because such fans really cared), and I bet if I had been looking much more deeply into these fan-fiction sequels, I could have found one that was as exceptional as the original Matrix.
Lesson learned: scripts for sequels of movies that have a strong fan-base should be written by people who really care about the franchise (and have good ideas).
Except that there is something called "Intellectual Property" and "copyright" that makes any attempt to use fan fiction a libility and open to endless litigation.
J. Michael Straczynski (of _Babylon V_ fame, and many others) immediately blocks anyone who tries to ptch him ideas, and he's not the only one:
https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/j-michael-straczynski-would-l...
But as a franchise owner, you can have a look into such fan(fiction) forums to recognize writing talents who do care about the franchise and which you might want to hire to work on a screenplay for a sequel.
I thought the "real" world could have been another simulation after Neo "used the force" in the squiddies in the tunnels - when he then passes out and ends up mentally in the train station thing.
Idea being that even those who thought they'd escaped, were still actually within the Matrix.
(And Inception hadn't been made back then)
That was my thought at the time. Or maybe even that the real world we actually live in is a simulation, and that by learning to control one, Neo learned to control the other.
That would have been a way better explanation than what we got. In fact, I don't think I ever understood how Neo could control the machines in the real world.
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.
My head canon was essentially that the nutrient connectors in the back of people's necks also had a weak wireless near range communication port to the computers wireless net. Why, because sometimes malfunctions and accidents can happen and people get detached and they need to be findable.
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.
My head cannon when I watched it for first time, it's the Neo bend reality abilities in the Matrix are really the matrix simulation, reflecting some kind of SPI habitability that he have in the real world but never know how to use. However, your idea sounds better, but would make it like another "Level 13" or "Existence"
The first act of the latest (fourth) movie was actually brilliant. I could watch a whole movie about Neo doubting the reality, his paranoia and his sessions with psychiatrist, etc (no Hugo Weaving is a downer, though). But once they logged off the matrix, it all kinda fell apart.
I wanted the Merovingian’s gang to be another group of humans with a different perspective on self-actualization. That could’ve been a cool third movie.
I like that!
I stand by the fact that a skilled editor cutting like hell across movies 2 and 3 to a singular sequel could save that story
A similar feat to The Phantom Edit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Edit
There are numerous, I just read an article recently(than I can't locate now) where a guy watched and reviewed about 6 fan edits. There's gotta be one out there for ya.
The problem is that 2 and 3 both fail to capitalize on their more interesting elements. Everything with Smith could've been so much more then what we got (seriously, an AI which probably has never left the Matrix gets downloaded into a real human body and this has...no serious ramifications or crisis for it's identity? Just do the "sees itself as Hugo Weaving thing" and let Hugo Weaving do that on camera because he absolutely could've).
>I really feel for the Wachoskis. They couldn't not do a sequel, but they had nowhere to go--The Matrix was already perfect.
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.
The 4th is a disgrace. It completely defiles the legacy of the Matrix.
I've never seen more people leave a cinema before.
I wish I'd left too.
They could have gone back to something not unlike what happened with power wrangling at OpenAI where OpenAI goes on later to build the machines that take over. In this world it is not LLMs but maybe more robotic like intellegence. Robot assistants. Kind of completely different. Maybe someone there sees the future and tries to prevent it but just narrowly fails. While not that fun it would be nice to see the Matrix situation explained how it got to that.
They could have done a prequel: where did the Oracle come from, the existing crew of morpheus, trinity, etc.
There is the Animatrix.... Specifically it has a history reel like that.
I would have Christopher Nolan paint the world as seen from Agent Smith point of view.
The Animatrix is the only other bit of Matrix-related media I consider to be real.
My reaction when I watched it 20+ years ago: Hallucinogens were definitely involved.
> Hallucinogens were definitely involved.
If these result in better movies: why not?
I didn't say "not". But I do have addiction in family and I wouldn't wish this on other families.
Hallucinogens have a reputation for many things, addiction is not one of them.
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.
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.
I'm sure those will quietly end with anti-hero architect reflecting on his brilliance, marveling is his creation, reminiscing on the Ex Machina clip "that's the history of Gods" getting up, checking his phone to confirm his invitation to Lighthaven for the evening. Pan shot => Knowing smile, humble words out the door... audience sits up, tears glistening, "that could be me? A God." they internalize. Roll credits.
