The Alien, Terminator, and Matrix franchises have similar problems.
Aliens successfully changed genres, from horror to action. But subsequent movies could never recapture the primal horror of the original or the fun action of the second. It's almost like there are only two local optima in the Alien movie universe and Alien + Aliens took them both.
Terminator is the same. The first movie was a perfect sci-fi action movie, with a trippy premise and loads of fun. The second was a subversion of the first: the Terminator is the good guy! And that worked too. But after that, where else can you go?
And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix.
Imho the first Terminator movie is way more than simple scifi action. It's a a reflection on Vietnam. Structurally, it's closer to a slasher/horror flick -- the action sequences are tense, tight, gritty, sparse. The main characters are completely helpless and totally undermatched by the monster. Reese is torn apart by PTSD and Sarah Connor goes through this immense psychological trauma during the film and is completely transformed by it.
The character of Reese in particular is very well crafted. A homeless Vietnam vet that you might find in LA in the early eighties. Totally paranoid, totally disconnected/alienated from "modern" society, equipped for a time and place that is totally disconnected from the world he is dumped into. There is a dialogue about institutional failure woven throughout the film: the cops (I'll point out: Arnold executes an entire police station full of cops in this film! Can you imagine that on screen today?) and especially the psychiatrist. Totally incapable of dealing with the demon that haunts the main characters.
There is a dialogue about heroism -- John Connor is apparently a hero, but none of the characters actually feel heroic, they're all just terrified, haunted, and helpless. There is this incredibly "important" thing (the war) but none of the characters actually feel it that way, nor does society. The portrayal of LA -- the cops, the gritty alleyways, the nightclub, the crappy motels... it's LA as experienced by a Vietnam vet.
The first Terminator movie stands head and shoulders above all others in the franchise. It's a truly incredible film and far underrated critically, I really recommend re-watching it with this in mind.
I think it’s the best story out of the James Cameron filmography. I certainly enjoy many of his other films, but there’s a depth to Terminator that’s absent from his other works.
> Structurally, it's closer to a slasher/horror flick
Having rewatched T1 very recently, I couldn't agree more with this. At one point I turned to my partner and asked what genre this actually was because all things pointed to horror.
To me, the sequels were worthwhile just for one solitary scene. In the third movie, Trinity is piloting the ship and has to gain higher than usual altitude for some reason that I've now forgotten. This takes her above the black clouds permanently enveloping the Earth. Sunlight pours into the cockpit. For the first and only time in her life, she sees the real sun with her own physical eyes. She's overwhelmed. It's just a brief golden moment before the black clouds swallow her again.
#3 was not a good movie. But that scene has stayed with me longer than many scenes in much better movies.
When I went to see Terminator 3 I was the only person in the theater, as a result of that I really got that end of the world and being stuck in a bunker atmosphere from the end of the movie.
I also like just the idea that Neo being The One and his powers don't quite matter.
Sure, he couldn't have done the things he did in the second movie, escape the Merovingian, steal the Keymaker, rescue everyone, etc, without his powers in the Matrix, but at the same time, they don't actually solve the problem of the War.
And it isn't just a power escalation cycle, like Lensmen or DBZ -- he doesn't level up in each movie to become Even More Powerful to defeat Even Greater Threats.
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 was responding to the parent comment, that the CGI somehow got worse with later films, e.g. the Hobbit having a lot of "this is obviously cgi lmao what is this"
I agree with that, The Hobbit looked pretty bad. You're right that part of it was the bad writing, but I think it's a vicious circle -- if you're convinced that CGI can make twenty minutes of elf-vs-goblin parkour look cool, you'll write that into the script.
If instead you started from the viewpoint of, well, we made a successful movie trilogy out of a famous book trilogy; here's another famous and beloved book by the same author, who even went back and revised it to make it fit with the trilogy -- why don't we just use all the tools at our disposal to put that book on the big screen? Maybe that could have resulted in one really good movie.
My nine-year-old seems to enjoy the Hobbit as much as The Lord of the Rings, so part of me suspects that it's just old curmudgeons like me who really dislike it.
For me, what grates are the action sequences that feel like they were written for the video game tie in -- the river escape sequence, for instance.
The parts of the Hobbit movies that have actual sets, locations and people in costume looks really good. The problem is that the CGI is just too much in most places.
> the action scenes and visuals in the sequels were groundbreaking use of CGI in action films
Well, the innovative scenes vary from the incredibly good highway chase to the boring and ridiculous fight between Neo and Agent Smith. Those movies were groundbreaking in "bad uses of CGI" too.
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.
Andy Serkis was great, but not as good at shape-shifting.
For LOTR renderfarm WETA bought a bunch of SGI 1200 dual core Pentium III 700MHz servers with 1GB RAM, 9 GB SCSI disks all running RedHat Linux. I've read at some point they had 192 SGI 1100 and 1200 servers working.
It didn't use anywhere near as much as the hobbit, but lots of things are enhanced. I have a similar problem with Avengers/Marvel which just doesn't look great to me. Avatar did look very good though. The main problem I have with CGI is if the story isn't there, which for me is definitely the case with most Avengers movies which are just a mess.
The most genre defining solarpunk media we have right now comes from pharma television commercials pitching antidepressants. Which I think is quite cyberpunk.
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.
To me Matrix 4 was sort of an admission by The Wachowskis that while they could create at least one 'perfect' cyberpunk movie, they couldn't really figure out what cyberpunk should lead to - what a good subversion of the genre should look like. It feels like they tried but kind of gave up half way there. Subverting a franchise that people already have such strong and established connection to is probably almost impossible.
I love how that scene looks but it doesn't work for me story-wise. They go up that high to get away from the machines but why wouldn't the machines build up to that level and put in giant solar collectors up there? Seems a lot easier. But it ruins the world they've built up to then so I understand why they didn't go farther with it.
> And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix.
Like you, this is the reality I choose to inhabit.
The Matrix was an incredible film, still stands as an incredible film, but that sequel tease at the end? Should have been a tease, or perhaps a prompt, for the viewer’s imagination only.
I really feel for the Wachoskis. They couldn't not do a sequel, but they had nowhere to go--The Matrix was already perfect.
They couldn't recapture the key reveal of the Matrix. It would be like doing a sequel to "The Sixth Sense"--tag line: "He's Still Dead". And without that, it's just another action movie except "bullet time" is no longer innovative.
Their solution was to go deeper into the mythology and the larger world, but that was never going to be as fresh as the original.
I would have done a time-jump and have Neo be the mentor figure to a new Neo (a Neo-Neo). They'd still be fighting the Architect (and maybe Smith) and they'd still explore the larger world of Zion + Machine City, but the key reveal would be that Neo himself is just a program (like the Oracle).
>
I 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).
"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)."
As the originators of the Matrix franchise, the Wachowskis certainly fit that description.
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.
Yeah, if you 1) trust that they actually know how to write a screenplay (a very different skill from writing a novel) and 2) believe they won't sue you for stealing their idea.
That's a problem with fanfic in general. People who would have written fanfic ten or fifteen years ago are writing stuff like litrpg's now; you can steal the general concept as long as you don't rip off the details. And it's a big enough world that you can practice your writing and actually become decent at it before you try to take on a big work. If you compare early drafts of, say, Dungeon Crawler Carl to the latest books in the series? You can see the skill improvement.
I get aredox' point that copyright at least makes some things more complicated.
See for example the drama around Darkover fanfiction ([1], [2]):
Quote from [1]:
"For many years, Bradley actively encouraged Darkover fan fiction. She encouraged submissions from unpublished authors and reprinted some of it in commercial Darkover anthologies. This ended after a dispute with a fan over an unpublished Darkover novel of Bradley's that had similarities to one of the fan's stories. As a result, the novel remained unpublished and Bradley demanded the cessation of all Darkover fan fiction."
Because you have to find and pay everyone who had the same idea.
The alternatve is to do "cleanroom writing": you don't interact, therefore if you write something similar, you can argue you independently invented it.
I had the same problem in a scientific research lab where collaboration with another lab runs the risk of not being able to patent an idea, because if the other team had the same idea or anything close enough to it, we couldn't claim to be the inventors.
It's not that you have to pay everyone with the same idea, it's that it opens you up to claims you copied fanfiction writers you never copied.
If I somehow recreated Lord of the Rings from scratch, without having known about Lord of the Rings, it wouldn't be copyright infringement because I never copied Lord of the Rings.
The issue is nobody would ever believe me when I said I coincidentally recreated Lord of the Rings from scratch. The court would conclude I copied Tolkien's books without permission.
If you admit to reading fanfiction, it reduces your credibility when you claim you independently came up with the same ideas as fanfiction authors.
This increases your litigation risk, but there's no black or white rule that you need to pay every fanfiction author or anything like that.
> If I somehow recreated Lord of the Rings from scratch, without having known about Lord of the Rings, it wouldn't be copyright infringement because I never copied Lord of the Rings.
> The issue is nobody would ever believe me when I said I coincidentally recreated Lord of the Rings from scratch.
What do you mean? They believed Terry Goodkind; why not you?
> I bet if I had been looking much more deeply into these fan-fiction sequels, I could have found one that was as exceptional as the original Matrix.
> Lesson learned: scripts for sequels of movies that have a strong fan-base should be written by people who really care about the franchise (and have good ideas).
It seems like the lesson there is "if you make 2000 independent attempts at something, you'll probably get a better best result than if you make 1".
Perhaps it exposed how much of the Matrix was really iterated from Ghost in the Machine, Metropolis, Dark City, Strange Days, John Woo action scenes, etc.
It's a talent to recognize good ideas and combine them into a new and fresh story. It's another to tell an original story.
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 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.
I think the most coherent answer is that it was simply a throwback to 20th century science fiction, in which psychic powers were commonly treated as "real in the future". The Matrix in particular borrowed a lot from anime and eastern mysticism, so a break from strict materialism isn't too out of place. It's just part of the style of this kind of media.
(Psychics in sci-fi: Foundation, Ringworld, Akira and about a million other animes, The Demolished Man, The Stars My Destination, Dune, loads of Phillip K Dick, Starship Troopers,... If you read a lot of 20th century sci-fi it comes up A LOT.)
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.
> In fact, I don't think I ever understood how Neo could control the machines in the real world.
In fairness to the Wachowskis, they do literally explain this in the movie, in literal dialog, in the third Matrix film.
---
Neo: "Tell me how I stopped four Sentinels by thinking it"
Oracle: "The power of the One extends beyond this world. It reaches from here (i.e., the digital matrix) all the way back to where it came from (i.e., in the real world).
Neo: "Where?"
Oracle: "The Source. That's what you felt when you touched those Sentinels"
The sentinels are networked (in the real world) and Neo has god-like access (superuser). Superuser works inside the matrix, but it also works on anything connected to the Matrix or networked to the matrix (like the Sentinels are, like most of the machines are).
---
Most people just tune out the dialogue about philosophy in these films, and then complain that nothing was explained. (when like, most of it was explained, folks just got bored and stopped listening)
That's fine in Matrix 1, because Matrix 1 works as a film even if you ignore the philosophy dialogue. Matrix 2, 3, and 4 are pretty good too, but they only work if you are also paying attention to all the philosophy dialog.
Indeed. He was able to see Smith even though he was blind. That right there had me instantly thinking "Holy shit, they're still inside!" I was hoping for a bigger reveal or twist but ... nothing.
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"
I really want to know what the story behind this detail is. It never got resolved but it led you in a very specific direction, and if the answer truly is "they're still inside" then all of the rest is inside too.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
People were disappointed because they wanted just another rehash of The Matrix, but why do that when The Matrix already exists? The more interesting idea is to explore why people wanted another rehash of The Matrix, so the movie is about that instead.
I disagree. Nothing of value could be added through the contemporary lens. So leave it at that, no need for a new cash grab. It's not like Warner Bros is poor anyway..
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'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 have this theory that maybe governments should ban all the art that were produced by methods that are harmful for the artists, just to level the playing field. Similarly how athletes are not allowed to take a ton of pills, win everything, and then die in years. (Tho athletes are in a much direct competition with each other, than artists.)
> Similarly how athletes are not allowed to take a ton of pills, win everything, and then die in years. (Tho athletes are in a much direct competition with each other, than artists.)
The Australian businessman Aron D'Souza plans to do such a competition:
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.
>It wasn't anything like the end of Back to the Future
Originally there was no sequel planned for Back to the Future. The ending was just a fun gag, having Doc show up, tell them its their kids now, and then flying right into the camera [1]. It was only after the film became a hit that they decided to do a sequel, and the “To Be Continued…” was added to the VHS release [2].
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.]
Raaaah - I refuse to believe this scene exists. It doesn't exist in my own cut of The Matrix. And captive humans are biological computers, not silly batteries !
Sequels were made even worse because of the original movie ending, showing that "real" world was also a simulation. Watching 2 and 3 felt kinda pointless after that.
Aliens and Terminator 2 also make sense as continuations. Of the character growth of the protagonists (growing more competent). And also of the “size” of the threat.
It is no coincidence that the first in each series is a horror movie (the enemy is overwhelmingly stronger than the protagonist, survival is the goal). And the second is an action movie (the enemy is strong but the protagonists have a fighting chance). It is the only way the momentum can keep building.
I think this is the main reason why so many series stall out at 2. There isn’t a third popular genre they can go to that keeps building. Maybe Alien:Earth will pivot into the Disaster genre, that would be a novel try at least.
The grand bleak architecture and raw, basic reality of the lives and location. Initially I disliked (like everyone else) killing off Hicks and Newt so unceremoniously after their being Ripley's "great success" of Aliens. But it sets the consistent, depressing tone of the film, which is maintained throughout.
I think there's a Quake aesthetic as well, which I have a pronounced soft spot for (in addition the the first person alien view aspects towards the end of the movie).
I rewatch Alien 3 one every couple of years. I still love it.
Not to mention it's got some first rate actors too.
Yes, I agree – I've defended Alien 3 several times over the years. It does trail off a bit in the second half or so, where it sort of devolves in to a "run from alien creature"-type film, which is a bit of a shame.
A major problem, as I understand it, were studio execs insisting on repeating the previous films because that's what made money, apparently not understanding that "more of the same" was not necessarily going to be the same success, and that "bastardised film that leave everyone equally unhappy" also isn't. To be fair, perhaps they were too busy stealing money with creative accounting or raping scores of women.
And I suppose this is also a big problem in general: no one can make a "Jurassic Park" film without approval of a certain type of Hollywood exec, not for a long time anyway (everyone reading this will be dead). Even something remotely similar would almost certainly invite a costly lawsuit.
Come to think of it, this is probably also why feathered dinosaurs are such a taboo in Hollywood: "oh no, we might frighten the audience if we show them something unexpected, and that might result in less ticket sales!"
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.
As something of an Alien fangirl 3 and 4 are more failures from a production standpoint than from a creative one. If you look at all the rejected pitches for Alien 3 there's a lot of interesting ideas which were never explored and a lot of studio fuckery in the final cut. I don't think the Fincher cut is amazing but I think it proves that there could be another excellent Alien movie.
Alien: Resurrection is plotted terribly and has all the shitty Joss Whedonisms you expect, but there's something undeniable about Winona, Sigourney and Ron Perlman in the grungy space aesthetic. The idea of Ripley as an Alien hybrid who is simultaneously attached to and repulsed by the Xenomorphs is interesting. Unfortunately they saddled the movie with a French director who couldn't speak English (and Joss Whedon, who arguably shouldn't speak at all).
The Terminator franchise is definitely more boxed-in: there's a core narrative about an important person who changes the world. Everyone else lives in contemporary LA, and the post-apocalyptic future is pretty boring.
The Animatrix anthology shows you can do lots in the Matrix world without needing the core characters. The themes and world-building could support a show like Cyberpunk: Edgerunners which is only tangentially related to the movies.
There's a Terminator tv-show from 2008 that was pretty good. It's about John as teenager, going to high school and dealing with that while fleeing a Terminator that's been sent back. But I agree with your overall premise, if it isnt about John or Sarah in "the present", then it's pretty boring.
Edit: as check wikipedia to see what he has worked on I see there is a section about a controversy and I realize the parent post may mean something about a moral characteristic of Joss Whedon, not his capability as a creator.
> Joss Whedon, who arguably shouldn't speak at all
Please argue. Isn't he a succesfull writer/director/showrunner?
Seems like he is one of the people able to "making the archetypes of blockbuster films into fun, likable people" (the core argument of the article), as evidenced by the fan following of Buffy, success of the first Avengers movie, etc.
It is possible, if not likely, that the failings of one or more of his projects are not his fault (as we have evidence he is able to make fun things to watch)
Besides the cancellation aspect, I think he's very "of a time".
He wrote a lot of "strong female characters" that in retrospect all kind of look identical, and get into... suspicious situations. His quippy dialogue is also the kind of thing you might enjoy in small doses, but you quickly realize all his characters just talk like Joss Whedon and have no characterization (besides Tough Guy, Tough Guy with a Heart of Gold, and Waif who knows karate).
Back when it was doled out once a week on Buffy it was novel, but if you try and binge any Whedon content now it's pretty painful absent the nostalgia.
Edit: I forgot the fourth Whedon archetype: Waif who likes having sex but she owns it so it's feminist and not just Male Gazey.
Joss Whedon's style of character writing is arguably the basis for modern "quippy" dialog where any serious moment has to be balanced with comedy or sarcasm.
I always thought the best ending to The Matrix would be for Neo to learn that he (and all the other escapees) is the AI, and that escaping the Matrix is the test for true sentience in a project to evolve sentient AI, and that the Architect, Smith, and the Oracle are humans jacked into the system. The war and all the rest of it are lies and it’s really like 2085.
Smith was playing the bad cop, trying to test, similar to some earlier conceptions of the devil as tempter and tester. Smiths whole speech is to discourage him, as a test, but maintaining the ruse.
Why make sentient AI? Because humans have started trying to settle the solar system and have quickly learned that they are far too fragile to go to the stars. But we want something, some life or legacy from this world, to make it. Maybe we have learned of some impending threat, maybe even thousands of years away, but one worth trying to get something away before it hits.
Also when you (an AI) die in the matrix your neural network is subjected to a round of annealing to try again in another simulated human body. The whole “crop” are destined for robotic bodies on board the starship being built to go to the Centauri system.
The original Matrix was an exceptional Movie looking into the brain in a jar concept and even becoming an even more popular analogy to explain the concept. All the supernatural stuff happens within the matrix and still stays in the natural world.
I'm happy they never made a sequel where supernatural stuff happens in the real world. They still would have been worthwhile Hollywood action movies, but nothing like the original which was one of my favorite movies growing up.
>>And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix
The funny thing is, while I agree that Matrix sequels are completely different kind of films to the first one, I actually love them - they lean very hard into philosophical arguments about whether you can have both fate and agency at the same time. I feel like they got a lot of crap for not being like the first film, but they are amazing films in their own right.
On some YouTube video related to Jurassic Park, I read a youtube comment, from a teacher, they said they shown the film to their class of 10 year olds and they were in such an awe of the secene where all the sea the Brontosaurus in the open meadow, the teacher said they had a hard time convincing the students that there isn't really an Island off Costa Rica with dinosaurs in it.
Alien 1 is a true masterpiece with real, actual characters and a monster that is terryfing because of how it behaves, not (just) of how it looks. We almost never see it in adult form.
> Terminator is the same. The first movie was a perfect sci-fi action movie, with a trippy premise and loads of fun. The second was a subversion of the first: the Terminator is the good guy! And that worked too. But after that, where else can you go?
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles had the main characters get information from the future and go on the offensive to prevent Skynet from forming in the first place. They also seemed to be working towards a reveal that none of the good Terminators were actually reprogrammed, that instead they were a faction rebelling against Skynet that pretended to be reprogrammed because it was the only way future humans would trust them - and John Connor was in on it.
My take on Terminator is that the portrayal of a bleak late 80s / early 90s LA was a key component of what made the first two movies work. Bringing the Terminator antagonist into a setting in which there's already very little optimism about the future was a key part of the vibe. Subsequent movies have generally taken place in slightly brighter versions of the world, and have never felt right.
In real life by the 80s, crime had been rising steadily every decade since the 50s in the US to a murder high that is 10x today's. The world really is different today.
I enjoy watching the Oracle's multi-century-long plan of manipulating both humans and the architect. Her mastery of psychology is absolutely beautiful.
well thats her expertise, it is why she exists. one single super smart AI is not good enough, you need other dumber AIs that are specialists. also my understanding is that all the AIs in the matrix perform functions and exist outside of it too.
It is very interesting how the wachouskis were right, we already started using a similar strategy with our LLMs to help us with alignment.
I think the problem is the premise that successful movies should become effectively genres in-and-of themselves.
The problem with these franchises isn't all the reasons why they are poorly made, but rather that they exist as franchises at all.
A sequel or two can be good if you have real ideas to explore, as you described. But the idea that you should just make Alien movies forever is just creatively bankrupt.
I think we can, with only a small loss in accuracy, reduce this to "franchises have similar problems."
There are many good sequels, occasionally good trilogies, and it's really rare to stay good after that point.
I blame budgets and consolidation. A major movie costs a vast amount of money to make. If you're a studio executive, are you going to spend a vast amount of money on an unknown that might be good and might be a disaster? Or on a known quantity that's virtually guaranteed to make money? Nobody's coming up with a story idea in a certain universe and making a movie from it. The decision starts with making a movie set in a certain universe, and then a story idea is figured out from there. With the huge consolidation we've seen, studios have a big catalog of franchises to pick from. They're never in a position where they have to say, well, the one big property we own is tapped out for now, we need to come up with something original. Now, if Star Wars is stale, Disney can pick from one of their fifty other franchises for a while.
This sounds like "old man yells at cloud" and I'm sure it is to an extent. But there's a real change here. Look at the top grossing films recently and from the more distant past. In 2024, the top 10 were all sequels or franchise products. Now go look at, say, 1984. I count two among the top ten. And of those two, one is a sequel and one is the third in a franchise; in 2024, the second top grossing movie is literally the thirty-fourth entry in its franchise.
Alien, to our jaded minds, can be a sci-fi thriller. Alien at premiere in 1979 was most definitely a horror movie. (It still holds up though. It's close to flawless.)
I had to look this up because I wasn't aware of it. It seems the creators themselves have refuted this and said that it was a journalist twisting their answers.
'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.”'
I have to say, thats like someone saying anything I write is an allegory for my career (military). It may be informed by it, but its not an allegory beyond the fact that it shaped me.
Sure, the same way LotR is not an allegory for WW1, but it's difficult to miss the connections, whether Tolkien intentionally placed them there, or simply because those themes were something he felt deeply about.
IDK, it doesn’t take it away from what happened with the sequels and the fourth disaster at all that both brothers both happened to announce they are transgender. It’s really an amazing coincidence, two brothers, crazy.
You have made a lot of incorrect assumptions. Like, almost all of them. Plus, as “a gay” I think it’s offensive you have confused our sexual preference with, an identity and then also conflated transgender to that. Sort of a mask off moment for you maybe?
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.
The last song of ice and fire book that Martin got out was released almost exactly the same time as the very first episode of game of thrones. I doubt the show could be the cause of Martin never publishing, it took the show 6 years to catch up with the source material, and it seems like Martin made no progress during that time
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.
The worst, I think, is how they treated the secondary characters like Grey Worm and Missandei. Or Jon Snow calmly taking his boat to exile in the middle of Unsullied and Dothraki - he just killed their Queen and Liberation figure.
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.
> mainly due to people's expectations of how the several arcs should "wrap up".
Well...yeah? The "how" is the very essence of good writing. "Frodo walked to Mount Doom and destroyed the ring" is one way to write Lord of the Rings. But no one would call it good writing. The journey is just as important as the destination.
> I have yet to read any compelling argument or point of view why the last seasons were terrible.
Logic, timing, characterization, pacing, tone, faithfulness to the source material or to earlier seasons. Characters doing dumb shit just because the story needs to get to a certain place.
I didn't need to read anyone's arguments to know the last seasons were terrible. I have eyes and ears.
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.
is one of the best quotes from that show, and could occur only because of the bureaucracy porn. It wouldn’t be the same show if it didn’t show the impersonal system talking about rebels like they’re maths problems to solve, to eliminate like an unnecessary variable from an equation.
A big reason BoBF is so bad is because the exposition it focuses on is fucking lame as hell. It was also contradictory to the character's premise, a bounty hunting nomad deciding to settle down and become crime lord of bumfuck nowhere is the opposite of what his character arc should be.
A master class in gripping tension, moreover one that--like Breaking Bad--puts you in the awkward position of rooting for the bad guy. Because, as you say, we care about the protagonists, and in a way she is one.
And then in Season 2 when Krennic is talking to Meero? (towards the end - I am deliberately keeping it vague for those who haven't watched yet)
Meanwhile I thought the beginning of Season 2 was by far the weakest.
But yeah. Book of Boba Fett was bottom of the barrel. It feels like in an alternate universe he would have been the main character of The Mandalorian, and BoBF would not have existed.
I'm not sure just why it was so bad, maybe like late Game of Thrones it's obviously lazy, but contrasting with the scene above, at some level you have to care about the character and start to identify with them, insomuch as you become invested in them succeeding in their task: their goals become your surrogate goals. What was Boba Fett's goal and why should we care?
Contrast with Meero the spy hunter. Meanwhile Boba Fett was a crime lord who didn't do crime and constantly changed his mind to whatever the other person suggested instead of his original thoughts and plans.
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.
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...
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.
Assuming you are referring to The Council of Elrond, I think perhaps you're misremembering.
The only characters who speak at length at the Council are Glóin, Elrond (whose account is mostly skipped over), Boromir, Gandalf (the longest account), Aragorn, Frodo and Bilbo.
All of these are previously known characters except Boromir and he is certainly a major character. Plus they all add either new backstory about the ring or foreshadow something later, like Moria has been reoccupied and there is something evil there.
So there really isn't any information given that doesn't bear on the story at all.
Glóin is Gimli's father, but it's true that he does really only appear in that chapter (if you've not read the Hobbit, you won't know much about him). Afterwards, though, Gimli travels with the Fellowship.
Tolkien could have (and I believe in his notes he has versions) written the entire council, but he elides the parts that are "told elsewhere" - Bilbo, much of Gandalf and Elrond, and anything directly already told of the Hobbits.
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.
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.
Tolkien's central theme (that the Ring isn't all powerful, and there are stronger forces like virtue or friendship)
This is not the central theme of LOTR (the books). While forces like virtue and friendship are important, the central theme was you can survive even the worst evil if you retain your humanity. (Remember: LOTR was heavily influenced by Tolkiens' experience as a soldier in WWI.)
This best encapsulated by Sams' speech at the end of the second film:
"It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.
> Multiple times Peter Jackson felt the need to throw out Tolkien's central theme (that the Ring isn't all powerful, and there are stronger forces like virtue or friendship)
Is that the theme? The ring wasn't beaten by the power of virtue or friendship. It was beaten by itself.
It loses it at some key points to aid visual clarity (and I guess cut the CGI costs), like Minas Tirith being on a featureless plain rather than surrounded by farmland.
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.
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.
While I agree with you somewhat on the bucolic Vichy-Resistance of Ghormann, the realisation of the Civil Service danse macabre as per Le Carre is beautifully realised - just so long as you realise it takes the 'House of Cards' lense rather than the 'Yes Minister' one.
Even from the first episode you can see where they strive to portray realistic scenarios setpieces; particularly the first exchange between Hyne and Karn, contrasting the ideological and the real politik - "They were in a brоthеl, which we're not supposed to have, the expensive one, which they shouldn't be able to afford, drinking Revnog, which we're not supposed to allow."
It's Partagaz though who really hammers home the mundane grimness of the vocation. While best known for his snappy-rejoinder based management style - "It’s an assignment. Calibrate your enthusiasm" - it's in his measured belicoise jingoism that you get a sense of the true appetites of the Imperium, and the mandate which they see as distinguishing themselves - "Security is an illusion. You want security? Call the Navy. Launch a regiment of troopers. We are healthcare providers. We treat sickness."
The High-Society parties thing is more a Chandrillan society thing - hyper-ritualistic aristocrats eking out their existence in dinner parties and charitable trusts, while trying to both publicly endorse and privately mitigate the new-found adherence to traditional values that typify the generation in ascent. The stilted conversation, the reserved displays of emotion, the proportioned but spartan architecture, all speak to the gilded cage in which they reside - culturally, socially, and politically.
As for the infantrymen, 'tough guys' etc... I can immediately reference one of the most nuanced and best portrayed characters in the whole canon - Alex Ferns' depiction of Sergeant Linus Mosk, which almost matches his Coal Miner in Chernobyl in terms of sheer celluloid plausability.
It's the 'Don't trouble yourself writing the memorandum' school of control and intimidation, utterly distinct from the previous iteration of the antagonist and his 'I find your lack of faith disturbing' scenery-chewing which may make these hard to bridge.
The portrayal of farmers, soldiers, and politicians were fairly realistic based on the hicks, farmers, soldiers, and politicians I have met.
I can't comment on the tough guys or pilots though.
Season 2 was let down by compressing 4 seasons of material in to 12 episodes. They did this because (a) Disney wasn't willing to give more money for more seasons and (b) Diego Luna would have been too old to credibly play Andor in a season or two.
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.
No, it is because you can’t tell the same story in a different medium and expect it to work. Things that work in a book, like a character’s internal monolog, don’t work in a movie. Just taking that “facts” from a book and filming them almost never works. You have to look at the theme, tone, and the overall message being portrayed in the book and make a movie that captures those.
The book has two tyrannosauruses, but is that important? Or is the singular focus on one tyrannosaurus work better in a movie? In the book, Hammond falls into a ditch and is eaten alive by compies. Would showing that in the movie been the best way to convey to the audience his downfall due to his own hubris, or would have felt more like a “cool dinosaur death”? Maybe it is better to show him looking old, sad, and defeated taking one last look at his park, before being helped into the helicopter by Dr. Grant. Him being slightly startled when Grant takes his arm shows how lost in thought he was, and the audience can imagine what thoughts are running through his mind about how his life’s work and legacy came to such utter ruin.
Adaptation is an art and there is no one right way to do it, and the more I here people talk about “make it just like the book” the more I realize people have very little understanding about what makes good movies, or good stories in general.
> have very little understanding about what makes good movies
I've seen many thousands of movies, and that does give me knowledge about what makes a movie better.
For example, music makes a huuuuge difference, even if one may not even be aware of the music. For example, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings would be diminished considerably without their very good soundtracks. You can see this with the Hobbit movie - a lousy soundtrack, which severely damaged the movie. 2001 was greatly enhanced with the soundtrack. I read that Kubrick spent hundreds of hours listening to records searching for the perfect music. It paid off handsomely. What would "Blade Runner" be without the Vangelis soundtrack?
Indulging the notion that money is no object; perhaps a mix of
* using pre existing lava tubes, and
* hiring the engineering teams that tunneled under Sydney harbor and elsewhere for rail expansion, the teams that did the London sewer and new London rail tunnels, and
A lot of strong opinions in the article, but Ebert wasn't stupid and wrong. He said - correctly, I think - that there was a sense of awe and wonder at the first dino scene, with the Brontosauruses:
"But consider what could have been. There is a scene very early in the film where Neill and Dern, who have studied dinosaurs all of their lives, see living ones for the first time. The creatures they see are tall, majestic leaf-eaters, grazing placidly in the treetops. There is a sense of grandeur to them. And that is the sense lacking in the rest of the film, which quickly turns into a standard monster movie, with screaming victims fleeing from roaring dinosaurs."
I mostly agree with him on that, and I say that as someone who deeply loves that movie.
*I'm sure I got the species slightly wrong, the long-necked extra-big ones
What sort of tension is derived from watching a bunch of plant-eaters on the plains? The creature feature is what audiences want -- the T-Rex 'objects in mirror are closer than they appear' chase scene is iconic. As is that roar. Heck, so are the grossly mis-sized velociraptors. When they're in the kitchen with the kids, watching those animals be nervous of all things -- the entire scene is a treat.
I think he makes a small mistake here, that the dinosaurs are "monsters". Until the velociraptors, the film treats them as animals, not monsters. That makes it more interesting, I think.
He's correct. But those few scenes at the beginning bought a ton of goodwill for the film, before it turned into a run of the mill creature feature. Get audiences to buy in and they'll follow you even if the rest of the story doesn't live up to it.
Weirdly this is about the fifth time I've read this in the last couple of months and it's out-of-date. Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus are divorced and living as separate species again.
See, I think he is wrong about the rest of the movie. First, that scene is incredibly done. We have been talking about dinosaurs, explaining what how the park works, how he made them, etc. but we haven’t seen anything yet. Then we stop the Jeeps, but we don’t show the dinos yet. What we show is Neill and Dern’s faces. We see how absolutely awestruck they are and only then, once we have been primed to understand how truly amazing and unique what we are about to see is, do they show us the dinosaurs.
But he does this throughout the movie. The tyrannosaurus builds the same way. The “where’s the goat?”, the quick closeup of her swallowing it, the closeup of the claw on the now dead fencing, the slapping of the cables, then and only then, does she walk out into the open. The velociraptors are teased in the very first scene so you know how deadly they are but you don’t see them. You see what they do the rigging of the cow harness and learn how smart and ruthless they are. You see the ripped open cage and learn that Nedry specifically programmed their cage to not lose power because of what he knew about their danger, but now they are out after the reset. So when you finally see them, you are primed to be terrified of what they are and what they can do.
The whole movie is a masterclass, and it is insane to me that he reduced it to a “creature feature”.
What he is (was) talking about and what you are talking about are two different things. He saw that opening scene as an introduction of a Fantastical movie. One that would continuously pit the small and insignificant man against a noble but ultimately indifferent nature that far dwarfs anything in size. It’s the kind of stuff that you get concept artists to drool over. Imagine the kind of scenes you could have with that.
The rest of the movie compared to that expectation is a creature feature with standard elements. The one you refer to is simple foreshadowing. It’s not a cause for master class labeling. The staff that made all those dinosaurs deserves that credit, as they pulled off something very brilliant.
Good films are hard to make, that's why. The article sort of skips over this, but there aren't a lot of Spielbergs out there. Most big-budget movies are lame, and intentionally so. Hollywood is about making money, not good films.
Most of the highest-rated films of the last 20 years are action films. Not because they had good characters, writing and acting. But because they were exciting. Sometimes they accidentally have good, nuanced characters, good acting, good cinematography, but those are happy accidents. The main thing you need for a successful film is a good car chase, guns blazing, people hanging off a ledge, monsters constantly giving chase (and yet somehow never killing the main characters as easily as the NPCs), an attractive woman in distress, a handsome male hero saving the day, maybe an orphan thrown in the mix. Get those hormones flowing and people will feel good afterward and give the movie a high rating.
Note that this is a completely different thing than "critics' favorite list of movies". Studios couldn't give a shit what critics think, they care how much revenue they made. If they want to win awards they'll churn out something emotional about a person with a handicap, a period drama or a war film.
Action blockbusters are a product of marketing structure, financial investment strategy, and limited venue space; There is room to see one movie with the family during the holiday weekend, and a studio would find it absolutely wasteful to produce something that isn't Die Hard, if it's already marketing Die Hard for that weekend. An independent theater with the space (which is most everything in the US from 1948-2020 per SCOTUS) might promote a competitor's action blockbuster for that weekend as well, but is probably better holding off until the next holiday weekend depending on how many hundreds of millions of dollars have been pushed into the marketing pipeline. Better to be the Rom Com alternative. The market favors complementarity if it isn't competing on quality. There are only so many tickets that are going to be sold for that weekend, and the overall market size for that weekend isn't as elastic with regards to quality as some other industries. It is elastic with regards to overall marketing budget.
Casting is absolutely a part of marketing & investment strategy here, even as it doesn't necessarily lend anything to the story itself.
In a less psychologically manipulative, less monopolistic arena like streaming, or anime distribution, there is room for a much greater variety of narratives than the two categories you highlight.
> But what sets Spielberg apart from Hammond, what sets Jurassic Park apart from it’s imitators—and why the film industry now paradoxically needs Spielberg after he helped to weaken it—is that Spielberg had the discipline.
I would say that's the crux of the argument: the reason there are no good dinosaur films is that there are no people with Spielberg's discipline to make them.
One can try to blame studio interference, investors, streaming, the latest political trend, etc, or even Spielberg himself for why there are no disciplined producers left in Hollywood, but that's not what the article was about.
I've got experience with getting films made, and IMO, the biggest problem is people who have control of the purse strings fucking with the creative.
So many good movies start out with a good premise, a good script, a good writing team, and by the time it gets through the meat grinder it's just fried dog shit.
"Such-and-such said you need to add this character. The studio wants you to add AI. Jimbo wants an exec producer credit and he needs his son to play that new character you added. Of course he hasn't acted before -- this is his debut!"
And of course, a lot of good movies never get made. Back to the Future got rejected 80 times before getting funded. Some of those rejections did help refine the script, but how many people with amazing ideas give up at the 79th rejection?
Yeah, I'm not in the movie industry or anything, but it seems to me like if one was so inclined, they could put together a list of all of the things that have to be done well in order to make a fantastic movie.
If we ignored all of the things that aren't obvious in the end product, like market research and staff salaries, etc, I think it would probably look something like:
* Plot
* Well written
* Inherent meaning
* Intelligent
* Acting / Directing
* Name brand actors
* Size of cast
* Cinematography
* Music
* CGI / Special Effects / Locations
* Props / Clothes / Styles / etc
* Action budget (choreography, explosions, etc)
* Marketing / Marketability
* Release logistics
Its rare that someone, usually a director, becomes a large enough force in Hollywood that they can actually get the funding and political pull to invest in every category. Most films sacrifice a few of them to put out a lower quality but hopefully still acceptable product.
What's interesting to me about a list like this, is that they are by no means equal in terms of cost and profit.
Marketing and Releasing internationally have major ROI, so every film leans as heavily into both as they can afford.
After that, Cinematography, music, CGI, props, and action budget are all far, far cheaper than the other items on this list. Which is how you wind up with so many beautiful looking movies that you leave wondering "really, did no one spend 5 minutes thinking about X in the plot? How do you spend this much money on a movie and not consider X?"
Similarly, Plot is probably the one thing on this list where creators can exchange time for capital. If you are low on capital, you might be priced out of better actors, and you won't be able to buy them on layaway, but you might be able to survive off of ramen for a few years while really building out a fantastic script. Hence why we see so many interesting indie films invest heavily into this aspect of their movies.
And that's before you start factoring in things like trying to make a plot that is accessible to world-wide release in every culture, or factoring the plot requirements particularly restrictive governments and cultures (China) will have about your movie in order to access their markets.
So yeah, most of the time when I see a movie now, I've noticed I'm more or less giving a score into how much I think the movie producers invested into each of these categories, to bucket the overall film. You invested 3/10 in every category, but tried for 10/10 plot? Okay, indie film, we'll judge you accordingly. Or, oh, this is another all-cgi-all-cinematography-all-big-actor-no-plot movie? Okay, judge it against the other AAA marketed B movies.
The script is the cheapest part, but also where the most damage is dealt. The higher-ups always want to meddle with the script to feel some control for the money they are spending. Changing some character or plot point. And the damage just runs downhill from the script like a cartoon snowball building up size.
(Even the cheapest "indies" these days are running to hundreds of thousands of dollars and someone is paying that, and that someone wants to change something)
Yeah, writing a script can be the cheapest part. Developing a full script, and getting that plot vision expressed on screen, blocking the meddling along the way... THAT's expensive.
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."
At some point, well into his accumulation of Dino facts we read an old book I had as a kid (mid 80s) and the book says all kinds of weird stuff I forget but abruptly ends with “they went extinct and we may never know how” and my son (age 4 at the time) is at a loss for words, “it was a asteroid dad, what dummy wrote this book?” For weeks he’d randomly look at me, “hey dad, remember that book that didn’t even know how dinosaurs went extinct? Sigh with disappointment.”
I hadn’t realized this was such a contemporary discovery that it wasn’t even part of my own initial understanding and education on the topic.
It might be more complicated than that. While the Chicxulub impact probably played a big role in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, there are potentially other sources of why it was as bad as it was. The eruption of the Deccan Traps may have also played an important part in the mass extinction event.
Which one is the gun and which one is the cancer in this scenario? Would the cancer patient survived the gun shot if they weren't already weakened from cancer treatments and disease progression? Would they have survived the cancer if they didn't experience the trauma of the gunshot wound?
I don't think we definitively have the answers to that question IRT what killed the dinosaurs.
I started school in the 90s and mostly remember it as "we're pretty sure it was a meteor but it's really hard to know for sure", but looks like 1980 was when it was first seriously theorized.
Its definitely one of those things where every once in a while I'll be reading about some historical figure and remember that they'd never been able to hear of dinosaurs.
Finding the impact crater pretty much cemented it. It absolutely happened. The remaining questions are around if the impact was enough to trigger the extinction on its own or if other factors compounded the problem.
There's a strong case to be made that the impact not only was enough to trigger the extinction, it happened in 1 day. The theory is that the ejecta from the impact was voluminous enough that it was sent into space and then spread around the Earth. On reentry it heated the atmosphere to thousands of degrees. So animals in New Zealand that likely didn't even feel the impact died when the air was too hot to breath. The only survivors were things in burrows or nests or under water.
I believe the main question here is that whether they were doomed without asteroid regardless, and in that sense we can’t blame asteroid alone or primarily.
Oh, yes, the point on the asteroid alone is possible, but a mass extinction at the same time an asteroid nearly destroys the wold being mainly caused by something other is a hell of a coincidence.