I like this idea.
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.]
Animatrix is certainly worth a watch. More or less it follows our current trajectory of humanity trying to offload anything resembling work onto AI.
It is becoming a batter series than The Matrix over time.
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.
I just recently watched it. Although the visuals may not match The Matrix, it was written very well. Found it pleasant.
I'll second this recommendation. And without spoilers. It's a very good film.
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.
Maybe we will see them and the last three seasons of Lost before we die
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.
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!"
Remember "48 Hours" with Eddy Murphy and Nick Nolte, that was a huge unexpected hit? The studio decided to do a sequel, "Another 48 Hours". Murphy and Nolte went on Jay Leno to promote it. They said that they analyzed everything in the original movie to see what worked and what didn't. Then they amped up everything that worked in the sequel.
You can guess the rest. The sequel bombed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
> 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
Once you embrace the Matrix trilogy as a trans allegory with blockbuster set pieces, it makes a lot more sense.
"There are no sequels to The Matrix" then becomes trans erasure, which is... unfortunate.
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...
That's a bit overly reductive of their answer:
'It's not something that I want to come out and rebut. Like, yes, it's a trans allegory — it was made by two closeted trans women, how can it not be?! But the way that they put that question in front of my answer, it seems like I’m coming out emphatically saying, “Oh yeah, we were thinking about it the whole time.”'
Childhood core memory ruined. Joy.
[dead]
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.
We also have the mix of both where they make an amazing show based on novels then ruin the entire world with terrible writing when the source material runs dry.
Glares at Game of Thrones
GoT still blows me away. You had about as close to an infinite budget as you can get in television, access to some of the best writers on the planet, as well as general guidance from Martin, and yet somehow you end up with season 8 (and 7, and to a lesser extent 6). It wouldn’t surprise me if Winds of Winter never gets published due in part to the TV series’ writing, which is to me the biggest loss.
I think the hate that the last seasons get are mainly due to people's expectations of how the several arcs should "wrap up". I have yet to read any compelling argument or point of view why the last seasons were terrible. They were rushed, but that doesn't equate to bad.
For me, it was the appearance of plot armor (starting with the end of season 5) that ruined the show.
Up to that point, you had a sense that anyone could die, no matter how important.
Seasons 6+ are full of meh tropes like last-second reversals, people popping out of water when they evidently should've drowned, the impossibly bullshit "blind girl kills trained assassin" moment, the WWE style end of the walkers, etc.
To me, that's just bad. Not rushed.
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.
Different points of comparison though. I'm not trying to hold up Andor against its betters, but its contemporaries.
> Good stories are universal. You need to care about the protagonists.
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 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.
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.
The book and movie didn’t (and was better for it - The Annualized Return of The Kings Fields would be dry reading) but Tolkien clearly did (both in his notes and in his thoughts). If I want these people to live here and go to the bar here, where would they have to work, and what kind of work would it entail?
“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.
> The book [...] didn’t
You mean the book that has a 40(?)-page chapter in which characters you never hear from before or afterwards describe what's happening in their home lands didn't go into the day-to-day? :)
Lord of the Rings (the book) is obsessed with this kind of detail to the point that many people find it difficult to read.
Most people get tripped up in the descriptions of flora and landscapes or the poetry; The Council of Elrond is one of the easier parts and moves along quickly.
A book is different. Part of the appeal is that sort of attention to detail. It definitely filters people who can deal with it.
My dad was a literature nerd. He loved Tolstoy. Personally, I’d rather be tortured by the Czars secret police than suffer through that. :)
I disagree. It does not dwell on economy, or technology, but at least we have pretty good overview of social fabric and power structures: how kings get to power, how they make decisions, how they raise armies, how they deal with allies, etc.
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...
It didn't dwell on it, but Tolkien was incredibly meticulous about consistency, distances, travel times, how politics works in his universe, and logistics.
And the films, for the most part, stuck very close to the source material.
... And then you get The Hobbit.
> And the films, for the most part, stuck very close to the source material.
Although when they depart, they swung for the fences. Multiple times Peter Jackson felt the need to throw out Tolkien's central theme (that the Ring isn't all powerful, and there are stronger forces like virtue or friendship), just to get cheap drama when characters act out of character under the influence of the Ring. It was really aggravating.
The Hobbit was more of a Disney theme park ride than a story.
There is an unofficial version of The Hobbit called the “m4 book edit” floating around that removes most of the extraneous junk. It’s vastly better than the theatrical versions.
> 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.
> [Dune] makes the mistake of not communicating anything to you about it. If you haven't read the books, much of the story is easily lost.
Counterpoint: my wife. I took her into Dune knowing nothing at all about it, besides how excited I was to see it, and she got everything. Like, seriously, everything. She's a super intelligent and intuitive person, and Villeneuve is one of her favorite directors so she's maybe the ideal audience member.
It might be fair say that the exposition is too subtle for a general audience to pick up, but it's certainly there. I refuse to hold that against the film, though. The usual state of Hollywood movies is to browbeat an audience with heavy-handed explanations, so I love it that Villeneuve makes you pay attention and think and remember and put together clues to understand everything that's going on. It's sophisticated filmmaking, dammit, and there's not enough of that around - especially in big-budget / sci-fi / franchise films.
In my opinion that's what makes Villeneuve's so great. For example, I think almost any other director would have had an info dump about what Mentat's are in the Dune universe, motivations and they they are important. Instead in Villeneuve's version, you simply see the results. For those watching the film without the context you simply chalk it up to a weird and wonderful way that the universe works. For those that have read the book, you get to do the information dump about Mentat's on your poor unexpecting wife who's watching the film with you.
This embodies show don't tell and it works amazingly.
> 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.
The films don't really give themselves a need to explain the mentats beyond "they're good at maths".
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.
> It's stuff that is masterfully communicated without the need for corny expository dialogue
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.
He got so many details right, and yet still created that UNIX meme. That’s amazing.
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.
> why haven't we seen more totally faithful adaptations of well-written, detailed speculative fiction?
Because people always think they can "fix" it to make it better.
Thank you. Nobody read the book? The problem with dinosaurs is the problem with Hollywood in general: lack of original ideas and good storytelling.
That is one of the things that really bugged me about the most recent sequel.
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?
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.
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
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 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.
I love animals but a tiger is no longer a majestic beast to fawn over when its suddenly stalking you in the jungle.
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.
The rare double gotcha fact
I’m imagining a cabal of dinosaurs experts cackling and laughing “time to bring the bronto back, too many people are getting uppity!”
But this alienated Pluto so much that it refuses to be a planet and is out hiding in the Oort cloud again.
> 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".
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)
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
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).
> kids notwithstanding
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.
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.
The Seinfeld trope is overstated.
There are plently of things to completely dislike about Seinfeld other than "other American comedies copied it".
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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
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.
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!
I thought that it still isn’t really known? Is is one common theory, but we have just probabilities to play with.
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...".
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.
I think the majority of palaeontologists now accept the idea. Alternative ideas get disproportionate attention in popular articles.
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.
The short TL;DR is that the guy who came up with the asteroid theory knew basically nothing about paleontology and paleoclimate, was way outside of his depth (he was a physicist that worked on the Manhattan project).
Eh, that's underselling Luis Alvarez a bit. He wasn't just "a physicist," he was a Nobel laureate and arguably one of the twentieth century's few Renaissance men. My favorite Alvarez hack was when he 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.
"The guy"? There were two guys, Luis Alvarez and his son Walter Alvarez, a geologist. It wasn't just a case of a famous physicist meddling in a field he knew nothing about.
Edit to add: checking Wikipedia, I see that chemists Frank Asaro and Helen Michel are also credited as part of the core team, although it still gets called the "Alvarez hypothesis".
Except the evidence didn't lead there. The fossil record is not consistent with sudden mass extinction. We have examples of sudden mass extinction events in Earth's history. The K-T boundary doesn't look like those. There were and still are many different lines of evidence pointing in incongruent directions. Alvarez pointed at layer of iridium and said "it must be a cosmic strike; it cannot be anything else" and derided anyone who still bothered publishing evidence to the contrary.
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.
I wouldn't be qualified to take sides in this particular pissing match, but still, the point stands. Alvarez was "directionally correct", and the existing researchers were not. He moved the field forward, while they did not.
It remains to be seen. To this day there still isn't any conclusive further evidence beyond "there was an impact event that closely coincides with the dinosaur extinction." Which is, don't get me wrong, very strong evidence. But the Deccan Traps are also just as much a smoking gun, which is why I proclaimed above that the one-two punch theory is the most reasonable. They both contributed to one of Earth life's most epic die offs.