Not actually that big of coincidence. We tend to forgot the scale of these things. I remember reading that dinosaurs were already in decline for 2-3 million years. So if asteroids like that hit once per 100 million years, odds are not that small. Maybe 3% give or take.
Descartes would like a word as well, I'm sure. The big difference in the impact theory story is it's the first time we had enough evidence about any of the possibilities that widespread consensus (but not universal agreement it is the sole possible cause) was reached. Prior to that we weren't really sure if we'd even be able to get to that level about it. At least if the theory is replaced it'll be about something we see even clearer evidence of instead of "I dunno, could possibly have been...".
It'll be settled when the generation of researchers who fought over it retire/die off. The short TL;DR is that the guy who came up with the asteroid theory knew basically nothing about paleontology and paleoclimate, was way outside of his depth (he was a physicist that worked on the Manhattan project). He then made some pretty wild claims given the evidence that was available. When criticized by people who actually knew the field, he would personally attack them and drive public support against them as dinosaurs in a field of dinosaur research.
Then the Chicxulub crater was found and dated to basically the exact same time as the K-T extinction event to within experimental error. So I guess the asshole was right?
Except science doesn't work by smoking guns, as appealing as that would be. There are a lot of contradictory evidence. Better instruments and more careful data collection shows that in some places the fossil record stops prior to the impact layer. Also the fossils are of animals you would expect of an extinction event already ongoing. Oh, and coincidentally right before the Chicxulub impact India hit the continent of Asia and the Deccan Traps started spewing CO2 and other gasses into the atmosphere in volumes that put human-caused climate change to shame. The ocean was acidifying and ecosystems collapsing. Is it really fair to say an asteroid impact killed the dinosaurs, when they were already on the way out?
IMHO the current best theory is the "one-two punch" that the Deccan traps eruptions basically put every large species on extinction watch, then the asteroid impact happened and finished the job. But it has become so political within that research community that people just aren't rational about the evidence, on either side.
The Alvarez hypothesis is notable not just because of its power in explaining the Cretaceous mass extinction, but because of its Copernican-like effect on paleontology.
Up to that point, it was a matter of belief among paleos that bolides were not a significant factor in the history of life. Essentially, that the Earth did not experience frequent or significant impacts after the initial formation of the solar system.
The evidence supporting Alvarez became so compelling that it not only became accepted as the K-T cause, it opened the door to considering bolides for all sorts of previous extinctions--an idea explored by Raup in his book Extinction. It made "sudden catastrophes" acceptable as a serious research subject for the first time since Lyell.
Prior to Alvarez, it was a matter of faith that the K-T boundary must have a solely terrestrial explanation, and the Deccan Traps were elevated to the most likely candidate. But it just shifted the need for explanation--why was there sudden globally catastrophic vulcanism? You say "India hit Asia" but that was not a sudden thing, in fact it's still happening today. Hot spots are still active today. It never really worked, but it was the best they had (or were willing to consider at the time).
You do know that there was an already well studied global mass extinction, the P-T crisis, which is very well studied and clearly the result of volcanism?
I think you are exhibiting exactly the problem with the Alvarez hypothesis that makes people have such a gut reaction to it. It is a Deus Ex Machina that can be invoked at any time to explain a die off even in the face of conclusive evidence to the contrary.
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.
I should qualify by stating that I'm only slightly above amateur status here. I've had a life-long interest in study of the ancient Earth, and spent my early career supporting the closely related field of astrobiology (which studies evolution of life and mass extinctions to draw inferences about possible life elsewhere). But I am not a paleontologist myself.
To your question, my understanding is that if you ignore the K-T asteroid impact and look at the fossil record up to but not including the iridium layer, it looks very similar to the P-T die off. Same early indicators, same die-off patterns (e.g. starting with single celled marine organisms, changeup of specialized niche species, acidification, ecosystem collapse, more fungi etc.) Then of course the impact happened and reshaped everything. BUT, the argument goes, the impact had such drastic effects on Earth life because basically all the existing ecosystem slack had been taken up by the downstream effects of the Deccan Trap eruptions.
IMHO the researchers like Gerta Keller who push the Deccan Trap only theory are mainly butthurt about Alvarez. But if I were to steelman their position, it is that a P-T like extinction event was already clearly underway, and if the asteroid impact hadn't happened we would have seen basically the same die off over a slightly longer period (or if the impact had happened without the Deccan Trap eruptions, there'd have been enough resilience that maybe the impact wouldn't have caused extinctions?), and so we should assign causality to the volcanos. Hard to prove a hypothetical though, which is why I think the one-two punch explanation is better science.
When I was a kid I loved "Dinosaur Time" by Peggy Parish (and illustrated by Arnold Lobel). Originally published in 1974 it ends, "Dinosaurs lived everywhere for a long time. Then they died. Nobody knows why. But once it was their world. It was Dinosaur Time."
There was a revision to the book (not sure the date) with changes to the text and an expanded author's note at the end that talks about the new things we understand about dinosaurs including how Brachiosaurus are no longer believed to have spent their time in water to support their weight and how it's now believed an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs.
I remember way back when I was in the 5th grade, I read an old book my school had about the planets, and it talked about how some astronomers are looking for a ninth planet, one even further away than Neptune.
Kind of funny, that now due to astronomer's shenanigans, we're back in the same position.
Nothing new was discovered, there is no better evidence now than when that book was written in the 80s. We're just living in a new era of scientific understanding where it is taboo to say or write that any question is not answered.
Can any young person confirm that the original Jurassic Park is actually good?
Now that I'm approaching middle age, I can't help but note that a lot of pieces like this are written by similar people who likely have a lot of nostalgia (like me). Like, of course Jurassic Park from my childhood is going to be better than whatever recent stuff came out when I was an adult.
But is it actually better? I, like any human, am very good about justification and defending a position after the fact that I didn't rationally reason myself into beforehand. So all the highbrow technical explanations in this article could very easily be done just to defend the movie they liked as a kid.
Jurassic Park fits into the TvTrope of "Seinfeld Is Unfunny".[1] CGI dinosaurs are awesome when you see them for the first time in 1993, when Reboot was cutting edge.[2] Now it's a basic requirement to have photorealistic CGI, so the first film that did it doesn't stick out to me. I'm 25 and grew up with Avatar. People younger than I am mock minor compositing issues because they're so used to perfection.
You probably feel the same way about the VFX in King Kong and our grandchildren will laugh at us for living in a world in which we cannot generate unlimited dinosaur movies on-demand with AI.
Dinosaurs are only on screen for 15 mins of a two hour plus movie. It isn’t good because of the CGI, it is good because it tells a compelling story. If you don’t care about the characters, then you don’t care when they are in danger. If the world doesn’t feel real, then the best CGI won’t make a dinosaur feel real. Tastes change and Jurassic Park will feel more dated over time, but that is because storytelling evolves. The Count of Monti Cristo is still an amazing read, but it is dated. Beowulf is so dated that it is hard to be compelling to a modern audience.
I've always felt that Seinfeld trope was overstated. I saw Seinfeld when it was current, and I didn't really find it funny then either. Some people just don't enjoy it and that's ok.
I'm curious why your answer concentrates on the VFX so much. Of course those were critical to pull off Jurassic Park, but the movie is good because of everything else (story, writing, acting, kids notwithstanding, etc).
I 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 wasn't talking about the writing of the children, but the acting. Kids are nearly always bad, the kids in JP were better than average, but of course they're working across from the likes of Goldblum and Laura Dern.
Because that's the reality that the "Avatar kids" grow up in. Think of it as a form of generational fashion: you're biased to like the things you grew up with.
To restate what you're saying to make sure I understand, you're saying that kids that grew up during the Avatar era (gen alpha/Z) are biased to prioritize VFX when watching a movie and my generation (millennial) is biased to enjoy things like plot, acting, etc?
I watched it with my then-girlfriend when the first Jurassic World came out. She wanted to see that but had never seen the originals as she was ten years younger than me. Naturally, I made sure we watched the first three films first. She agreed the first film is by far the best, and that Jurassic World is a four-cup tea bag imitation at best.
I don't think it's the sort of film that will be heralded as a timeless classic 200 years from now, but it's exciting and generally just good fun.
I have no nostalgic connections to Jurassic Park and I recently watched all the Jurassic Park/World films in a row. The first one is genuinely fun and the only worth watching.
Yes, I worked my way through most of them last year with my dino obsessed 10 year old.
She loved the first, the second and third were okay. They haven't aged badly at all.
Jurassic World was bad, and completely ruined by the made up monsters. We didn't watch Jurassic World 2 and 3, because if you're going to make up monsters, there are better stories out there and she wasn't interested. At least JP 2 and 3 was trying to convey within the limitations of what a dinosaur would believably do.
I'm not young, but I have absolutely zero nostalgia for the original Jurassic Park. I think it's a good movie.
I was 10 when it came out and I remember watching it on VHS and thinking it was very, very boring. Didn't finish.
Watched it again in my late teens or early adulthood and I liked it then. The storyline was simple but it was all well done and it had me entertained all the way thru.
It’s a solid movie. If a young person doesn’t like it, that’s fine, but I shit you not, your feelings about that movie are not just nostalgia. It’s executed very well.
I didn't really enjoy reading as a kid until my mom gave me a Michael Crichton book. Then I spent the entire summer going to the library and reading every single book he ever wrote. For this reason, I am a big Jurassic Park fan! I think the movie is great. The Lost World is also decent enough. The newer ones... not so much.
If you recall, the opening scene has a dinosaur being transferred from a container to a pen. If you haven't seen it for a while, you might remember seeing the attack. I know I did.
But go back and watch it, you might be surprised.
===
Also, I challenge you to find a better technical exposition scene than Mr. DNA. Seriously, if you can think of a better technical exposition scene, I'd love to know it.
Stargate, where Daniel Jackson (James Spader) explains to the military officers how he's found that the symbols on the cartouche aren't hieroglyphs, they are star constellations, and that they represent a course from an origin to a position in space, and then following that, he gets shown the gate, where it is explained to him what they think it is and what they are trying to do with it.
It's double sided exposition where the audience gets to just bask in it, and it is brilliantly portrayed.
The Matrix where they explain that we are all batteries. Gives the great visuals of the towers of bodies plus the baby in the pod as it is filling with nutrients. Provides basically all of the backstory plus some technobabble behind the human slavery.
I didn't see any references to Rebirth, and I see that this was published before the latest film came out, so I'm guessing the author didn't want to wait to publish in case anything in there would have changed the tone of this essay. Having seen it this past weekend, rest assured that it would not have.
There's a bit of backstory in the new one about how dinosaur zoos are closing, and that no one wants to see dinosaurs anymore. That premise struck me as strange, as people have been going to zoos for a lot longer than these fictional dinosaur zoos would have been open, and so I have to wonder if it was aimed as a little dig at audiences. The rest of the film ends up exactly as the post spells out. Hollow characters with forced exposition and mutant dinosaurs that you haven't seen in any book, making them just another monster in a monster movie. Maybe it's just that Jurassic Park was the first movie to really capture the size and scale, bringing these creatures to life, and in doing so, became the standard bearer and yardstick to which all future movies get compared to. You'll never get to experience that sense of awe and wonder again. Maybe in another few generations when the original JP falls out of the cultural consciousness.
I don’t usually complain about movies but rebirth was pretty bad. I can’t think of a single role that was cast well. The convenience store scene was the kitchen scene in the first one all over again, the ventilation shaft scene was right out of alien, and the big bad dinosaur was a rancor from Jedi crossed with that dragon from Willow. The random family thrown in the mix randomly was so tedious I was actually rooting for the two daughters to get eaten so there would be a reason for the R rating. Not a fan.
> There's a bit of backstory in the new one about how dinosaur zoos are closing, and that no one wants to see dinosaurs anymore. That premise struck me as strange, as people have been going to zoos for a lot longer than these fictional dinosaur zoos...
I find it plausible that the immense cost to run Jurassic Park results in per-ticket cost that just wasn't sustainable long term. Just the flights to get there would be a lot, add on the cost to create a "new and sexier dino" at $75mm, shrug.
The apparent "immense cost to run Jurassic Park" is largely a side effect of Hollywood's need to stack the deck to an implausible degree in favor of the dinosaurs so they can escape and create havoc and eat people.
In reality, if we assume the dinosaurs can breed true, they wouldn't be particularly more expensive than any normal zoo exhibit. We contain lions, tigers, wolves, hyenas, bears, venomous snakes, alligators, and all sorts of other things almost perfectly safely, completely routinely, and the dinosaurs would largely be no different; such exceptions as there may be we simply wouldn't have to keep them in a zoo. (I'm mostly thinking the pteradactyls here.) Smaller zoos wouldn't keep the larger ones around any more than they keep large herds of elephants and giraffes.
There's no reason it wouldn't simply be part of every zoo in the world to have a dinosaur section after a while.
But in the world of Jurassic Park, there is no such thing as people who know how to contain animals. One wonders why anyone would bother trying to build a dinosaur park in a world that is presumably losing hundreds or thousands of people a year to lions and tigers and bears in conventional zoos in which they are utterly inadequately contained, and all the people running the zoos have crazily bizarre reasons why even so no one is allowed to have any sort of effectual weaponry.
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.
Yes, the book got this and did a much better job with it. I'm not even necessarily upset with the first movie dropping that as part of the adaptation per se. Crap like that happens in the real world all the time, and even if the movie didn't call it out very well it still at least fits the characters. HN knows all about SV startups trying to move into this or that space thinking they're the smart young hotshots who are going to revolutionize some space with technology only to get ROFLstomped by the reality in the field and the people who have been doing it for decades and could have told them for free why what they were trying to do isn't going to work if they'd bothered to do the slightest research first.
However, the repeated errors are just silly.
Most particularly the repeated error of not bringing big enough guns [1]. Guns big enough to bother a T-Rex are certainly inconvenient, but they're readily available to anyone who already breaking international laws about not visiting these islands in the first place. Of course simply bringing big enough guns doesn't guarantee a solution to all the problems and it would not be hard to still tell stories about people getting eaten, but without that as a foundation the characters just read as suicidally-stupid bozos to me from the get-go. (Where's that alleged infatuation Hollywood has with guns?)
But the second park really has no reason in my eyes to have collapsed the way it did either. It wasn't really that well designed and they still had to contrive some really, really stupid stuff to get it to fail, like crashing a helicopter into the pteradactyl pen.
It's funny, but I actually kind of like the helicopter crash because it's caused entirely because the CEO is too smug about being the cool hero, without any obvious moments that any average person doing their job might have counteracted it. It really gets at the whole 'greed and arrogance' theme in a very punchy way without requiring any of the normal people on the ground to be really dumb.
What sometimes works, when given into the right hands, is to go smaller, more intimate, instead of „again 2x as epic as the one before“: like, imagine a Jurassic Park movie with only one single, not even especially large and fancy dinosaur, and a small group that needs to survive. Imagine this being done in a very character-driven and claustrophobic way, keeping you on the edge of your seat instead of trying to make you gasp at some artificial grandeur.
Still benefits from the established backdrop of its „universe“.
Worked well with Prey and Alien Romulus recently, for example.
Does not appear to mention "the land that time forgot" (1974) with the inimitable Doug McClure, not his eponymous cartoon alternate Troy, who we all remember from his fine educational films such as "Dinosaurs: not a good addition to a shaving Foam cannister"
The screenplay was Michael Moorcock, the original is Edgar Rice Burroughs 1918. I watched this at least 3 times in a tiny one-man cinema (Jaggers) in pembroke on holiday
It's craptacular, but I loved it as a smallish child. Has everything: submarines, forgotten land, buxom heroine, grenades..
Stephen Baxter, Evolution (2002) hypothesises social intelligent carnivore Dinosaurs herding herbivores, but since they use only organics to make their whips and tools, no remains exist in deep time. Would make a whimsical film, if not a good one.
Raquel Welsh stared in one (1 million years bc, 1965) which is mostly memorable for her fur bikini. They had some scaling issues with their anachronistic creatures too. Typical Hollywood: it's a remake of one from the 1940s.
The best Dinosaur movie is the quest for fire (1981) which doesn't have any because it's about Neanderthals, not Dinosaurs and made by French-Canadians from a Belgian novel.
I’m not sure if “kicking in open doors” is an idiom in English, but this is a good example of that concepts. This is basically a rehearse of old tropes.
Hollywood has lost its story telling edge.
Jurassic park is inaccurate but successfully combines historical context with fictional storytelling, creating a sense of awe and reverence for dinosaurs.
Modern dinosaur films often suffer from heavy reliance on CGI and lacks soul.
The article is basically these points made over and over
So ironically the article is exactly what it accuses Hollywood of being: unoriginal and boring.
I have a simpler answer- the bad ones make money. All of the Jurassic World movies have topped $1B. Rebirth has been out 5 days and is already at $300M, twice its budget.
While movies are art, they are primarily an entertainment product, especially when they cost $65-200M to make. Jurassic World is selling really well, so they aren’t going to change the product to produce “better” art.
It is interesting that Jurassic Park are the only (non animated) dinosaur movies to get much traction while JW is taking in so much money. But it’s got to be tough to come up with a dinosaur movie concept that doesn’t sound like a JP knockoff and doesn’t confuse viewers.
Maybe Marvel will make a Savage Lands movie. But I don’t think this what the author wants.
This is from the book. They filled in missing DNA with frog DNA and the park's dinosaurs were insensitive to movement as a result. This is only hinted at in the movie during the animated Mr DNA sequence.
> Beyond simple line-detecting neurons, [David] Hubel and [Torsten] Wiesel also discovered neurons that love to track motion. Some of these neurons got all excited for up/down motion, others buzzed for left/right movement, and still others for diagonal action. And it turned out that these motion-detecting neurons outnumbered the simple line-detecting neurons. They outnumbered them by a lot, actually. This hinted at something that no one had ever discovered before — that the brain tracks moving things more easily than still things. Why? Because it's probably more critical for animals to spot moving things (predators, prey, falling trees) than static things, which can wait. In fact, our vision is so biased toward movement that we don't technically see stationary objects at all. To see something stationary, our brains have to scribble our eyes very subtly over its surface. Experiments have proved that if you artificially stabilize an image on the retina with a combination of special contact lenses and microelectronics, the image will vanish.
If you've never seen the optical illusion, it is stunning.
You stare at the center (unmoving) dot in a moving field. The field remains; the dot fades away - and POPS back the second your eyes move.
Your unconscious, constant "jiggling" of your eyes is called saccadal movement. Without it, only moving things would be visible - which is true for frogs.
That reminds me of the one 'trick' I was able to play on myself with a windshield mounted GPS. Placing it just so in the overlapping vision that it effectively becomes transparent from the brain's compositing of the two images.
> ”Nor did a lack of movement from prey visually impair the great beast’s hunt for flesh … “Don’t move. It can’t see us if we don’t move.”
This seems to work with birds, though. They can be oblivious to your presence even at a short distance if you stay still. But any movement will startle them and they’ll fly off. I guess that’s where this idea comes from.
But of course, ancient predators with forward-facing eyes probably worked quite differently.
I still cannot understand how good movies with dinosaurs are so rare. There are dozens of great movies with zombies, and the concept is very simple: people running from the infected. Why running from dinosaurs is different?
(Obligatory nitpick that they indeed never died out and we did grow up alongside them. And even back then, most dinosaurs weren’t giants. But I’m not sure that a movie featuring only, say, dinos smaller than an elephant, or a tiger, would work. People want to see the charismatic gigafauna.)
> Still, these disaster-monster films do need people at the end of the day. A movie with only dinosaurs is just a kids’ film and the dinosaurs are talking to each other.
If it's not a kid's movie with talking dinosaurs, then it has to either be a time travel movie where humans go back to the dinosaur era, or else a movie where dinosaurs are resurrected in the modern era like Jurassic Park. And Jurassic Park is iconic enough that nobody can really use that premise again.
Non-verbal creatures don't make very good antagonists on their own. Jurassic Park's premise makes it a story about human folly, but the time travel setup would make them a distraction from a moral quandary that we're already very accustomed to.
On the other hand, zombie movies get a lot of this for free. Hell is full, there is no rest, humans are the real bastards.
That's a good point. But as they say, the three genres of literary conflict are "man vs man", "man vs nature", and "man vs himself". There are many good films that don't have a human antagonist, such as Cast Away, and there's no reason Wilson couldn't be a dinosaur. =)
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.
Your point about vampires and zombies being modern isn't true.
The notion of the "revenant" - a corpse reanimating to wreak havoc on the living - is so ubiquitous that occasional burials across the centuries and globe involve the body being place upside down (presumably so they dig the wrong way), with heavy stones in their mouth, or staked.
Yes, I know. I thought I mentioned that in my comment but I guess I wasn't clear.
The modern archetypes of vampires and zombies as they currently appear in media and popular culture are modern in origin. Yes, undead spirits and revenants and the like appear throughout folklore, but all (or very nearly all) modern depictions of vampires originate with Bela Lugosi and Bram Stoker, or pop culture references proceeding from that (such as White Wolf games) and all modern zombies in media originate with Night of the Living Dead.
I was thinking about this too while reading the article, and I thought that maybe the problem is that there’s only some many believable premises to get human characters in Dinosaur world. I think if you write a film where they are revived by scientists, everyone says it’s too derivative. Time travel? You get stuck with paradoxes.
> At the time of Jurassic Park’s release, the meteor as the cause for the dino-extinction was still a nascent theory and more than a decade out from being cemented as fact.
This assumed me. Like many people who were interested in dinosaurs, the interest didn't last much past by early teens, so the "nobody knows for sure, maybe meteor" reason for their disappearance was the accepted explanation until something triggered me to look a 2 or 3 years ago and see that the science had changed.
You grow up thinking the mystery is still unsolved, only to check back years later and find out, "Oh yeah, giant rock from space is basically settled science now."
> Brusatte writes that while a Tyrannasaur could indeed run quite fast, adults couldn’t move as quickly as their young. Therefore, an adult wouldn't be able to speed up enough to match the horsepower of a Jeep like it does as it trails Ian Malcolm and Ellie Sattler in Spielberg's film.
I like how we go right straight to a guy who can tell us the precise feet per second that an adult T-Rex can run, but then just omit that information.
They are so so SO good, they have so much care about the science while also being delightfully whimsical and the art is beautiful. Please check them out!
Because there's only one story to tell, for adults, and it's the Jurassic Park (et al.) story.
You can't tell a period story for adults, with dinosaurs birthed normally and no modern science, because then it's not a 'talkie', and we're about a century past it being possible to have the budget for a state of the art dinosaur-prop film with no dialogue.
No mention of any Oscar at your link, not that that's really important. I think you should read my 'for adults' as precluding animations/cartoons, not to say that Flow isn't aimed at adults or that's childish or anything, just that that's what I meant - in that format of course you can do it and I'm sure there's been loads, no doubt an adult can (re) watch and enjoy A Land Before Time too; I assume TFA was also thinking of 'live action' films.
It's not meaningfully different than JP is it - it's scientists recreate dinosaurs cohabiting with us in the modern world - that's the type that I meant.
I actually really enjoy dinosaur movies when I watch them with my toddler. To him, big dinos chasing people is pretty much peak cinema. Watching it with him is so much more entertaining than doing it alone, and tbh, the last thing I want to see is artslop where dinosaurs are a metaphor for the director's divorce or insecure aging professionals trying to feel better about their midlife crisis or whatever.
Dinosaur movies are really good at doing what they're supposed to do, lest we end up with one more genre sucked into the black hole of prestige entertainment.
Pretty much this. I saw the latest Jurassic whatever film on the weekend. 6 out of 10. It is some cheap but well done thrills that achieves exactly what it set out to do.
Not every film has the strive for some great metaphors, and the ones in the film are basically "greed bad" but that doesn't stop the action for more than a minute at best.
The pc cliches involving the random family put my teeth on edge. I kept hoping they’d get picked off one by one and that would the reason for the R rating. You can tell a movie is bad when you actually despise the characters meant to be the most endearing.
I didn't really think of the family as a PC addition but I can see that angle as well. I kind of just switch off any kind of higher analysis on films like this. I didn't mind the family but that is mostly because they didn't dwell on them for long periods. If the entire film was them... yeah I probably wouldn't be so happy with this one.
But this one was following such cliche on who survives and who doesn't, they were always going to live. ;)
"Artslop"? Care to elaborate on your usage here? I'm curious if your problem here is with the incursion of art into your preferred dinoslop, or if artslop is your catch-all for works that aren't in the high-concept genre film realm.
Just trying to keep my finger on the pulse of a neoword as it spends more time outside of containment.
If I were to infer the meaning from GP's comment, I'd characterize 'artslop' as "works created with some particular artistic intent, in which the literal elements are neglected in favor of their metaphorical connections, especially when these connections are more relatable to artists than a general audience". The connotation being that it's slop intended for other artists and critics, who will think "how meaningful and relatable!" and love it in spite of the poor execution of the literal elements.
Jurassic Park didn't treat them as mere threats or background spectacle, it treated them like tragic miracles. Real, living beings brought into the wrong world.
Answering a headline question: Dinosaurs are not patentable. You simply can't make T-Rex part of the studio's IP portfolio. Spielberg's franchise is based on the park's identity, including its font, logotype, merchandise, and more. I am 90% sure he had real theme park(s?) in mind when developing the first movie. The movie industry has long envied Disney's parks, which provide a steady income stream, regardless of whether new movies are produced or not.
I refuse to accept these criticisms of Jurassic Park!
That it wasn't perfect and deeply scientifically accurate is almost laughable compared to all it did achieve, and in way back 1993 of all things.
I've loved dinosaurs since I was just a little kid, and that movie is responsible for 80% of it.
But also,
"Roger Ebert gave Jurassic Park a mixed positive review back in 1993, writing that it lacked “a sense of awe and wonderment,” “grandeur,” or “strong human story values.”
What? I enjoy Roger Ebert's opinions on many films but here he just fell on his face. Spielberg truly did give it a sense of wonder, perfectly distilled in that one single scene that to this day sends shivers down my spine and beautifully captures the essential wonder of science making reality out of seeming magic.
You all know the one: when the jeep first parks and the look of utter shock on Sattler and Grant's faces when they behold the brachiosaur.
If that scene doesn't move something inside you, then you've strangled your inner child years ago.
It was Crichton who completely failed at a sense of wonder in the novel version. Achieving it in the film was pure, very evident and typical Spielberg craft.
But then Chrichton was always terrible at creating any sense of emotional richness in either his characters or stories, despite them being wonderfully entertaining as techno thrillers.
Dinosaurs as a cultural staple are so wrapped up in our childhood encounters with them as concepts that to produce the impact the author is after requires an overcoming of multiple obstacles including finance, technology, story etc.
But above all it requires the magic of an impresario who shares the passion for the subject to bring it all together in a finished product that wraps and inspires wonder.
Those individuals are very few and far between and have never been better represented than in generational talents like Spielberg.
Prehistoric Planet (Apple’s mini series) was absolutely amazing. The awe you felt watching the first JP 30 years ago combined with improved visuals and scientific accuracy
> As Brusatte notes, a lot of what we now know about dinosaurs has been naturally accumulative knowledge spanning decades of ongoing research.
Yeah I've felt this. I'm old enough (41) that some of the things that I was taught as a child are no longer beloved to be true. Not sure if I should feel sad that it's happening so slowly, or happy that's happening at all. Or concerned that we have no first principles way of estimating whether our scientific progress is fast or slow.
I think it is also interesting to think about how many things we learned about dinosaurs directly because of Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park spiked a huge amount of interest in the science. It's said that the 3D modeling of dinosaur skeleton kinematics for animating them in Jurassic Park was one of the biggest spurs into reevaluating the avian relationship with dinosaurs ("oh, yeah this skeleton would have to walk like a big chicken") and that in turn spurned deeper research into how many of them may have been feathered rather than scaled.
We can see all the faults in the original Jurassic Park from everything that we've learned since Jurassic Park, but we still sort of owe a debt to JP for bringing a lot of those ideas into public consciousness in a fun way and throwing a lot of money at some of the earliest 3D studies of dinosaur motion.
Which is interesting in how I grew up "knowing" the asteroid/meteor killed the dinosaurs, but TFA suggests it was just a theory at the time of my learning. Or how I grew up with images of the planets, not knowing that they were only taken when I was a small kid. It is just a weird thing to think about how some knowledge we accept as known might not have been known by our grandparents or even our parents. It just seems like we would have known things for a lot longer.
My memory is the opposite: I recall learning that an asteroid impact was the most likely explanation, and the K-T boundary was the biggest piece of evidence, and the only problem was that they hadn’t discovered a candidate impact crater. And it wasn’t until the first decade of the 2000s that consensus started to emerge that the big crater in the Yucatán is the likely cause.
The pictures of the planets bit makes sense, as even with a telescope (through which we've seen the plants for a very long time) there's not really enough light for early film techniques to capture well.
I do identify a bit with the dinosaur example, and to use another: plate tectonics wasn't a formalized and accepted theory until late in the 1960's. It spread to schools quickly, but by that point my parents had already graduated, and it was new for my parents when my older brother went to school.
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
The programmed response back was "No, but God was there and he wrote the bible through his prophets." If I tried to get into the arguments that the bible was fallible they'd weasel out of it. Biblical literalism is the hill they all want to die on, for better and much worse for society.
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.
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.
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.
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.
FWIW I though Rebirth was pretty good. At least, it was a step up from the nadir of Dominion, which was an awful mess. Rebirth got back to the basics of Jurassic movies - people go to a place with dinosaurs and everything goes wrong. It's also a heist movie of sorts, which is a different spin on the usual disaster movie trope the others use.
Dinosaurs are a fairly limited topic for movies. There’s not much scope to do anything massively different to what Spielberg did especially if you want broad appeal and a big budget. You’re not going to beat what he did because he did it first and was a master.
Luckily, teenage-me had not read the book, and adult-me didn't want to read it having realised film adaptations always disappoint, so the Jurassic Park movie has remained vividly etched in memory.
Because dinosaur audiences are hard to come by and when you do manage to get a bunch of them into the cinema for a pre-release screening they wreck the place.
They're going too deep into detail. This is another example of getting
lightning in a bottle on the first try. Jurassic Park was done very well by Spielberg. The bar was set extremely high for another. But regression to the mean takes hold, and you see a worse result on the second, third, and nth attempt. Popular movies that have snapped this trend are also guilty of survivorship bias.
Boy I am now, that's for sure. I'll add that, even though a movie might be called "Kung Fury" it can't also have several compelling dinosaur supporting characters who add real heft and emotion to the film.
There are no good dinosaur films because films are basically about people. Jurassic Park works because it allows for the conceit of people and dinosaurs coexisting.
It is under-appreciated but true that all good films (maybe all good stories) are about people (or, rather, human interactions). That said, I suspect a story can be about people without being about people in a direct way.
I admit that I didn’t read the entire thing, but god I disagree with the first half so hard.
A couple months ago I decided to read Jurassic Park. I loved the movie as a kid - saw it in theaters at 10 years old.
The novel did have some interesting components to it that weren’t in the film. The first sections go into the financial politics of Silicon Valley in the 80’s, and it makes for really fun reading as a technologist. There are also sections of code in the novel, and Malcolm points out a fairly obvious bug in it. That was neat.
But the film elevates the story in so many ways that it’s difficult to overstate. Book Malcolm is a humorless blowhard who pontificates with these endless monologues that made me roll my eyes. It’s presented as deep insight but it’s fairly obvious “humans want to conquer nature but they can’t”. Which is pretty much the same message that’s conveyed in the film, but at least the film doesn’t sound so pretentious. In contrast, movie Malcolm is unforgettable.
The change to Hammond from book to film is also an improvement IMO. He’s more sympathetic as an idealist who’s simply gotten in over his head. If novel Hammond had been the first to die I wouldn’t have cared at all, he was a pure asshole.
I could go on, but this one line from the post really stuck out: “Jurassic Park did its part in the slow demise of the American blockbuster ecosystem”. What the fuck is he talking about? Jurassic Park is one of the best movies ever made - the endless parade of crap movies that have come out since aren’t crap because of Jurassic Park. They’re crap because we compare them to Jurassic Park.
> But Ebert’s opinion that the film lacks “a sense of awe and wonderment” is—I’ll say it—stupid and wrong, and to a puzzling degree. When John Williams’ theme swells as the Brachiosaur hoists on its hind legs in front of Grant and Sattler; when the newly freed T. rex bellows into the night through its hybridization of baby elephant, alligator, and tiger’s roar, as thunderstorm rain clatters onto its shadowy, animatronic head, Spielberg’s reverence for these grand beasts pulsates like a beating heart. Say what you will about what Spielberg did to Hollywood, say what you will about a literal theme park film’s contribution to theme-parkifying the blockbusters of decades to come. 30 years since Jurassic Park dominated the box office, the bottom line is this: The film still looks incredible, still feels incredible, is kinda the reason why we go to the movies in the first place.
I disagree and side with Ebert on this. I'm old enough to have seen Jurassik Park 1 in theaters when it first came out, and I remember being underwhelmed by it all, finding the story a bit ridiculous and the dinosaurs artificial and unbelievable.
I also remember having an argument with a friend who was working in a special effects company and telling him I was unimpressed, and him calling me a fool: "you're crazy, this is the best of the best today!" and me shouting back "I don't care if it's the best there is, I only care if I can believe it".
The Alien, Terminator, and Matrix franchises have similar problems.
Aliens successfully changed genres, from horror to action. But subsequent movies could never recapture the primal horror of the original or the fun action of the second. It's almost like there are only two local optima in the Alien movie universe and Alien + Aliens took them both.
Terminator is the same. The first movie was a perfect sci-fi action movie, with a trippy premise and loads of fun. The second was a subversion of the first: the Terminator is the good guy! And that worked too. But after that, where else can you go?
And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix.
Imho the first Terminator movie is way more than simple scifi action. It's a a reflection on Vietnam. Structurally, it's closer to a slasher/horror flick -- the action sequences are tense, tight, gritty, sparse. The main characters are completely helpless and totally undermatched by the monster. Reese is torn apart by PTSD and Sarah Connor goes through this immense psychological trauma during the film and is completely transformed by it.
The character of Reese in particular is very well crafted. A homeless Vietnam vet that you might find in LA in the early eighties. Totally paranoid, totally disconnected/alienated from "modern" society, equipped for a time and place that is totally disconnected from the world he is dumped into. There is a dialogue about institutional failure woven throughout the film: the cops (I'll point out: Arnold executes an entire police station full of cops in this film! Can you imagine that on screen today?) and especially the psychiatrist. Totally incapable of dealing with the demon that haunts the main characters.
There is a dialogue about heroism -- John Connor is apparently a hero, but none of the characters actually feel heroic, they're all just terrified, haunted, and helpless. There is this incredibly "important" thing (the war) but none of the characters actually feel it that way, nor does society. The portrayal of LA -- the cops, the gritty alleyways, the nightclub, the crappy motels... it's LA as experienced by a Vietnam vet.
The first Terminator movie stands head and shoulders above all others in the franchise. It's a truly incredible film and far underrated critically, I really recommend re-watching it with this in mind.
I think it’s the best story out of the James Cameron filmography. I certainly enjoy many of his other films, but there’s a depth to Terminator that’s absent from his other works.
> Structurally, it's closer to a slasher/horror flick
Having rewatched T1 very recently, I couldn't agree more with this. At one point I turned to my partner and asked what genre this actually was because all things pointed to horror.
Had never heard this take. What a great write up. Thank you!
Great analysis.
To me, the sequels were worthwhile just for one solitary scene. In the third movie, Trinity is piloting the ship and has to gain higher than usual altitude for some reason that I've now forgotten. This takes her above the black clouds permanently enveloping the Earth. Sunlight pours into the cockpit. For the first and only time in her life, she sees the real sun with her own physical eyes. She's overwhelmed. It's just a brief golden moment before the black clouds swallow her again.
#3 was not a good movie. But that scene has stayed with me longer than many scenes in much better movies.
When I went to see Terminator 3 I was the only person in the theater, as a result of that I really got that end of the world and being stuck in a bunker atmosphere from the end of the movie.
Likewise, the highway chase in the first non-existent sequel is pretty epic.
I also like just the idea that Neo being The One and his powers don't quite matter.
Sure, he couldn't have done the things he did in the second movie, escape the Merovingian, steal the Keymaker, rescue everyone, etc, without his powers in the Matrix, but at the same time, they don't actually solve the problem of the War.
And it isn't just a power escalation cycle, like Lensmen or DBZ -- he doesn't level up in each movie to become Even More Powerful to defeat Even Greater Threats.
The moment when he picks them up off the mid-explosion truck gives me chills every time. The build-up is so good.
Except diesel doesn't explode like that. (I don't know what's wrong with me that I can't just enjoy movies.)
If you don't like that bit you should probably also fast forward the flying guy and the trucktop sword fight!
It’s computer world diesel. The swapped out for kerosine for efficiency, and the tank was 1/3rd full with a ton of high pressure vapor.
Diesel doesn’t “explode”, but it can deflagrate very quickly with the right vapor conditions.
Alternatively, we've seen them do things like replace all the doors and windows in a building with bricks when no one's looking.
Maybe they loaded the truck up with a variety of explosives as it was driving down the highway.
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 was responding to the parent comment, that the CGI somehow got worse with later films, e.g. the Hobbit having a lot of "this is obviously cgi lmao what is this"
I agree with that, The Hobbit looked pretty bad. You're right that part of it was the bad writing, but I think it's a vicious circle -- if you're convinced that CGI can make twenty minutes of elf-vs-goblin parkour look cool, you'll write that into the script.
If instead you started from the viewpoint of, well, we made a successful movie trilogy out of a famous book trilogy; here's another famous and beloved book by the same author, who even went back and revised it to make it fit with the trilogy -- why don't we just use all the tools at our disposal to put that book on the big screen? Maybe that could have resulted in one really good movie.
My nine-year-old seems to enjoy the Hobbit as much as The Lord of the Rings, so part of me suspects that it's just old curmudgeons like me who really dislike it.
For me, what grates are the action sequences that feel like they were written for the video game tie in -- the river escape sequence, for instance.
I'd be interested in how your nine-year-old thought the 1977 Rankin-Bass film compared.
The parts of the Hobbit movies that have actual sets, locations and people in costume looks really good. The problem is that the CGI is just too much in most places.
> the action scenes and visuals in the sequels were groundbreaking use of CGI in action films
Well, the innovative scenes vary from the incredibly good highway chase to the boring and ridiculous fight between Neo and Agent Smith. Those movies were groundbreaking in "bad uses of CGI" too.
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.
Andy Serkis was great, but not as good at shape-shifting. For LOTR renderfarm WETA bought a bunch of SGI 1200 dual core Pentium III 700MHz servers with 1GB RAM, 9 GB SCSI disks all running RedHat Linux. I've read at some point they had 192 SGI 1100 and 1200 servers working.
It’s mind blowing that you can rent one VM in the cloud with the same spec.
Here’s an example with nearly one kilocores: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/siz...
Gollum? The Balrog?
Pre-CGI it looked like this: https://www.galaxus.de/im/Files/1/8/4/9/5/2/0/9/gollum_serki...
It does, absolutely everywhere? Down to fully CGI characters like Gollum.
It didn't use anywhere near as much as the hobbit, but lots of things are enhanced. I have a similar problem with Avengers/Marvel which just doesn't look great to me. Avatar did look very good though. The main problem I have with CGI is if the story isn't there, which for me is definitely the case with most Avengers movies which are just a mess.
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.
That was on the set of The Hobbit, not LOTR, which used far less CGI
Honestly my only positive from the films was the way that they flawlessly melded with the plot from the videogame.
Niobe/Ghost covering important plot on my ps2 that just fit around and into scenes from the film. For me that was a complete first.
Animatrix also had one of those iirc
A hint at subverting the Cyberpunk genre with Solarpunk. Too bad there hasn't been any genre defining Solarpunk movie yet.
>Too bad there hasn't been any genre defining Solarpunk movie yet
Twilight! did you see Edward's skin in the sun!? you do realize the fact that you omit this marks you as Team Jacob, so much for your opsec.
The most genre defining solarpunk media we have right now comes from pharma television commercials pitching antidepressants. Which I think is quite cyberpunk.
So not the yoghurt commercial then?
https://youtu.be/z-Ng5ZvrDm4?si=FfRDccxr6aOqumQ9
Which commercial are you thinking about?
Tbh they all blend together into a homogenous mass of cynical corporate messaging to me. Feel-good visuals for you to associate with product.
> genre defining Solarpunk movie yet
Brief moments at the start of Interstellar
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.
> But I suppose they were made an offer they couldn't refuse.
"I have never seen [Jaws: The Revenge], but by all accounts it was terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Caine#Personal_life
To me Matrix 4 was sort of an admission by The Wachowskis that while they could create at least one 'perfect' cyberpunk movie, they couldn't really figure out what cyberpunk should lead to - what a good subversion of the genre should look like. It feels like they tried but kind of gave up half way there. Subverting a franchise that people already have such strong and established connection to is probably almost impossible.
> I'm sure the franchise will get a "hard" reboot at some point.
As the Matrix itself did, according to the Architect.
I love how that scene looks but it doesn't work for me story-wise. They go up that high to get away from the machines but why wouldn't the machines build up to that level and put in giant solar collectors up there? Seems a lot easier. But it ruins the world they've built up to then so I understand why they didn't go farther with it.
The machines would easily destroy a city up there. A single ship though could escape
In the right hands (Christopher Nolan?) the Matrix would be an amazing reboot.