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.
Fantasia gets this wrong, depicting the dinosaurs dying from lack of water.
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...
> 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."
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.
It's actually an explicit plot point in the original book that the containment is insufficient because Hammond thinks he's a big brain brilliant genius who can do all this stuff from scratch better than any boring old normal zookeepers. The movie lost that in translation as part of the attempt to make him a kindly grandfather making bad decisions instead of a two-faced showman who's completely full of himself.
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.
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.
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.
Primal, although it is a series and not a film, offers a counterpoint to most of these critiques.
> "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.
This is a plot point in the excellent Peter Watt's novel Blindsight.
Found a source of others are interested: https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/fixational-eye-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.)
Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds is technically a dinosaur film.
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.
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.
I’d argue Zombies and Vampires are an archetypical trope of the human Shadow. The narcissist, the undead that consumes other humans.
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’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.
"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.
> ”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
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.
Mid-way down:
> ... 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.
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
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.
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!
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
I had a teacher get in trouble for discussing plate tectonics in the 1990s, in a public school. Turns out it still upsets a lot of religious groups and also was tied to some peculiar schools of climate change denialists in the 90s. I still don't entirely know how denying plate tectonics was useful for climate change denial that decade, I just remember how weird it was for the teacher to suggest to forget a whole science lecture because people didn't want us to know it. Come to think of it, that probably also was around the time we watched Jurassic Park in class.
Did the Streisand Effect kick in making you (and/or other students) unable to forget it? "Whoa, teacher says to forget it, so I'm really going to remember it now!"
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.
That effect certainly kicked in for me. Led me down several science rabbit holes at a precocious age that I don't think I would have if it was test required.
That is wild, did they believe in this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diluvium
On the religious side, I know several megachurches in my city got directly infected by Ken Ham [1] himself. (A person to which I have negative respect, including his massive wastes of state tax incentives that affect my own tax dollars.) One of his schticks was the the "Earth is only 6000 years old because the bible says so". I spent a lot of time in High School (private, years after the public school incident above) rolling my eyes through arguments using another of his schticks used to "combat" things like tectonic theory, the simplistic argument fallacy "Were you there?" I still have so much hate for that anti-science tactic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Ham
> "Were you there?"
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
plate tectonics is a good one. I definitely remember my mom telling me as a kid how South America and Africa look like they fit together, and my dad talking about Pangea being the name when the pieces were fit together. it wasn't until much later that I realized that my parents were not taught this in school, but my dad just kept up with current events much more. It is weird to think that something is so new that even your parents were not taught it.
Obviously it will vary by location and age. But I was in high school in the early 80s, and plate tectonics & Pangea were already in our text books. (And in my country it takes forever for stuff to make it into textbooks.)
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.
Is the coastlines of South America and Africa looking like they fit together actually because of plate tectonics, or is it just a coincidence?
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.
are you playing devil's advocate? perhaps you're just not familiar with Pangea? here's a video to show plate movement:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGdPqpzYD4o
I'm familiar with that. We see that shortly after a split the edges of the two sides of the split match, as we would expect. As they separate water fills the gap so those matching edges and now also matching coastlines.
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?
I really do not know what you are getting with all of those words. Put simply, if the continents were puzzle pieces, would you not attempt to put South America and Africa together? QED
I think they're wondering whether that's a lucky coincidence, or whether it would still be true with different sea levels (such as during the ice ages, when sea levels were lower).
I guess the point is really it's the continental shelves that should fit together, not the coast lines.
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
until it's dis-proven, or until it is proven.
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?
the large body of corroborating evidence (and ability to be dis-proven) is what makes it a theory
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"
> we can't directly observe what's going on the earth's crust over a period of millions of years
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.
well that's easy to explain
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)
The wierd things the latest JP movies still have the Dino's as being featherless
It’s lore
Yup, the lore blames the frog/amphibian DNA and Doctor Wu's interference (military application side projects).
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.
Finally real journalism is back
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
i think they were extinct before cameras were invented
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.
Well there are no therapsid movies at all.
"Why are there no good dinosaur films?
Dinosaurs don't dialog
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.
Maybe not in films, but on TV is: https://thedoctorwhosite.co.uk/doctorwho/dinosaurs-on-a-spac...
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.
> 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.
Nature... did not find a way.
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.
Why is Hacker News talking about dinosaur films?