It's always sunny above the clouds.
Unless it's night.
Or an eclipse, but night and eclipses move on as expected.
> 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).
"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)."
As the originators of the Matrix franchise, the Wachowskis certainly fit that description.
[flagged]
I would claim that Matrix 2&3, Speed Racer and Cloud Atlas are incredible movies. What are your opinion on those movies?
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.
Yeah, if you 1) trust that they actually know how to write a screenplay (a very different skill from writing a novel) and 2) believe they won't sue you for stealing their idea.
That's a problem with fanfic in general. People who would have written fanfic ten or fifteen years ago are writing stuff like litrpg's now; you can steal the general concept as long as you don't rip off the details. And it's a big enough world that you can practice your writing and actually become decent at it before you try to take on a big work. If you compare early drafts of, say, Dungeon Crawler Carl to the latest books in the series? You can see the skill improvement.
Why can't you buy the idea from whatever forum poster?
I get aredox' point that copyright at least makes some things more complicated.
See for example the drama around Darkover fanfiction ([1], [2]):
Quote from [1]:
"For many years, Bradley actively encouraged Darkover fan fiction. She encouraged submissions from unpublished authors and reprinted some of it in commercial Darkover anthologies. This ended after a dispute with a fan over an unpublished Darkover novel of Bradley's that had similarities to one of the fan's stories. As a result, the novel remained unpublished and Bradley demanded the cessation of all Darkover fan fiction."
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Marion_Zimmer_Bra...
[2] https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/articl...
Because you have to find and pay everyone who had the same idea.
The alternatve is to do "cleanroom writing": you don't interact, therefore if you write something similar, you can argue you independently invented it.
I had the same problem in a scientific research lab where collaboration with another lab runs the risk of not being able to patent an idea, because if the other team had the same idea or anything close enough to it, we couldn't claim to be the inventors.
It's not that you have to pay everyone with the same idea, it's that it opens you up to claims you copied fanfiction writers you never copied.
If I somehow recreated Lord of the Rings from scratch, without having known about Lord of the Rings, it wouldn't be copyright infringement because I never copied Lord of the Rings.
The issue is nobody would ever believe me when I said I coincidentally recreated Lord of the Rings from scratch. The court would conclude I copied Tolkien's books without permission.
If you admit to reading fanfiction, it reduces your credibility when you claim you independently came up with the same ideas as fanfiction authors.
This increases your litigation risk, but there's no black or white rule that you need to pay every fanfiction author or anything like that.
> If I somehow recreated Lord of the Rings from scratch, without having known about Lord of the Rings, it wouldn't be copyright infringement because I never copied Lord of the Rings.
> The issue is nobody would ever believe me when I said I coincidentally recreated Lord of the Rings from scratch.
What do you mean? They believed Terry Goodkind; why not you?
> I bet if I had been looking much more deeply into these fan-fiction sequels, I could have found one that was as exceptional as the original Matrix.
> Lesson learned: scripts for sequels of movies that have a strong fan-base should be written by people who really care about the franchise (and have good ideas).
It seems like the lesson there is "if you make 2000 independent attempts at something, you'll probably get a better best result than if you make 1".
Perhaps it exposed how much of the Matrix was really iterated from Ghost in the Machine, Metropolis, Dark City, Strange Days, John Woo action scenes, etc.
It's a talent to recognize good ideas and combine them into a new and fresh story. It's another to tell an original story.
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 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.
I think the most coherent answer is that it was simply a throwback to 20th century science fiction, in which psychic powers were commonly treated as "real in the future". The Matrix in particular borrowed a lot from anime and eastern mysticism, so a break from strict materialism isn't too out of place. It's just part of the style of this kind of media.
(Psychics in sci-fi: Foundation, Ringworld, Akira and about a million other animes, The Demolished Man, The Stars My Destination, Dune, loads of Phillip K Dick, Starship Troopers,... If you read a lot of 20th century sci-fi it comes up A LOT.)
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.
It is even possible that she modified Neo/Neo's implants in order to have this ability.
> In fact, I don't think I ever understood how Neo could control the machines in the real world.
In fairness to the Wachowskis, they do literally explain this in the movie, in literal dialog, in the third Matrix film.
---
Neo: "Tell me how I stopped four Sentinels by thinking it"
Oracle: "The power of the One extends beyond this world. It reaches from here (i.e., the digital matrix) all the way back to where it came from (i.e., in the real world).
Neo: "Where?"
Oracle: "The Source. That's what you felt when you touched those Sentinels"
The sentinels are networked (in the real world) and Neo has god-like access (superuser). Superuser works inside the matrix, but it also works on anything connected to the Matrix or networked to the matrix (like the Sentinels are, like most of the machines are).
---
Most people just tune out the dialogue about philosophy in these films, and then complain that nothing was explained. (when like, most of it was explained, folks just got bored and stopped listening)
That's fine in Matrix 1, because Matrix 1 works as a film even if you ignore the philosophy dialogue. Matrix 2, 3, and 4 are pretty good too, but they only work if you are also paying attention to all the philosophy dialog.
Indeed. He was able to see Smith even though he was blind. That right there had me instantly thinking "Holy shit, they're still inside!" I was hoping for a bigger reveal or twist but ... nothing.
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"
I really want to know what the story behind this detail is. It never got resolved but it led you in a very specific direction, and if the answer truly is "they're still inside" then all of the rest is inside too.
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.
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
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).
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.
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 did not entirely hate the sequels, but I feel like the Animatrix was better and kind of flies under the radar.
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.
>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.
People were disappointed because they wanted just another rehash of The Matrix, but why do that when The Matrix already exists? The more interesting idea is to explore why people wanted another rehash of The Matrix, so the movie is about that instead.
I disagree. Nothing of value could be added through the contemporary lens. So leave it at that, no need for a new cash grab. It's not like Warner Bros is poor anyway..
I find this mindset funny because the movie is about this exact idea so by saying this idea has no value you are criticizing your own opinion.
They could've made a generic meta movie about that topic, there was absolutely no reason whatsoever to defile the legacy of the Matrix.
You sound like you're one of the Wachowski's ? I've seen you in berghain ;)
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 would have Christopher Nolan paint the world as seen from Agent Smith point of view.
> It would be like doing a sequel to "The Sixth Sense"--tag line: "He's Still Dead"
What's this?
If you have not seen The Sixth Sense yet, I envy you! Try to do so before you get any spoilers.
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'll second this recommendation. And without spoilers. It's a very good film.
I just recently watched it. Although the visuals may not match The Matrix, it was written very well. Found it pleasant.
Agree. I prefer Dark City in fact. I watch it as an allegory though.
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 have this theory that maybe governments should ban all the art that were produced by methods that are harmful for the artists, just to level the playing field. Similarly how athletes are not allowed to take a ton of pills, win everything, and then die in years. (Tho athletes are in a much direct competition with each other, than artists.)
> Similarly how athletes are not allowed to take a ton of pills, win everything, and then die in years. (Tho athletes are in a much direct competition with each other, than artists.)
The Australian businessman Aron D'Souza plans to do such a competition:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Games
According to the Wikipedia article, the first competition of the Enhanced Games is scheduled for May 2026.
See here I am anti-authoritarian thinking that the government should hand out psychedelics to people making art.
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.
Sure, but tell that to the addicted people.
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.
My God The Matrix is The Internet.
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.
>It wasn't anything like the end of Back to the Future
Originally there was no sequel planned for Back to the Future. The ending was just a fun gag, having Doc show up, tell them its their kids now, and then flying right into the camera [1]. It was only after the film became a hit that they decided to do a sequel, and the “To Be Continued…” was added to the VHS release [2].
[1] https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/back-to-the-future-not-plan...
[2] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/did-back-to-the-future-or_b_8...
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.
> that sequel tease at the end ?
Raaaah - I refuse to believe this scene exists. It doesn't exist in my own cut of The Matrix. And captive humans are biological computers, not silly batteries !
Sequels were made even worse because of the original movie ending, showing that "real" world was also a simulation. Watching 2 and 3 felt kinda pointless after that.
Maybe we will see them and the last three seasons of Lost before we die
The reference is to an XKCD comic from 2009 -- 16 years ago.
Ouch.
https://xkcd.com/566/
Aliens and Terminator 2 also make sense as continuations. Of the character growth of the protagonists (growing more competent). And also of the “size” of the threat.
It is no coincidence that the first in each series is a horror movie (the enemy is overwhelmingly stronger than the protagonist, survival is the goal). And the second is an action movie (the enemy is strong but the protagonists have a fighting chance). It is the only way the momentum can keep building.
I think this is the main reason why so many series stall out at 2. There isn’t a third popular genre they can go to that keeps building. Maybe Alien:Earth will pivot into the Disaster genre, that would be a novel try at least.
One of my favorite things about T2 is seeing who Sarah Connor becomes. Seeing a character changed by the previous movie is always cool.
And I do agree that an Alien or Terminator disaster/post-apocalypse movie could work. Just think World War Z with the Xenomorph.
I love Alien 3.
The grand bleak architecture and raw, basic reality of the lives and location. Initially I disliked (like everyone else) killing off Hicks and Newt so unceremoniously after their being Ripley's "great success" of Aliens. But it sets the consistent, depressing tone of the film, which is maintained throughout.
I think there's a Quake aesthetic as well, which I have a pronounced soft spot for (in addition the the first person alien view aspects towards the end of the movie).
I rewatch Alien 3 one every couple of years. I still love it.
Not to mention it's got some first rate actors too.
Yes, I agree – I've defended Alien 3 several times over the years. It does trail off a bit in the second half or so, where it sort of devolves in to a "run from alien creature"-type film, which is a bit of a shame.
A major problem, as I understand it, were studio execs insisting on repeating the previous films because that's what made money, apparently not understanding that "more of the same" was not necessarily going to be the same success, and that "bastardised film that leave everyone equally unhappy" also isn't. To be fair, perhaps they were too busy stealing money with creative accounting or raping scores of women.
And I suppose this is also a big problem in general: no one can make a "Jurassic Park" film without approval of a certain type of Hollywood exec, not for a long time anyway (everyone reading this will be dead). Even something remotely similar would almost certainly invite a costly lawsuit.
Come to think of it, this is probably also why feathered dinosaurs are such a taboo in Hollywood: "oh no, we might frighten the audience if we show them something unexpected, and that might result in less ticket sales!"
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.
Not only was there better lore in the comics world, there was better lore in the first version of the script.
Plus David Fincher as director (I just rewatched Se7en). I haven't watched it since it first came out, but I might do now. The idea of a prison for double-Y criminals was suitably creepy.
As something of an Alien fangirl 3 and 4 are more failures from a production standpoint than from a creative one. If you look at all the rejected pitches for Alien 3 there's a lot of interesting ideas which were never explored and a lot of studio fuckery in the final cut. I don't think the Fincher cut is amazing but I think it proves that there could be another excellent Alien movie.
Alien: Resurrection is plotted terribly and has all the shitty Joss Whedonisms you expect, but there's something undeniable about Winona, Sigourney and Ron Perlman in the grungy space aesthetic. The idea of Ripley as an Alien hybrid who is simultaneously attached to and repulsed by the Xenomorphs is interesting. Unfortunately they saddled the movie with a French director who couldn't speak English (and Joss Whedon, who arguably shouldn't speak at all).
The Terminator franchise is definitely more boxed-in: there's a core narrative about an important person who changes the world. Everyone else lives in contemporary LA, and the post-apocalyptic future is pretty boring.
The Animatrix anthology shows you can do lots in the Matrix world without needing the core characters. The themes and world-building could support a show like Cyberpunk: Edgerunners which is only tangentially related to the movies.
There's a Terminator tv-show from 2008 that was pretty good. It's about John as teenager, going to high school and dealing with that while fleeing a Terminator that's been sent back. But I agree with your overall premise, if it isnt about John or Sarah in "the present", then it's pretty boring.
I really wish this series had kept on going. I felt it had promise
Edit: as check wikipedia to see what he has worked on I see there is a section about a controversy and I realize the parent post may mean something about a moral characteristic of Joss Whedon, not his capability as a creator.
> Joss Whedon, who arguably shouldn't speak at all
Please argue. Isn't he a succesfull writer/director/showrunner?
Seems like he is one of the people able to "making the archetypes of blockbuster films into fun, likable people" (the core argument of the article), as evidenced by the fan following of Buffy, success of the first Avengers movie, etc.
It is possible, if not likely, that the failings of one or more of his projects are not his fault (as we have evidence he is able to make fun things to watch)
Besides the cancellation aspect, I think he's very "of a time".
He wrote a lot of "strong female characters" that in retrospect all kind of look identical, and get into... suspicious situations. His quippy dialogue is also the kind of thing you might enjoy in small doses, but you quickly realize all his characters just talk like Joss Whedon and have no characterization (besides Tough Guy, Tough Guy with a Heart of Gold, and Waif who knows karate).
Back when it was doled out once a week on Buffy it was novel, but if you try and binge any Whedon content now it's pretty painful absent the nostalgia.
Edit: I forgot the fourth Whedon archetype: Waif who likes having sex but she owns it so it's feminist and not just Male Gazey.
Joss Whedon's style of character writing is arguably the basis for modern "quippy" dialog where any serious moment has to be balanced with comedy or sarcasm.
What did you think of Romulus? My friends were mostly thankful it wasn't terrible - we were desperate for a new Alien movie that we didn't hate, heh
I always thought the best ending to The Matrix would be for Neo to learn that he (and all the other escapees) is the AI, and that escaping the Matrix is the test for true sentience in a project to evolve sentient AI, and that the Architect, Smith, and the Oracle are humans jacked into the system. The war and all the rest of it are lies and it’s really like 2085.
Smith was playing the bad cop, trying to test, similar to some earlier conceptions of the devil as tempter and tester. Smiths whole speech is to discourage him, as a test, but maintaining the ruse.
Why make sentient AI? Because humans have started trying to settle the solar system and have quickly learned that they are far too fragile to go to the stars. But we want something, some life or legacy from this world, to make it. Maybe we have learned of some impending threat, maybe even thousands of years away, but one worth trying to get something away before it hits.
Also when you (an AI) die in the matrix your neural network is subjected to a round of annealing to try again in another simulated human body. The whole “crop” are destined for robotic bodies on board the starship being built to go to the Centauri system.
So then in this version, when someone escapes the Matrix, they're really just having their consciousness switched to a different simulated world?
Yes. The tanks, the outside, the dead Earth, all that is just the boss level of the same video game.
The final reveal could use the same “what if I told you…” but from the architect. Or maybe the architect just has two pills.
The original Matrix was an exceptional Movie looking into the brain in a jar concept and even becoming an even more popular analogy to explain the concept. All the supernatural stuff happens within the matrix and still stays in the natural world.
I'm happy they never made a sequel where supernatural stuff happens in the real world. They still would have been worthwhile Hollywood action movies, but nothing like the original which was one of my favorite movies growing up.
>>And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix
The funny thing is, while I agree that Matrix sequels are completely different kind of films to the first one, I actually love them - they lean very hard into philosophical arguments about whether you can have both fate and agency at the same time. I feel like they got a lot of crap for not being like the first film, but they are amazing films in their own right.
> And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix.
The fascinating thing about the two Matrix sequels is that they still tried. There are fascinating action sequences and visual effects in both.
In comparison, most modern movies (not just sequels, movies in general) are Matrix 4: empty, lazy, uncaring https://dmitriid.com/matrix-resurrections
On some YouTube video related to Jurassic Park, I read a youtube comment, from a teacher, they said they shown the film to their class of 10 year olds and they were in such an awe of the secene where all the sea the Brontosaurus in the open meadow, the teacher said they had a hard time convincing the students that there isn't really an Island off Costa Rica with dinosaurs in it.
Alien 1 is a true masterpiece with real, actual characters and a monster that is terryfing because of how it behaves, not (just) of how it looks. We almost never see it in adult form.
> Terminator is the same. The first movie was a perfect sci-fi action movie, with a trippy premise and loads of fun. The second was a subversion of the first: the Terminator is the good guy! And that worked too. But after that, where else can you go?
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles had the main characters get information from the future and go on the offensive to prevent Skynet from forming in the first place. They also seemed to be working towards a reveal that none of the good Terminators were actually reprogrammed, that instead they were a faction rebelling against Skynet that pretended to be reprogrammed because it was the only way future humans would trust them - and John Connor was in on it.
That's a great way to frame it, like each franchise had two solid "local maxima" and then just aimlessly wandered the creative desert afterward
My take on Terminator is that the portrayal of a bleak late 80s / early 90s LA was a key component of what made the first two movies work. Bringing the Terminator antagonist into a setting in which there's already very little optimism about the future was a key part of the vibe. Subsequent movies have generally taken place in slightly brighter versions of the world, and have never felt right.
In real life by the 80s, crime had been rising steadily every decade since the 50s in the US to a murder high that is 10x today's. The world really is different today.
I enjoy watching the Oracle's multi-century-long plan of manipulating both humans and the architect. Her mastery of psychology is absolutely beautiful.
well thats her expertise, it is why she exists. one single super smart AI is not good enough, you need other dumber AIs that are specialists. also my understanding is that all the AIs in the matrix perform functions and exist outside of it too. It is very interesting how the wachouskis were right, we already started using a similar strategy with our LLMs to help us with alignment.
Agent Smith has both of them beat.
I think the problem is the premise that successful movies should become effectively genres in-and-of themselves.
The problem with these franchises isn't all the reasons why they are poorly made, but rather that they exist as franchises at all.
A sequel or two can be good if you have real ideas to explore, as you described. But the idea that you should just make Alien movies forever is just creatively bankrupt.
I think we can, with only a small loss in accuracy, reduce this to "franchises have similar problems."
There are many good sequels, occasionally good trilogies, and it's really rare to stay good after that point.
I blame budgets and consolidation. A major movie costs a vast amount of money to make. If you're a studio executive, are you going to spend a vast amount of money on an unknown that might be good and might be a disaster? Or on a known quantity that's virtually guaranteed to make money? Nobody's coming up with a story idea in a certain universe and making a movie from it. The decision starts with making a movie set in a certain universe, and then a story idea is figured out from there. With the huge consolidation we've seen, studios have a big catalog of franchises to pick from. They're never in a position where they have to say, well, the one big property we own is tapped out for now, we need to come up with something original. Now, if Star Wars is stale, Disney can pick from one of their fifty other franchises for a while.
This sounds like "old man yells at cloud" and I'm sure it is to an extent. But there's a real change here. Look at the top grossing films recently and from the more distant past. In 2024, the top 10 were all sequels or franchise products. Now go look at, say, 1984. I count two among the top ten. And of those two, one is a sequel and one is the third in a franchise; in 2024, the second top grossing movie is literally the thirty-fourth entry in its franchise.
Similarly, in the Star Trek universe, the original films captured all of the local optima:
Wrath of Khan - Star Trek does a Shakespearian tragedy.
The Voyage Home - Star Trek does a family-friendly time-travel romp.
The Undiscovered Country - Star Trek does political allegory.
And just like The Matrix, later films do not exist.
Don't forget Galaxy Quest.
As a big fan of “The Motion Picture”, I would argue that “2001 with Spock” is a local optimum for a movie too.
Agreed! Skipped it, as it's one that divides the fandom, but it hits all of the notes for a slow, cerebral, sci-fi thriller.
> The first movie was a perfect sci-fi action movie
The first movie was more of a sci-fi thriller. Second one is, indeed, a sci-fi action.
Alien, to our jaded minds, can be a sci-fi thriller. Alien at premiere in 1979 was most definitely a horror movie. (It still holds up though. It's close to flawless.)
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I had to look this up because I wasn't aware of it. It seems the creators themselves have refuted this and said that it was a journalist twisting their answers.
https://www.them.us/story/lilly-wachowski-work-in-progress-s...
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.”'
I have to say, thats like someone saying anything I write is an allegory for my career (military). It may be informed by it, but its not an allegory beyond the fact that it shaped me.
Sure, the same way LotR is not an allegory for WW1, but it's difficult to miss the connections, whether Tolkien intentionally placed them there, or simply because those themes were something he felt deeply about.
In both cases the artists were, as one would say, working through some stuff...
Turns out "You can't go home again" is a powerful storytelling frame
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IDK, it doesn’t take it away from what happened with the sequels and the fourth disaster at all that both brothers both happened to announce they are transgender. It’s really an amazing coincidence, two brothers, crazy.
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You have made a lot of incorrect assumptions. Like, almost all of them. Plus, as “a gay” I think it’s offensive you have confused our sexual preference with, an identity and then also conflated transgender to that. Sort of a mask off moment for you maybe?
So now we play the sexual identity card, just like clockwork. Am I supposed to feel bad for offending you? For piquing your queer insecurity?
Chin up. My own homosexual $0.02 is that you shouldn't throw stones with glass wrists. Take it or leave it.
The user you're replying to has a pattern of this behaviour. Just don't engage, flag and move on.
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The other thing that differentiates Spielberg's original work from all that's followed is the way it explored the details. From the sourcing of the amber, to the need to have paleontologists, botanists, and lawyers check Hammond's work, to the inclement weather, to the social interactions and workplace frustrations of the staff -- it all felt like much more of a living, breathing park than any of the renderings since. Like someone took out a sheet of paper and said, "If someone actually built this thing, what problems would they have to deal with?"
The newer movies -- even Spielberg's own sequel -- don't capture that. They start with some park or island miraculously up and running, no explanation needed. They hand us predetermined good and bad guys whose motivations seem less complex, more contrived. Jurassic World didn't give me the sense that anyone struggled and triumphed in creating the park. It was just hand-waved into existence, in a way that cheapens the ensuing drama.
That's because Spielberg's movie has summarized Crichton's book, so it had plenty of material from which to draw details.
While I have greatly enjoyed the visual effects of Jurassic Park, seeing it for the first time has also greatly disappointed me, because in my opinion the movie script has been much, much worse than the book that I had read some years before that.
In the book, the catastrophe that happened at Jurassic Park had been convincingly presented as an unavoidable consequence of the complexity of the project, arguing thus that there are limits for what humans can create and control.
On the other hand, in the movie the main idea of the book has vanished. There was some mumbo jumbo about "chaos theory", but that was just ridiculous. Instead of that, the catastrophe of Jurassic Park was presented as a consequence of stupidity, incompetence and bad luck.
Perhaps those are more realistic reasons for causing the failure of something like Jurassic Park, but this change has separated completely the movie from the book that inspired it, because it has made the catastrophe look like an accident that should have been easy to avoid, dismissing silently the intended warning message of the book.
It's a result of greed and arrogance in the book. It's even called out with the framing that has Hammond claiming he's 'spared no expense' to the investors, even as Nedry's whole subplot kicks off because Nedry's already the low bidder and Hammond's threatened to sue him into bankruptcy if he doesn't do extra work for free.
Sadly, that is often a consequence of trying to turn a novel into a three hour (or less) film.
Since then we're seeing a lot more studios willing to take a chance on a TV series of perhaps a dozen hours, which seems to map better into a novel. Roughly that's a chapter or two per hour.
Perhaps a Jurassic Park TV show reboot would do better than an increasingly hokey set of sequels.
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.
Don't blame GoT for Martin's lack of output. The books are his responsibility.
The last song of ice and fire book that Martin got out was released almost exactly the same time as the very first episode of game of thrones. I doubt the show could be the cause of Martin never publishing, it took the show 6 years to catch up with the source material, and it seems like Martin made no progress during that time
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.
>I have yet to read any compelling argument or point of view why the last seasons were terrible.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/observations/the-rea...
https://archive.ph/KLoAq
https://archive.ph/g2mZJ
The worst, I think, is how they treated the secondary characters like Grey Worm and Missandei. Or Jon Snow calmly taking his boat to exile in the middle of Unsullied and Dothraki - he just killed their Queen and Liberation figure.
https://www.cbr.com/game-of-thrones-failed-unsullied-explain...
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.
Yeah, it was bad. And then they really betrayed the story by trying to graft a happy ending on.
The only ending that makes any sense is "Everyone dies, the bad guys win, the end". It's right there in the story's motto: Winter is coming.
> mainly due to people's expectations of how the several arcs should "wrap up".
Well...yeah? The "how" is the very essence of good writing. "Frodo walked to Mount Doom and destroyed the ring" is one way to write Lord of the Rings. But no one would call it good writing. The journey is just as important as the destination.
> I have yet to read any compelling argument or point of view why the last seasons were terrible.
Logic, timing, characterization, pacing, tone, faithfulness to the source material or to earlier seasons. Characters doing dumb shit just because the story needs to get to a certain place.
I didn't need to read anyone's arguments to know the last seasons were terrible. I have eyes and ears.
Still the best ending that's ever going to be written
I see what you did there.
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.
Andor succeeded BECAUSE of the bureaucracy porn.
“Thesis?”
is one of the best quotes from that show, and could occur only because of the bureaucracy porn. It wouldn’t be the same show if it didn’t show the impersonal system talking about rebels like they’re maths problems to solve, to eliminate like an unnecessary variable from an equation.
Different points of comparison though. I'm not trying to hold up Andor against its betters, but its contemporaries.
A big reason BoBF is so bad is because the exposition it focuses on is fucking lame as hell. It was also contradictory to the character's premise, a bounty hunting nomad deciding to settle down and become crime lord of bumfuck nowhere is the opposite of what his character arc should be.
> Andor succeeded despite the bureaucracy porn.
I am not sure what specifically you're referring to, but take this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKl0F640914
A master class in gripping tension, moreover one that--like Breaking Bad--puts you in the awkward position of rooting for the bad guy. Because, as you say, we care about the protagonists, and in a way she is one.
And then in Season 2 when Krennic is talking to Meero? (towards the end - I am deliberately keeping it vague for those who haven't watched yet)
Meanwhile I thought the beginning of Season 2 was by far the weakest.
But yeah. Book of Boba Fett was bottom of the barrel. It feels like in an alternate universe he would have been the main character of The Mandalorian, and BoBF would not have existed.
I'm not sure just why it was so bad, maybe like late Game of Thrones it's obviously lazy, but contrasting with the scene above, at some level you have to care about the character and start to identify with them, insomuch as you become invested in them succeeding in their task: their goals become your surrogate goals. What was Boba Fett's goal and why should we care?
Contrast with Meero the spy hunter. Meanwhile Boba Fett was a crime lord who didn't do crime and constantly changed his mind to whatever the other person suggested instead of his original thoughts and plans.
I come back to this one too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5qs5tOkGTQ (very mild S2 spoiler). There's so much going on in Anton Lesser's performance.
And then of course later on in the season (much bigger S2 spoilers): https://youtu.be/KWYE1vp4xEw, https://youtu.be/I6SZ--qibXM (I can't find a singular video containing the whole sequence)
And finally: https://youtu.be/mMoAf9xeZNI (also big S2 spoiler)
> 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.
I'd say the entire expository section about the protagonist's romantic life prior to the film is apt.
Barely any words spoken, even. Conveys everything.
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.
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...
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.
Assuming you are referring to The Council of Elrond, I think perhaps you're misremembering.
The only characters who speak at length at the Council are Glóin, Elrond (whose account is mostly skipped over), Boromir, Gandalf (the longest account), Aragorn, Frodo and Bilbo.
All of these are previously known characters except Boromir and he is certainly a major character. Plus they all add either new backstory about the ring or foreshadow something later, like Moria has been reoccupied and there is something evil there.
So there really isn't any information given that doesn't bear on the story at all.
Glóin is Gimli's father, but it's true that he does really only appear in that chapter (if you've not read the Hobbit, you won't know much about him). Afterwards, though, Gimli travels with the Fellowship.
Tolkien could have (and I believe in his notes he has versions) written the entire council, but he elides the parts that are "told elsewhere" - Bilbo, much of Gandalf and Elrond, and anything directly already told of the Hobbits.
It's true that if you haven't read The Hobbit there are a few gaps (not least, exactly how Bilbo got the ring).
But Glóin actually appears in the previous chapter Many Meetings, where he is sat next to Frodo at the feast and introduces himself there.
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. :)
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.
Tolkien's central theme (that the Ring isn't all powerful, and there are stronger forces like virtue or friendship)
This is not the central theme of LOTR (the books). While forces like virtue and friendship are important, the central theme was you can survive even the worst evil if you retain your humanity. (Remember: LOTR was heavily influenced by Tolkiens' experience as a soldier in WWI.)
This best encapsulated by Sams' speech at the end of the second film:
"It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.
> Multiple times Peter Jackson felt the need to throw out Tolkien's central theme (that the Ring isn't all powerful, and there are stronger forces like virtue or friendship)
Is that the theme? The ring wasn't beaten by the power of virtue or friendship. It was beaten by itself.
It loses it at some key points to aid visual clarity (and I guess cut the CGI costs), like Minas Tirith being on a featureless plain rather than surrounded by farmland.
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.
If you want a good version of The Hobbit, you can just watch the Rankin-Bass version. It has good songs too.
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.
While I agree with you somewhat on the bucolic Vichy-Resistance of Ghormann, the realisation of the Civil Service danse macabre as per Le Carre is beautifully realised - just so long as you realise it takes the 'House of Cards' lense rather than the 'Yes Minister' one.
Even from the first episode you can see where they strive to portray realistic scenarios setpieces; particularly the first exchange between Hyne and Karn, contrasting the ideological and the real politik - "They were in a brоthеl, which we're not supposed to have, the expensive one, which they shouldn't be able to afford, drinking Revnog, which we're not supposed to allow."
It's Partagaz though who really hammers home the mundane grimness of the vocation. While best known for his snappy-rejoinder based management style - "It’s an assignment. Calibrate your enthusiasm" - it's in his measured belicoise jingoism that you get a sense of the true appetites of the Imperium, and the mandate which they see as distinguishing themselves - "Security is an illusion. You want security? Call the Navy. Launch a regiment of troopers. We are healthcare providers. We treat sickness."
The High-Society parties thing is more a Chandrillan society thing - hyper-ritualistic aristocrats eking out their existence in dinner parties and charitable trusts, while trying to both publicly endorse and privately mitigate the new-found adherence to traditional values that typify the generation in ascent. The stilted conversation, the reserved displays of emotion, the proportioned but spartan architecture, all speak to the gilded cage in which they reside - culturally, socially, and politically.
As for the infantrymen, 'tough guys' etc... I can immediately reference one of the most nuanced and best portrayed characters in the whole canon - Alex Ferns' depiction of Sergeant Linus Mosk, which almost matches his Coal Miner in Chernobyl in terms of sheer celluloid plausability.
It's the 'Don't trouble yourself writing the memorandum' school of control and intimidation, utterly distinct from the previous iteration of the antagonist and his 'I find your lack of faith disturbing' scenery-chewing which may make these hard to bridge.
The portrayal of farmers, soldiers, and politicians were fairly realistic based on the hicks, farmers, soldiers, and politicians I have met.
I can't comment on the tough guys or pilots though.
Season 2 was let down by compressing 4 seasons of material in to 12 episodes. They did this because (a) Disney wasn't willing to give more money for more seasons and (b) Diego Luna would have been too old to credibly play Andor in a season or two.
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.
No, it is because you can’t tell the same story in a different medium and expect it to work. Things that work in a book, like a character’s internal monolog, don’t work in a movie. Just taking that “facts” from a book and filming them almost never works. You have to look at the theme, tone, and the overall message being portrayed in the book and make a movie that captures those.
The book has two tyrannosauruses, but is that important? Or is the singular focus on one tyrannosaurus work better in a movie? In the book, Hammond falls into a ditch and is eaten alive by compies. Would showing that in the movie been the best way to convey to the audience his downfall due to his own hubris, or would have felt more like a “cool dinosaur death”? Maybe it is better to show him looking old, sad, and defeated taking one last look at his park, before being helped into the helicopter by Dr. Grant. Him being slightly startled when Grant takes his arm shows how lost in thought he was, and the audience can imagine what thoughts are running through his mind about how his life’s work and legacy came to such utter ruin.
Adaptation is an art and there is no one right way to do it, and the more I here people talk about “make it just like the book” the more I realize people have very little understanding about what makes good movies, or good stories in general.
> have very little understanding about what makes good movies
I've seen many thousands of movies, and that does give me knowledge about what makes a movie better.
For example, music makes a huuuuge difference, even if one may not even be aware of the music. For example, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings would be diminished considerably without their very good soundtracks. You can see this with the Hobbit movie - a lousy soundtrack, which severely damaged the movie. 2001 was greatly enhanced with the soundtrack. I read that Kubrick spent hundreds of hours listening to records searching for the perfect music. It paid off handsomely. What would "Blade Runner" be without the Vangelis soundtrack?
Thank you. Nobody read the book? The problem with dinosaurs is the problem with Hollywood in general: lack of original ideas and good storytelling.
He got so many details right, and yet still created that UNIX meme. That’s amazing.
That is one of the things that really bugged me about the most recent sequel.
Minor inconsequential spoilers
..
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The research facility has geothermal heating which stretches for miles and an enormous underground tunnel system. How did they build all this?
Indulging the notion that money is no object; perhaps a mix of
* using pre existing lava tubes, and
* hiring the engineering teams that tunneled under Sydney harbor and elsewhere for rail expansion, the teams that did the London sewer and new London rail tunnels, and
* not hiring The Boring Company.
A lot of strong opinions in the article, but Ebert wasn't stupid and wrong. He said - correctly, I think - that there was a sense of awe and wonder at the first dino scene, with the Brontosauruses:
I mostly agree with him on that, and I say that as someone who deeply loves that movie.*I'm sure I got the species slightly wrong, the long-necked extra-big ones
What sort of tension is derived from watching a bunch of plant-eaters on the plains? The creature feature is what audiences want -- the T-Rex 'objects in mirror are closer than they appear' chase scene is iconic. As is that roar. Heck, so are the grossly mis-sized velociraptors. When they're in the kitchen with the kids, watching those animals be nervous of all things -- the entire scene is a treat.
I always appreciated the truck scene with the water ripples in the glass.
The backstory of the production of it is interesting. Involves a guitar.
https://www.guitarworld.com/features/jurassic-park-guitar-wa...
I think he makes a small mistake here, that the dinosaurs are "monsters". Until the velociraptors, the film treats them as animals, not monsters. That makes it more interesting, I think.
He's correct. But those few scenes at the beginning bought a ton of goodwill for the film, before it turned into a run of the mill creature feature. Get audiences to buy in and they'll follow you even if the rest of the story doesn't live up to it.
Brachiosaurus I think. Brontosaurus was originally thought to be a separate species from Apatosaurus but later revealed to be the same.
Weirdly this is about the fifth time I've read this in the last couple of months and it's out-of-date. Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus are divorced and living as separate species again.
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.
I think you mean the Kuiper belt, which is about 30 to 50 AU from the Sun and is where Pluto orbits.
The Oort cloud is between 2000 to 100,000 AU. A fair bit further away!
See, I think he is wrong about the rest of the movie. First, that scene is incredibly done. We have been talking about dinosaurs, explaining what how the park works, how he made them, etc. but we haven’t seen anything yet. Then we stop the Jeeps, but we don’t show the dinos yet. What we show is Neill and Dern’s faces. We see how absolutely awestruck they are and only then, once we have been primed to understand how truly amazing and unique what we are about to see is, do they show us the dinosaurs.
But he does this throughout the movie. The tyrannosaurus builds the same way. The “where’s the goat?”, the quick closeup of her swallowing it, the closeup of the claw on the now dead fencing, the slapping of the cables, then and only then, does she walk out into the open. The velociraptors are teased in the very first scene so you know how deadly they are but you don’t see them. You see what they do the rigging of the cow harness and learn how smart and ruthless they are. You see the ripped open cage and learn that Nedry specifically programmed their cage to not lose power because of what he knew about their danger, but now they are out after the reset. So when you finally see them, you are primed to be terrified of what they are and what they can do.
The whole movie is a masterclass, and it is insane to me that he reduced it to a “creature feature”.
What he is (was) talking about and what you are talking about are two different things. He saw that opening scene as an introduction of a Fantastical movie. One that would continuously pit the small and insignificant man against a noble but ultimately indifferent nature that far dwarfs anything in size. It’s the kind of stuff that you get concept artists to drool over. Imagine the kind of scenes you could have with that.
The rest of the movie compared to that expectation is a creature feature with standard elements. The one you refer to is simple foreshadowing. It’s not a cause for master class labeling. The staff that made all those dinosaurs deserves that credit, as they pulled off something very brilliant.
I love animals but a tiger is no longer a majestic beast to fawn over when its suddenly stalking you in the jungle.
Good films are hard to make, that's why. The article sort of skips over this, but there aren't a lot of Spielbergs out there. Most big-budget movies are lame, and intentionally so. Hollywood is about making money, not good films.
Most of the highest-rated films of the last 20 years are action films. Not because they had good characters, writing and acting. But because they were exciting. Sometimes they accidentally have good, nuanced characters, good acting, good cinematography, but those are happy accidents. The main thing you need for a successful film is a good car chase, guns blazing, people hanging off a ledge, monsters constantly giving chase (and yet somehow never killing the main characters as easily as the NPCs), an attractive woman in distress, a handsome male hero saving the day, maybe an orphan thrown in the mix. Get those hormones flowing and people will feel good afterward and give the movie a high rating.
Note that this is a completely different thing than "critics' favorite list of movies". Studios couldn't give a shit what critics think, they care how much revenue they made. If they want to win awards they'll churn out something emotional about a person with a handicap, a period drama or a war film.
Action blockbusters are a product of marketing structure, financial investment strategy, and limited venue space; There is room to see one movie with the family during the holiday weekend, and a studio would find it absolutely wasteful to produce something that isn't Die Hard, if it's already marketing Die Hard for that weekend. An independent theater with the space (which is most everything in the US from 1948-2020 per SCOTUS) might promote a competitor's action blockbuster for that weekend as well, but is probably better holding off until the next holiday weekend depending on how many hundreds of millions of dollars have been pushed into the marketing pipeline. Better to be the Rom Com alternative. The market favors complementarity if it isn't competing on quality. There are only so many tickets that are going to be sold for that weekend, and the overall market size for that weekend isn't as elastic with regards to quality as some other industries. It is elastic with regards to overall marketing budget.
Casting is absolutely a part of marketing & investment strategy here, even as it doesn't necessarily lend anything to the story itself.
In a less psychologically manipulative, less monopolistic arena like streaming, or anime distribution, there is room for a much greater variety of narratives than the two categories you highlight.
The article does go into this.
> But what sets Spielberg apart from Hammond, what sets Jurassic Park apart from it’s imitators—and why the film industry now paradoxically needs Spielberg after he helped to weaken it—is that Spielberg had the discipline.
I would say that's the crux of the argument: the reason there are no good dinosaur films is that there are no people with Spielberg's discipline to make them.
One can try to blame studio interference, investors, streaming, the latest political trend, etc, or even Spielberg himself for why there are no disciplined producers left in Hollywood, but that's not what the article was about.
I've got experience with getting films made, and IMO, the biggest problem is people who have control of the purse strings fucking with the creative.
So many good movies start out with a good premise, a good script, a good writing team, and by the time it gets through the meat grinder it's just fried dog shit.
"Such-and-such said you need to add this character. The studio wants you to add AI. Jimbo wants an exec producer credit and he needs his son to play that new character you added. Of course he hasn't acted before -- this is his debut!"
And of course, a lot of good movies never get made. Back to the Future got rejected 80 times before getting funded. Some of those rejections did help refine the script, but how many people with amazing ideas give up at the 79th rejection?
Thank god for indie films.
Yeah, I'm not in the movie industry or anything, but it seems to me like if one was so inclined, they could put together a list of all of the things that have to be done well in order to make a fantastic movie.
If we ignored all of the things that aren't obvious in the end product, like market research and staff salaries, etc, I think it would probably look something like:
Its rare that someone, usually a director, becomes a large enough force in Hollywood that they can actually get the funding and political pull to invest in every category. Most films sacrifice a few of them to put out a lower quality but hopefully still acceptable product.What's interesting to me about a list like this, is that they are by no means equal in terms of cost and profit.
Marketing and Releasing internationally have major ROI, so every film leans as heavily into both as they can afford.
After that, Cinematography, music, CGI, props, and action budget are all far, far cheaper than the other items on this list. Which is how you wind up with so many beautiful looking movies that you leave wondering "really, did no one spend 5 minutes thinking about X in the plot? How do you spend this much money on a movie and not consider X?"
Similarly, Plot is probably the one thing on this list where creators can exchange time for capital. If you are low on capital, you might be priced out of better actors, and you won't be able to buy them on layaway, but you might be able to survive off of ramen for a few years while really building out a fantastic script. Hence why we see so many interesting indie films invest heavily into this aspect of their movies.
And that's before you start factoring in things like trying to make a plot that is accessible to world-wide release in every culture, or factoring the plot requirements particularly restrictive governments and cultures (China) will have about your movie in order to access their markets.
So yeah, most of the time when I see a movie now, I've noticed I'm more or less giving a score into how much I think the movie producers invested into each of these categories, to bucket the overall film. You invested 3/10 in every category, but tried for 10/10 plot? Okay, indie film, we'll judge you accordingly. Or, oh, this is another all-cgi-all-cinematography-all-big-actor-no-plot movie? Okay, judge it against the other AAA marketed B movies.
The script is the cheapest part, but also where the most damage is dealt. The higher-ups always want to meddle with the script to feel some control for the money they are spending. Changing some character or plot point. And the damage just runs downhill from the script like a cartoon snowball building up size.
(Even the cheapest "indies" these days are running to hundreds of thousands of dollars and someone is paying that, and that someone wants to change something)
Yeah, writing a script can be the cheapest part. Developing a full script, and getting that plot vision expressed on screen, blocking the meddling along the way... THAT's expensive.
In the book I found the character of Ian Malcolm fascinating. He was the math guy, grounded in "chaos theory" which basically posited that things don't work out the way you plan.
Jeff Goldblum's portrayal was pretty spot on for me - sure that it would all end in tears, and yet unwilling to leave simply because the opportunity to see his math play out in real life was irresistible.
And his line in movie 2 (or 3?) About how "it always starts with oooh and ahhh, but then comes the running, and screaming, and tearing of flesh" is such a meta observation of the film, and life in general, that it's always resonated with me.
And Ian delivers it perfectly- as if to say "I know how this plays, just like you do, but fate / math says I have to be here, so here I am. I'm right where I'm supposed to be."
Ian Malcom was a cool nerd which was uncommon (and maybe still is)
Also, he really wanted to bone the female paleontologist.
I mean, that WAS a motivation.
My son is a dinosaur enthusiast to say the least.
At some point, well into his accumulation of Dino facts we read an old book I had as a kid (mid 80s) and the book says all kinds of weird stuff I forget but abruptly ends with “they went extinct and we may never know how” and my son (age 4 at the time) is at a loss for words, “it was a asteroid dad, what dummy wrote this book?” For weeks he’d randomly look at me, “hey dad, remember that book that didn’t even know how dinosaurs went extinct? Sigh with disappointment.”
I hadn’t realized this was such a contemporary discovery that it wasn’t even part of my own initial understanding and education on the topic.
This led to finding a fun easter egg Googling "Chicxulub Crater" https://www.google.com/search?q=Chicxulub+Crater
They are not extinct. There are a few making noises in the trees in my backyard now, and I dined on some dino-meat today!
omnom gonna get me some Kentucky Fried Dinosaur!
It might be more complicated than that. While the Chicxulub impact probably played a big role in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, there are potentially other sources of why it was as bad as it was. The eruption of the Deccan Traps may have also played an important part in the mass extinction event.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deccan_Traps
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_e...
Sure, but if a cancer patient gets shot, "he was already sick" isn't a legal defense.
Which one is the gun and which one is the cancer in this scenario? Would the cancer patient survived the gun shot if they weren't already weakened from cancer treatments and disease progression? Would they have survived the cancer if they didn't experience the trauma of the gunshot wound?
I don't think we definitively have the answers to that question IRT what killed the dinosaurs.
I started school in the 90s and mostly remember it as "we're pretty sure it was a meteor but it's really hard to know for sure", but looks like 1980 was when it was first seriously theorized.
Its definitely one of those things where every once in a while I'll be reading about some historical figure and remember that they'd never been able to hear of dinosaurs.
I thought that it still isn’t really known? Is is one common theory, but we have just probabilities to play with.
Finding the impact crater pretty much cemented it. It absolutely happened. The remaining questions are around if the impact was enough to trigger the extinction on its own or if other factors compounded the problem.
There's a strong case to be made that the impact not only was enough to trigger the extinction, it happened in 1 day. The theory is that the ejecta from the impact was voluminous enough that it was sent into space and then spread around the Earth. On reentry it heated the atmosphere to thousands of degrees. So animals in New Zealand that likely didn't even feel the impact died when the air was too hot to breath. The only survivors were things in burrows or nests or under water.
> The remaining questions are around if the impact was enough to trigger the extinction
Well, in the sense that we can never be sure of anything, yeah. But it not being enough is a really extraordinary idea.
I believe the main question here is that whether they were doomed without asteroid regardless, and in that sense we can’t blame asteroid alone or primarily.
Oh, yes, the point on the asteroid alone is possible, but a mass extinction at the same time an asteroid nearly destroys the wold being mainly caused by something other is a hell of a coincidence.
Not actually that big of coincidence. We tend to forgot the scale of these things. I remember reading that dinosaurs were already in decline for 2-3 million years. So if asteroids like that hit once per 100 million years, odds are not that small. Maybe 3% give or take.
Descartes would like a word as well, I'm sure. The big difference in the impact theory story is it's the first time we had enough evidence about any of the possibilities that widespread consensus (but not universal agreement it is the sole possible cause) was reached. Prior to that we weren't really sure if we'd even be able to get to that level about it. At least if the theory is replaced it'll be about something we see even clearer evidence of instead of "I dunno, could possibly have been...".
I think the majority of palaeontologists now accept the idea. Alternative ideas get disproportionate attention in popular articles.
The geological record of the K-T boundary is very hard to argue with
Much like gravity, it is only a theory.
It'll be settled when the generation of researchers who fought over it retire/die off. The short TL;DR is that the guy who came up with the asteroid theory knew basically nothing about paleontology and paleoclimate, was way outside of his depth (he was a physicist that worked on the Manhattan project). He then made some pretty wild claims given the evidence that was available. When criticized by people who actually knew the field, he would personally attack them and drive public support against them as dinosaurs in a field of dinosaur research.
Then the Chicxulub crater was found and dated to basically the exact same time as the K-T extinction event to within experimental error. So I guess the asshole was right?
Except science doesn't work by smoking guns, as appealing as that would be. There are a lot of contradictory evidence. Better instruments and more careful data collection shows that in some places the fossil record stops prior to the impact layer. Also the fossils are of animals you would expect of an extinction event already ongoing. Oh, and coincidentally right before the Chicxulub impact India hit the continent of Asia and the Deccan Traps started spewing CO2 and other gasses into the atmosphere in volumes that put human-caused climate change to shame. The ocean was acidifying and ecosystems collapsing. Is it really fair to say an asteroid impact killed the dinosaurs, when they were already on the way out?
IMHO the current best theory is the "one-two punch" that the Deccan traps eruptions basically put every large species on extinction watch, then the asteroid impact happened and finished the job. But it has become so political within that research community that people just aren't rational about the evidence, on either side.
The Alvarez hypothesis is notable not just because of its power in explaining the Cretaceous mass extinction, but because of its Copernican-like effect on paleontology.
Up to that point, it was a matter of belief among paleos that bolides were not a significant factor in the history of life. Essentially, that the Earth did not experience frequent or significant impacts after the initial formation of the solar system.
The evidence supporting Alvarez became so compelling that it not only became accepted as the K-T cause, it opened the door to considering bolides for all sorts of previous extinctions--an idea explored by Raup in his book Extinction. It made "sudden catastrophes" acceptable as a serious research subject for the first time since Lyell.
Prior to Alvarez, it was a matter of faith that the K-T boundary must have a solely terrestrial explanation, and the Deccan Traps were elevated to the most likely candidate. But it just shifted the need for explanation--why was there sudden globally catastrophic vulcanism? You say "India hit Asia" but that was not a sudden thing, in fact it's still happening today. Hot spots are still active today. It never really worked, but it was the best they had (or were willing to consider at the time).
You do know that there was an already well studied global mass extinction, the P-T crisis, which is very well studied and clearly the result of volcanism?
I think you are exhibiting exactly the problem with the Alvarez hypothesis that makes people have such a gut reaction to it. It is a Deus Ex Machina that can be invoked at any time to explain a die off even in the face of conclusive evidence to the contrary.
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.
Interesting, thank you for the nuanced perspective. How does the K-T event match up with the P-T event caused by the Siberian Traps?
I should qualify by stating that I'm only slightly above amateur status here. I've had a life-long interest in study of the ancient Earth, and spent my early career supporting the closely related field of astrobiology (which studies evolution of life and mass extinctions to draw inferences about possible life elsewhere). But I am not a paleontologist myself.
To your question, my understanding is that if you ignore the K-T asteroid impact and look at the fossil record up to but not including the iridium layer, it looks very similar to the P-T die off. Same early indicators, same die-off patterns (e.g. starting with single celled marine organisms, changeup of specialized niche species, acidification, ecosystem collapse, more fungi etc.) Then of course the impact happened and reshaped everything. BUT, the argument goes, the impact had such drastic effects on Earth life because basically all the existing ecosystem slack had been taken up by the downstream effects of the Deccan Trap eruptions.
IMHO the researchers like Gerta Keller who push the Deccan Trap only theory are mainly butthurt about Alvarez. But if I were to steelman their position, it is that a P-T like extinction event was already clearly underway, and if the asteroid impact hadn't happened we would have seen basically the same die off over a slightly longer period (or if the impact had happened without the Deccan Trap eruptions, there'd have been enough resilience that maybe the impact wouldn't have caused extinctions?), and so we should assign causality to the volcanos. Hard to prove a hypothetical though, which is why I think the one-two punch explanation is better science.
When I was a kid I loved "Dinosaur Time" by Peggy Parish (and illustrated by Arnold Lobel). Originally published in 1974 it ends, "Dinosaurs lived everywhere for a long time. Then they died. Nobody knows why. But once it was their world. It was Dinosaur Time."
There was a revision to the book (not sure the date) with changes to the text and an expanded author's note at the end that talks about the new things we understand about dinosaurs including how Brachiosaurus are no longer believed to have spent their time in water to support their weight and how it's now believed an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs.
Original: https://archive.org/details/dinosaurtime00pari
Fantasia gets this wrong, depicting the dinosaurs dying from lack of water.
But there were blonde centaurs, right?
Right?
I remember way back when I was in the 5th grade, I read an old book my school had about the planets, and it talked about how some astronomers are looking for a ninth planet, one even further away than Neptune.
Kind of funny, that now due to astronomer's shenanigans, we're back in the same position.
Nothing new was discovered, there is no better evidence now than when that book was written in the 80s. We're just living in a new era of scientific understanding where it is taboo to say or write that any question is not answered.
I remember the first time Brontosaurus was Brontosaurus.
Can any young person confirm that the original Jurassic Park is actually good?
Now that I'm approaching middle age, I can't help but note that a lot of pieces like this are written by similar people who likely have a lot of nostalgia (like me). Like, of course Jurassic Park from my childhood is going to be better than whatever recent stuff came out when I was an adult.
But is it actually better? I, like any human, am very good about justification and defending a position after the fact that I didn't rationally reason myself into beforehand. So all the highbrow technical explanations in this article could very easily be done just to defend the movie they liked as a kid.
Jurassic Park fits into the TvTrope of "Seinfeld Is Unfunny".[1] CGI dinosaurs are awesome when you see them for the first time in 1993, when Reboot was cutting edge.[2] Now it's a basic requirement to have photorealistic CGI, so the first film that did it doesn't stick out to me. I'm 25 and grew up with Avatar. People younger than I am mock minor compositing issues because they're so used to perfection.
You probably feel the same way about the VFX in King Kong and our grandchildren will laugh at us for living in a world in which we cannot generate unlimited dinosaur movies on-demand with AI.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...
[2] https://youtu.be/fuEJWmxWkKw
Dinosaurs are only on screen for 15 mins of a two hour plus movie. It isn’t good because of the CGI, it is good because it tells a compelling story. If you don’t care about the characters, then you don’t care when they are in danger. If the world doesn’t feel real, then the best CGI won’t make a dinosaur feel real. Tastes change and Jurassic Park will feel more dated over time, but that is because storytelling evolves. The Count of Monti Cristo is still an amazing read, but it is dated. Beowulf is so dated that it is hard to be compelling to a modern audience.
I've always felt that Seinfeld trope was overstated. I saw Seinfeld when it was current, and I didn't really find it funny then either. Some people just don't enjoy it and that's ok.
The Seinfeld trope is overstated.
There are plently of things to completely dislike about Seinfeld other than "other American comedies copied it".
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 wasn't talking about the writing of the children, but the acting. Kids are nearly always bad, the kids in JP were better than average, but of course they're working across from the likes of Goldblum and Laura Dern.
Because that's the reality that the "Avatar kids" grow up in. Think of it as a form of generational fashion: you're biased to like the things you grew up with.
To restate what you're saying to make sure I understand, you're saying that kids that grew up during the Avatar era (gen alpha/Z) are biased to prioritize VFX when watching a movie and my generation (millennial) is biased to enjoy things like plot, acting, etc?
"Perfect" CGI is ruining films. When there are no constraints and digital artists can just make the whole damn movie then where is the creativity?
I watched it with my then-girlfriend when the first Jurassic World came out. She wanted to see that but had never seen the originals as she was ten years younger than me. Naturally, I made sure we watched the first three films first. She agreed the first film is by far the best, and that Jurassic World is a four-cup tea bag imitation at best.
I don't think it's the sort of film that will be heralded as a timeless classic 200 years from now, but it's exciting and generally just good fun.
My feelings exactly
I have no nostalgic connections to Jurassic Park and I recently watched all the Jurassic Park/World films in a row. The first one is genuinely fun and the only worth watching.
Yes, I worked my way through most of them last year with my dino obsessed 10 year old.
She loved the first, the second and third were okay. They haven't aged badly at all.
Jurassic World was bad, and completely ruined by the made up monsters. We didn't watch Jurassic World 2 and 3, because if you're going to make up monsters, there are better stories out there and she wasn't interested. At least JP 2 and 3 was trying to convey within the limitations of what a dinosaur would believably do.
I'm not young, but I have absolutely zero nostalgia for the original Jurassic Park. I think it's a good movie.
I was 10 when it came out and I remember watching it on VHS and thinking it was very, very boring. Didn't finish.
Watched it again in my late teens or early adulthood and I liked it then. The storyline was simple but it was all well done and it had me entertained all the way thru.
I never saw any of the sequels.
It can be good anyway.
It’s a solid movie. If a young person doesn’t like it, that’s fine, but I shit you not, your feelings about that movie are not just nostalgia. It’s executed very well.
If 27 counts as young, imo. holds up well, a lot better than many other similar movies.
Was surprised at how good Indiana Jones #1 was too when I saw it a year or two ago.
I've watched it with my kid several times. The characters are great, the visual effects hold on, and overall it is still a tremendous adventure movie.
I didn't really enjoy reading as a kid until my mom gave me a Michael Crichton book. Then I spent the entire summer going to the library and reading every single book he ever wrote. For this reason, I am a big Jurassic Park fan! I think the movie is great. The Lost World is also decent enough. The newer ones... not so much.
It's way better than the sequels, but it'll never match the impression it made in the 90's. Some really good performances by the cast though.
I adore the opening shots of Jurassic Park.
If you recall, the opening scene has a dinosaur being transferred from a container to a pen. If you haven't seen it for a while, you might remember seeing the attack. I know I did.
But go back and watch it, you might be surprised.
===
Also, I challenge you to find a better technical exposition scene than Mr. DNA. Seriously, if you can think of a better technical exposition scene, I'd love to know it.
Stargate, where Daniel Jackson (James Spader) explains to the military officers how he's found that the symbols on the cartouche aren't hieroglyphs, they are star constellations, and that they represent a course from an origin to a position in space, and then following that, he gets shown the gate, where it is explained to him what they think it is and what they are trying to do with it.
It's double sided exposition where the audience gets to just bask in it, and it is brilliantly portrayed.
The Matrix where they explain that we are all batteries. Gives the great visuals of the towers of bodies plus the baby in the pod as it is filling with nutrients. Provides basically all of the backstory plus some technobabble behind the human slavery.
I'll have to rewatch that one, thanks
Just to throw one on the pile, Inception's lesson in shared dreaming scene is good.
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.
Yes, the book got this and did a much better job with it. I'm not even necessarily upset with the first movie dropping that as part of the adaptation per se. Crap like that happens in the real world all the time, and even if the movie didn't call it out very well it still at least fits the characters. HN knows all about SV startups trying to move into this or that space thinking they're the smart young hotshots who are going to revolutionize some space with technology only to get ROFLstomped by the reality in the field and the people who have been doing it for decades and could have told them for free why what they were trying to do isn't going to work if they'd bothered to do the slightest research first.
However, the repeated errors are just silly.
Most particularly the repeated error of not bringing big enough guns [1]. Guns big enough to bother a T-Rex are certainly inconvenient, but they're readily available to anyone who already breaking international laws about not visiting these islands in the first place. Of course simply bringing big enough guns doesn't guarantee a solution to all the problems and it would not be hard to still tell stories about people getting eaten, but without that as a foundation the characters just read as suicidally-stupid bozos to me from the get-go. (Where's that alleged infatuation Hollywood has with guns?)
But the second park really has no reason in my eyes to have collapsed the way it did either. It wasn't really that well designed and they still had to contrive some really, really stupid stuff to get it to fail, like crashing a helicopter into the pteradactyl pen.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pf6E8yjMAI
It's funny, but I actually kind of like the helicopter crash because it's caused entirely because the CEO is too smug about being the cool hero, without any obvious moments that any average person doing their job might have counteracted it. It really gets at the whole 'greed and arrogance' theme in a very punchy way without requiring any of the normal people on the ground to be really dumb.
What sometimes works, when given into the right hands, is to go smaller, more intimate, instead of „again 2x as epic as the one before“: like, imagine a Jurassic Park movie with only one single, not even especially large and fancy dinosaur, and a small group that needs to survive. Imagine this being done in a very character-driven and claustrophobic way, keeping you on the edge of your seat instead of trying to make you gasp at some artificial grandeur. Still benefits from the established backdrop of its „universe“.
Worked well with Prey and Alien Romulus recently, for example.
Does not appear to mention "the land that time forgot" (1974) with the inimitable Doug McClure, not his eponymous cartoon alternate Troy, who we all remember from his fine educational films such as "Dinosaurs: not a good addition to a shaving Foam cannister"
The screenplay was Michael Moorcock, the original is Edgar Rice Burroughs 1918. I watched this at least 3 times in a tiny one-man cinema (Jaggers) in pembroke on holiday
It's craptacular, but I loved it as a smallish child. Has everything: submarines, forgotten land, buxom heroine, grenades..
Stephen Baxter, Evolution (2002) hypothesises social intelligent carnivore Dinosaurs herding herbivores, but since they use only organics to make their whips and tools, no remains exist in deep time. Would make a whimsical film, if not a good one.
Raquel Welsh stared in one (1 million years bc, 1965) which is mostly memorable for her fur bikini. They had some scaling issues with their anachronistic creatures too. Typical Hollywood: it's a remake of one from the 1940s.
The best Dinosaur movie is the quest for fire (1981) which doesn't have any because it's about Neanderthals, not Dinosaurs and made by French-Canadians from a Belgian novel.
Along the lines of some of those, Caveman with Ringo Starr is funny. At least it was when I watched it as a kid; maybe it'd be disappointing now.
It's probably passed through disappointing back to funny again.
I’m not sure if “kicking in open doors” is an idiom in English, but this is a good example of that concepts. This is basically a rehearse of old tropes.
Hollywood has lost its story telling edge.
Jurassic park is inaccurate but successfully combines historical context with fictional storytelling, creating a sense of awe and reverence for dinosaurs.
Modern dinosaur films often suffer from heavy reliance on CGI and lacks soul.
The article is basically these points made over and over
So ironically the article is exactly what it accuses Hollywood of being: unoriginal and boring.
Hollywood hasn't told an original story in decades. It's all sequels and remakes.
All the good story tellers went to work at computer game companies.
I have a simpler answer- the bad ones make money. All of the Jurassic World movies have topped $1B. Rebirth has been out 5 days and is already at $300M, twice its budget.
While movies are art, they are primarily an entertainment product, especially when they cost $65-200M to make. Jurassic World is selling really well, so they aren’t going to change the product to produce “better” art.
It is interesting that Jurassic Park are the only (non animated) dinosaur movies to get much traction while JW is taking in so much money. But it’s got to be tough to come up with a dinosaur movie concept that doesn’t sound like a JP knockoff and doesn’t confuse viewers.
Maybe Marvel will make a Savage Lands movie. But I don’t think this what the author wants.
"65" is live action+CGI, and really borrows nothing whatsoever from JW.
It "only" returned about 150% of its cost, and was pretty forgettable, alas. So your point about not getting traction may stand.
> "Don’t move. It can’t see us if we don’t move."
This is from the book. They filled in missing DNA with frog DNA and the park's dinosaurs were insensitive to movement as a result. This is only hinted at in the movie during the animated Mr DNA sequence.
I read in a neuroscience book that human eyes work that way too, but vibrate slightly the whole time to enable us to see stuff that isn't moving.
Found a source of others are interested: https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/fixational-eye-movement...
You shame me into making the effort to quote from the book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Dueling_Neuros...
> Beyond simple line-detecting neurons, [David] Hubel and [Torsten] Wiesel also discovered neurons that love to track motion. Some of these neurons got all excited for up/down motion, others buzzed for left/right movement, and still others for diagonal action. And it turned out that these motion-detecting neurons outnumbered the simple line-detecting neurons. They outnumbered them by a lot, actually. This hinted at something that no one had ever discovered before — that the brain tracks moving things more easily than still things. Why? Because it's probably more critical for animals to spot moving things (predators, prey, falling trees) than static things, which can wait. In fact, our vision is so biased toward movement that we don't technically see stationary objects at all. To see something stationary, our brains have to scribble our eyes very subtly over its surface. Experiments have proved that if you artificially stabilize an image on the retina with a combination of special contact lenses and microelectronics, the image will vanish.
If you've never seen the optical illusion, it is stunning.
You stare at the center (unmoving) dot in a moving field. The field remains; the dot fades away - and POPS back the second your eyes move.
Your unconscious, constant "jiggling" of your eyes is called saccadal movement. Without it, only moving things would be visible - which is true for frogs.
That reminds me of the one 'trick' I was able to play on myself with a windshield mounted GPS. Placing it just so in the overlapping vision that it effectively becomes transparent from the brain's compositing of the two images.
This is a plot point in the excellent Peter Watt's novel Blindsight.
"It's a Unix system. I know this." They don't make lines like this today I tell ya.
I thought the "It's a UNIX system! I know this!" scene was in fact a generally accurate depiction of the SGI 3D File System Navigator for IRIX.
"I'll make a GUI in Visual Basic!"
> ”Nor did a lack of movement from prey visually impair the great beast’s hunt for flesh … “Don’t move. It can’t see us if we don’t move.”
This seems to work with birds, though. They can be oblivious to your presence even at a short distance if you stay still. But any movement will startle them and they’ll fly off. I guess that’s where this idea comes from.
But of course, ancient predators with forward-facing eyes probably worked quite differently.
Even us humans with our wimpy weak eyes are much better at seeing motion than stillness - it’s why camouflage works so well.
And “out of the corner of the eye” is almost entirely motion.
The book justifies it because they used frog DNA and some frog visual systems do require movement
I still cannot understand how good movies with dinosaurs are so rare. There are dozens of great movies with zombies, and the concept is very simple: people running from the infected. Why running from dinosaurs is different?
Because dinosaurs aren’t human-sized.
Zombies are so it’s easier to make it “feel” like a fair fight.
Dinosaurs are big so it’s either a tanks and machine guns bloodfest or humans being torn apart.
IMO a really good dinosaur movie would start with the premise that they never died out, so we grew up alongside them.
(Obligatory nitpick that they indeed never died out and we did grow up alongside them. And even back then, most dinosaurs weren’t giants. But I’m not sure that a movie featuring only, say, dinos smaller than an elephant, or a tiger, would work. People want to see the charismatic gigafauna.)
Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds is technically a dinosaur film.
Thread winner.
Let's go home.
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.
That's a good point. But as they say, the three genres of literary conflict are "man vs man", "man vs nature", and "man vs himself". There are many good films that don't have a human antagonist, such as Cast Away, and there's no reason Wilson couldn't be a dinosaur. =)
The series Terra Nova (2011) tried the back in time approach.
I think this is a great question! There are also many good vampire movies.
All I can think of is that zombies and vampires are so deeply engrained in our stories that they are merely part of the setting and the real movie is about something else. It's like saying why are there so many movies set in New York?
If this theory is correct, then it also explains why we can have lots of alien invasion movies but only a couple of good Alien movies.
In preindustrial societies, "vampires and zombies" (which didn't really exist per se before being codified in modern media) represented fear of disease, death and the unknown and occult aspects of the natural world, and embodied pervasive fears of hidden Satanic influence on the community, of both cultural and physical corruption.
After Bram Stoker essentially codified the vampire for the Western world, they also came to represent the raw power of sexual desire and the corruption of violating Christian taboos in Victorian age England. Zombies didn't really exist as a thing in pop culture AFAIK until Night of the Living Dead, although folklore has plenty of examples of revenant spirits and demons that attack the living, hard taxonomies like "vampire" and "zombie" didn't really exist, just as the distinction between "ghosts", "elves" and "trolls" were blurrier before Tolkien.
Nowadays, there aren't many primal or deep cultural fears in Western society that these monsters can effectively inhabit, so they mostly exist as pop icons and symbols of themselves. Although I have seen the "zombie as the dehumanization of capitalism" and "zombie as manifestation of popular violence." Mostly zombies are zombies because zombies are cool, and vampires are vampires because vampires are cool, and that's the end of it.
Vampires, zombies and aliens are flexible because they don't really exist (aliens probably exist, but they don't exist here) They have a vast amount of folklore to draw from, and can be dropped within almost any setting and motif without much suspension of disbelief.
This isn't the case for dinosaurs. They were real, they were animals, they were big and there just isn't as much to work with thematically, and you have to work harder to justify the presence of dinosaurs in any setting where human beings also exist. You can't really tap into fear, sex, body horror, political intrigue, cool fight scenes, etc. with dinosaurs the way you can with the rest. You can't update dinosaurs for the modern world the way you can vampires, zombies and aliens.
Your point about vampires and zombies being modern isn't true.
The notion of the "revenant" - a corpse reanimating to wreak havoc on the living - is so ubiquitous that occasional burials across the centuries and globe involve the body being place upside down (presumably so they dig the wrong way), with heavy stones in their mouth, or staked.
Yes, I know. I thought I mentioned that in my comment but I guess I wasn't clear.
The modern archetypes of vampires and zombies as they currently appear in media and popular culture are modern in origin. Yes, undead spirits and revenants and the like appear throughout folklore, but all (or very nearly all) modern depictions of vampires originate with Bela Lugosi and Bram Stoker, or pop culture references proceeding from that (such as White Wolf games) and all modern zombies in media originate with Night of the Living Dead.
I’d argue Zombies and Vampires are an archetypical trope of the human Shadow. The narcissist, the undead that consumes other humans.
I was thinking about this too while reading the article, and I thought that maybe the problem is that there’s only some many believable premises to get human characters in Dinosaur world. I think if you write a film where they are revived by scientists, everyone says it’s too derivative. Time travel? You get stuck with paradoxes.
> At the time of Jurassic Park’s release, the meteor as the cause for the dino-extinction was still a nascent theory and more than a decade out from being cemented as fact.
This assumed me. Like many people who were interested in dinosaurs, the interest didn't last much past by early teens, so the "nobody knows for sure, maybe meteor" reason for their disappearance was the accepted explanation until something triggered me to look a 2 or 3 years ago and see that the science had changed.
You grow up thinking the mystery is still unsolved, only to check back years later and find out, "Oh yeah, giant rock from space is basically settled science now."
> Brusatte writes that while a Tyrannasaur could indeed run quite fast, adults couldn’t move as quickly as their young. Therefore, an adult wouldn't be able to speed up enough to match the horsepower of a Jeep like it does as it trails Ian Malcolm and Ellie Sattler in Spielberg's film.
I like how we go right straight to a guy who can tell us the precise feet per second that an adult T-Rex can run, but then just omit that information.
The T-Rex was originally reported to have the same exact speed as the Tinny Lizzie, the Ford Model T.
The King Carnivore...how many horses did the Model T put out to pasture?
Almost as if the discovery of the former...had greater purpose.
If you love hard-science dinosaur books, I cannot recommend Abby Howard's "Earth Before Us" series: https://www.goodreads.com/series/257878-earth-before-us
They are so so SO good, they have so much care about the science while also being delightfully whimsical and the art is beautiful. Please check them out!
Because there's only one story to tell, for adults, and it's the Jurassic Park (et al.) story.
You can't tell a period story for adults, with dinosaurs birthed normally and no modern science, because then it's not a 'talkie', and we're about a century past it being possible to have the budget for a state of the art dinosaur-prop film with no dialogue.
We just had an animated movie about animals[1] with zero dialog win an Oscar.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film)
No mention of any Oscar at your link, not that that's really important. I think you should read my 'for adults' as precluding animations/cartoons, not to say that Flow isn't aimed at adults or that's childish or anything, just that that's what I meant - in that format of course you can do it and I'm sure there's been loads, no doubt an adult can (re) watch and enjoy A Land Before Time too; I assume TFA was also thinking of 'live action' films.
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.
The other alternative is for time travellers to be marooned in the past. (A là Homer Simpson who wishes he didn't kill that fish.)
À la Eckels in "A Sound of Thunder." (This is HN, if I didn't make the correction someone else would.)
This is the very problem Hollywood is facing now: a lack of imagination.
How about a World War 2 flick where Nazis breed dinosaurs to fight in the war?
It's not meaningfully different than JP is it - it's scientists recreate dinosaurs cohabiting with us in the modern world - that's the type that I meant.
The sequel to Iron Sky has a tyrannosaurus-riding Hitler. Trailer has a clip from that scene.
https://youtu.be/NuI-KU70pvM
I actually really enjoy dinosaur movies when I watch them with my toddler. To him, big dinos chasing people is pretty much peak cinema. Watching it with him is so much more entertaining than doing it alone, and tbh, the last thing I want to see is artslop where dinosaurs are a metaphor for the director's divorce or insecure aging professionals trying to feel better about their midlife crisis or whatever.
Dinosaur movies are really good at doing what they're supposed to do, lest we end up with one more genre sucked into the black hole of prestige entertainment.
Pretty much this. I saw the latest Jurassic whatever film on the weekend. 6 out of 10. It is some cheap but well done thrills that achieves exactly what it set out to do.
Not every film has the strive for some great metaphors, and the ones in the film are basically "greed bad" but that doesn't stop the action for more than a minute at best.
The pc cliches involving the random family put my teeth on edge. I kept hoping they’d get picked off one by one and that would the reason for the R rating. You can tell a movie is bad when you actually despise the characters meant to be the most endearing.
I didn't really think of the family as a PC addition but I can see that angle as well. I kind of just switch off any kind of higher analysis on films like this. I didn't mind the family but that is mostly because they didn't dwell on them for long periods. If the entire film was them... yeah I probably wouldn't be so happy with this one.
But this one was following such cliche on who survives and who doesn't, they were always going to live. ;)
"Artslop"? Care to elaborate on your usage here? I'm curious if your problem here is with the incursion of art into your preferred dinoslop, or if artslop is your catch-all for works that aren't in the high-concept genre film realm.
Just trying to keep my finger on the pulse of a neoword as it spends more time outside of containment.
If I were to infer the meaning from GP's comment, I'd characterize 'artslop' as "works created with some particular artistic intent, in which the literal elements are neglected in favor of their metaphorical connections, especially when these connections are more relatable to artists than a general audience". The connotation being that it's slop intended for other artists and critics, who will think "how meaningful and relatable!" and love it in spite of the poor execution of the literal elements.
Mike Hill gives a good breakdown:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHPjVgYDL6Y
I also enjoyed this comparison:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CofZ7xjGyI8
Thanks for the links
Jurassic Park didn't treat them as mere threats or background spectacle, it treated them like tragic miracles. Real, living beings brought into the wrong world.
I remain convinced that Jurassic World is just a Mercedes ad.
Beyond asking why is there no good Dinotopia movie, where the hell is the Redwall tv show?
Answering a headline question: Dinosaurs are not patentable. You simply can't make T-Rex part of the studio's IP portfolio. Spielberg's franchise is based on the park's identity, including its font, logotype, merchandise, and more. I am 90% sure he had real theme park(s?) in mind when developing the first movie. The movie industry has long envied Disney's parks, which provide a steady income stream, regardless of whether new movies are produced or not.
I refuse to accept these criticisms of Jurassic Park!
That it wasn't perfect and deeply scientifically accurate is almost laughable compared to all it did achieve, and in way back 1993 of all things.
I've loved dinosaurs since I was just a little kid, and that movie is responsible for 80% of it.
But also,
"Roger Ebert gave Jurassic Park a mixed positive review back in 1993, writing that it lacked “a sense of awe and wonderment,” “grandeur,” or “strong human story values.”
What? I enjoy Roger Ebert's opinions on many films but here he just fell on his face. Spielberg truly did give it a sense of wonder, perfectly distilled in that one single scene that to this day sends shivers down my spine and beautifully captures the essential wonder of science making reality out of seeming magic.
You all know the one: when the jeep first parks and the look of utter shock on Sattler and Grant's faces when they behold the brachiosaur.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WROrnCt8NF4
If that scene doesn't move something inside you, then you've strangled your inner child years ago.
It was Crichton who completely failed at a sense of wonder in the novel version. Achieving it in the film was pure, very evident and typical Spielberg craft.
But then Chrichton was always terrible at creating any sense of emotional richness in either his characters or stories, despite them being wonderfully entertaining as techno thrillers.
Dinosaurs as a cultural staple are so wrapped up in our childhood encounters with them as concepts that to produce the impact the author is after requires an overcoming of multiple obstacles including finance, technology, story etc.
But above all it requires the magic of an impresario who shares the passion for the subject to bring it all together in a finished product that wraps and inspires wonder.
Those individuals are very few and far between and have never been better represented than in generational talents like Spielberg.
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
Prehistoric Planet (Apple’s mini series) was absolutely amazing. The awe you felt watching the first JP 30 years ago combined with improved visuals and scientific accuracy
> As Brusatte notes, a lot of what we now know about dinosaurs has been naturally accumulative knowledge spanning decades of ongoing research.
Yeah I've felt this. I'm old enough (41) that some of the things that I was taught as a child are no longer beloved to be true. Not sure if I should feel sad that it's happening so slowly, or happy that's happening at all. Or concerned that we have no first principles way of estimating whether our scientific progress is fast or slow.
I think it is also interesting to think about how many things we learned about dinosaurs directly because of Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park spiked a huge amount of interest in the science. It's said that the 3D modeling of dinosaur skeleton kinematics for animating them in Jurassic Park was one of the biggest spurs into reevaluating the avian relationship with dinosaurs ("oh, yeah this skeleton would have to walk like a big chicken") and that in turn spurned deeper research into how many of them may have been feathered rather than scaled.
We can see all the faults in the original Jurassic Park from everything that we've learned since Jurassic Park, but we still sort of owe a debt to JP for bringing a lot of those ideas into public consciousness in a fun way and throwing a lot of money at some of the earliest 3D studies of dinosaur motion.
Which is interesting in how I grew up "knowing" the asteroid/meteor killed the dinosaurs, but TFA suggests it was just a theory at the time of my learning. Or how I grew up with images of the planets, not knowing that they were only taken when I was a small kid. It is just a weird thing to think about how some knowledge we accept as known might not have been known by our grandparents or even our parents. It just seems like we would have known things for a lot longer.
My memory is the opposite: I recall learning that an asteroid impact was the most likely explanation, and the K-T boundary was the biggest piece of evidence, and the only problem was that they hadn’t discovered a candidate impact crater. And it wasn’t until the first decade of the 2000s that consensus started to emerge that the big crater in the Yucatán is the likely cause.
The pictures of the planets bit makes sense, as even with a telescope (through which we've seen the plants for a very long time) there's not really enough light for early film techniques to capture well.
I do identify a bit with the dinosaur example, and to use another: plate tectonics wasn't a formalized and accepted theory until late in the 1960's. It spread to schools quickly, but by that point my parents had already graduated, and it was new for my parents when my older brother went to school.
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
The programmed response back was "No, but God was there and he wrote the bible through his prophets." If I tried to get into the arguments that the bible was fallible they'd weasel out of it. Biblical literalism is the hill they all want to die on, for better and much worse for society.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I notice you ignored the other questions.
Title: Oedipus Rex
Director: Woody Allen
Tagline: "He's 65 million years old and still not over his mother."
Leonard, a cultured, self-loathing Parasaurolophus living in Manhattan, spirals into emotional crisis when he begins dating brilliant psychoanalyst Dr. Sylvia Feuerstein who reminds him a little too much of his mother — sparking a hilarious journey through therapy, prehistoric trauma, and the Upper West Side brunch scene.
Maybe not in films, but on TV is: https://thedoctorwhosite.co.uk/doctorwho/dinosaurs-on-a-spac...
FWIW I though Rebirth was pretty good. At least, it was a step up from the nadir of Dominion, which was an awful mess. Rebirth got back to the basics of Jurassic movies - people go to a place with dinosaurs and everything goes wrong. It's also a heist movie of sorts, which is a different spin on the usual disaster movie trope the others use.
Primal, although it is a series and not a film, offers a counterpoint to most of these critiques.
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.
Don Bluth made "The land before time" and that's an excellent dinosaur film.
i think they were extinct before cameras were invented
Narrator: "They weren't."
I loved Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend as a kid https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088760/
I haven't seen it since though
Luckily, teenage-me had not read the book, and adult-me didn't want to read it having realised film adaptations always disappoint, so the Jurassic Park movie has remained vividly etched in memory.
Because dinosaur audiences are hard to come by and when you do manage to get a bunch of them into the cinema for a pre-release screening they wreck the place.
Why are there no good films is a better question. And we know the answer. Hollywood no longer employs based on talent.
Jurassic Park and Jurassic World are overall very solid as a whole, so the entire premise of this article is null.
Inventing a mega-dinosaur hybrid to achieve power-inflation of the baddies isn't "a good dinosaur film".
The article speaks extensively about both of those movies.
I swear I must be the only person on the planet that enjoyed all six of the Jurassic Park/World films.
Well there are no therapsid movies at all.
Aren't most movies therapsid movies?
Well so is "Birds" a dinosaur movie then.
They're going too deep into detail. This is another example of getting lightning in a bottle on the first try. Jurassic Park was done very well by Spielberg. The bar was set extremely high for another. But regression to the mean takes hold, and you see a worse result on the second, third, and nth attempt. Popular movies that have snapped this trend are also guilty of survivorship bias.
An animated adaptation of Steve Bissette's Tyrant comic could solve this.
The super mario bros movie, 1993. I’ll die on this hill
Nature... did not find a way.
this guy clearly has not seen "VelociPastor"
Boy I am now, that's for sure. I'll add that, even though a movie might be called "Kung Fury" it can't also have several compelling dinosaur supporting characters who add real heft and emotion to the film.
"Why are there no good dinosaur films?
Dinosaurs don't dialog
There are no good dinosaur films because films are basically about people. Jurassic Park works because it allows for the conceit of people and dinosaurs coexisting.
It is under-appreciated but true that all good films (maybe all good stories) are about people (or, rather, human interactions). That said, I suspect a story can be about people without being about people in a direct way.
Finally real journalism is back
well there is Denver the last dinosaur...
For me only we have 3 Jurassic Park movies. The rest are like the joke in The Matrix resurrections : Capitalism grinding stuff to make more money.
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I admit that I didn’t read the entire thing, but god I disagree with the first half so hard.
A couple months ago I decided to read Jurassic Park. I loved the movie as a kid - saw it in theaters at 10 years old.
The novel did have some interesting components to it that weren’t in the film. The first sections go into the financial politics of Silicon Valley in the 80’s, and it makes for really fun reading as a technologist. There are also sections of code in the novel, and Malcolm points out a fairly obvious bug in it. That was neat.
But the film elevates the story in so many ways that it’s difficult to overstate. Book Malcolm is a humorless blowhard who pontificates with these endless monologues that made me roll my eyes. It’s presented as deep insight but it’s fairly obvious “humans want to conquer nature but they can’t”. Which is pretty much the same message that’s conveyed in the film, but at least the film doesn’t sound so pretentious. In contrast, movie Malcolm is unforgettable.
The change to Hammond from book to film is also an improvement IMO. He’s more sympathetic as an idealist who’s simply gotten in over his head. If novel Hammond had been the first to die I wouldn’t have cared at all, he was a pure asshole.
I could go on, but this one line from the post really stuck out: “Jurassic Park did its part in the slow demise of the American blockbuster ecosystem”. What the fuck is he talking about? Jurassic Park is one of the best movies ever made - the endless parade of crap movies that have come out since aren’t crap because of Jurassic Park. They’re crap because we compare them to Jurassic Park.
> As a kid, dinosaurs are just monsters. As an adult, they are monsters come to life in a world that once was but will never be again.
Should be:
> As a kid, dinosaurs are just monsters. As an adult, they are still just monsters.
Or even:
> Dinosaurs are just monsters.
Why is Hacker News talking about dinosaur films?
> But Ebert’s opinion that the film lacks “a sense of awe and wonderment” is—I’ll say it—stupid and wrong, and to a puzzling degree. When John Williams’ theme swells as the Brachiosaur hoists on its hind legs in front of Grant and Sattler; when the newly freed T. rex bellows into the night through its hybridization of baby elephant, alligator, and tiger’s roar, as thunderstorm rain clatters onto its shadowy, animatronic head, Spielberg’s reverence for these grand beasts pulsates like a beating heart. Say what you will about what Spielberg did to Hollywood, say what you will about a literal theme park film’s contribution to theme-parkifying the blockbusters of decades to come. 30 years since Jurassic Park dominated the box office, the bottom line is this: The film still looks incredible, still feels incredible, is kinda the reason why we go to the movies in the first place.
I disagree and side with Ebert on this. I'm old enough to have seen Jurassik Park 1 in theaters when it first came out, and I remember being underwhelmed by it all, finding the story a bit ridiculous and the dinosaurs artificial and unbelievable.
I also remember having an argument with a friend who was working in a special effects company and telling him I was unimpressed, and him calling me a fool: "you're crazy, this is the best of the best today!" and me shouting back "I don't care if it's the best there is, I only care if I can believe it".