[HN Gopher] Why are there no good dinosaur films?
___________________________________________________________________
Why are there no good dinosaur films?
Author : fremden
Score : 180 points
Date : 2025-07-04 19:55 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (briannazigler.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (briannazigler.substack.com)
| jxjnskkzxxhx wrote:
| > 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| tshaddox wrote:
| 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 Yucatan is the
| likely cause.
| zdragnar wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| bruce511 wrote:
| 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.
| tzs wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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
| tzs wrote:
| 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?
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| 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.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| 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.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| That is wild, did they believe in this
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophism
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diluvium
| WorldMaker wrote:
| 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
| dylan604 wrote:
| > "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
| WorldMaker wrote:
| 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.
| blibble wrote:
| 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
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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?
| blibble wrote:
| 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"
| mr_toad wrote:
| > 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.
| blibble wrote:
| 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)
| throaway5454 wrote:
| The wierd things the latest JP movies still have the Dino's as
| being featherless
| croes wrote:
| It's lore
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Yup, the lore blames the frog/amphibian DNA and Doctor Wu's
| interference (military application side projects).
| Butthead69 wrote:
| Dominion had a feathered Pyroraptor
| WorldMaker wrote:
| 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.
| taco_emoji wrote:
| 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?
| jxjnskkzxxhx wrote:
| > 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.
| robertcarter wrote:
| 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
| pks016 wrote:
| Thanks for the links
| speed_spread wrote:
| Nature... did not find a way.
| nullhole wrote:
| 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
| throaway5454 wrote:
| Brachiosaurus I think. Brontosaurus was originally thought to
| be a separate species from Apatosaurus but later revealed to be
| the same.
| masfuerte wrote:
| 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.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| But this alienated Pluto so much that it refuses to be a
| planet and is out hiding in the Oort cloud again.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| 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!
| throaway5454 wrote:
| The rare double gotcha fact
| bombcar wrote:
| I'm imagining a cabal of dinosaurs experts cackling and
| laughing "time to bring the bronto back, too many people
| are getting uppity!"
| jfengel wrote:
| 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.
| p_ing wrote:
| 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.
| marklubi wrote:
| 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...
| magarnicle wrote:
| 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.
| HK-NC wrote:
| I love animals but a tiger is no longer a majestic beast to
| fawn over when its suddenly stalking you in the jungle.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| 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".
| dvh wrote:
| What's your opinion on 1955 Czech movie "Cesta do praveku"
| storus wrote:
| 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
| campak wrote:
| i think they were extinct before cameras were invented
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Narrator: "They weren't."
| sdsd wrote:
| 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.
| tmiku wrote:
| "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.
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| 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.
| SlowTao wrote:
| 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.
| chasd00 wrote:
| 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.
| conductr wrote:
| 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.
| zamadatix wrote:
| This led to finding a fun easter egg Googling "Chicxulub
| Crater" https://www.google.com/search?q=Chicxulub+Crater
| ender341341 wrote:
| 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.
| vel0city wrote:
| 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...
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Sure, but if a cancer patient gets shot, "he was already
| sick" isn't a legal defense.
| vel0city wrote:
| 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.
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| 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!
| skrebbel wrote:
| omnom gonna get me some Kentucky Fried Dinosaur!
| pests wrote:
| Fantasia gets this wrong, depicting the dinosaurs dying from
| lack of water.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| But there were blonde centaurs, right?
|
| Right?
| nicce wrote:
| I thought that it still isn't really known? Is is one common
| theory, but we have just probabilities to play with.
| zamadatix wrote:
| 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...".
| adastra22 wrote:
| 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.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _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.
| adastra22 wrote:
| 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.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| 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.
| adastra22 wrote:
| 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.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| "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".
| snowwrestler wrote:
| 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).
| mr_toad wrote:
| I think the majority of palaeontologists now accept the idea.
| Alternative ideas get disproportionate attention in popular
| articles.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > 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.
| nicce wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| wang_li wrote:
| 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.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Much like gravity, it is only a theory.
| codeduck wrote:
| The geological record of the K-T boundary is very hard to
| argue with
| codeduck wrote:
| I remember the first time Brontosaurus was Brontosaurus.
| aimor wrote:
| 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
| carlosjobim wrote:
| 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.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _"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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| cco wrote:
| The book justifies it because they used frog DNA and some frog
| visual systems do require movement
| LeftHandPath wrote:
| 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.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| 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.
| n3storm wrote:
| Thank you. Nobody read the book? The problem with dinosaurs
| is the problem with Hollywood in general: lack of original
| ideas and good storytelling.
| mpalmer wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > 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.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > 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?
| mpalmer wrote:
| 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.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| 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.
| Detrytus wrote:
| 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...
| vkou wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The Hobbit was more of a Disney theme park ride than a
| story.
| xoxxala wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| If you want a good version of The Hobbit, you can just
| watch the Rankin-Bass version. It has good songs too.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
| sparsely wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| atq2119 wrote:
| > 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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. :)
| olddustytrail wrote:
| 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 Gloin, 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| Gloin 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.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| 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 Gloin actually appears in the previous chapter Many
| Meetings, where he is sat next to Frodo at the feast and
| introduces himself there.
| echelon wrote:
| > 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.
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| > 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.
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| > 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.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| 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.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| 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.
| eszed wrote:
| > [ _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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| mpalmer wrote:
| Different points of comparison though. I'm not trying to
| hold up Andor against its betters, but its contemporaries.
| watwut wrote:
| > 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.
| anonymars wrote:
| > 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.
| dmonitor wrote:
| 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.
| arbitrary_name wrote:
| Andor succeeded BECAUSE of the bureaucracy porn.
| quacked wrote:
| 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.
| piltdownman wrote:
| 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 brothel,
| 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.
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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.
| jfengel wrote:
| 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.
| Loughla wrote:
| 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_
| jmb99 wrote:
| 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.
| iamsaitam wrote:
| 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.
| rkomorn wrote:
| 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.
| auntienomen wrote:
| 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.
| aredox wrote:
| >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...
| triceratops wrote:
| > 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.
| tuna74 wrote:
| Don't blame GoT for Martin's lack of output. The books
| are his responsibility.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| 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
| mavhc wrote:
| Still the best ending that's ever going to be written
| IAmBroom wrote:
| I see what you did there.
| crooked-v wrote:
| 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.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| That is one of the things that really bugged me about the most
| recent sequel.
|
| Minor inconsequential spoilers
|
| ..
|
| ..
|
| The research facility has geothermal heating which stretches
| for miles and an enormous underground tunnel system. How did
| they build all this?
| defrost wrote:
| 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_.
| christophilus wrote:
| He got so many details right, and yet still created that UNIX
| meme. That's amazing.
| yeahboats wrote:
| 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.
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| 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.
| cco wrote:
| > 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.
| jerf wrote:
| 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.
| crooked-v wrote:
| 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.
| jerf wrote:
| 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
| chasd00 wrote:
| 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.
| throw7 wrote:
| "It's a Unix system. I know this." They don't make lines like
| this today I tell ya.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| "I'll make a GUI in Visual Basic!"
| csours wrote:
| 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.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| 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.
| csours wrote:
| I'll have to rewatch that one, thanks
| muixoozie wrote:
| Just to throw one on the pile, Inception's lesson in shared
| dreaming scene is good.
| OJFord wrote:
| 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.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| This is the very problem Hollywood is facing now: a lack of
| imagination.
| deadbabe wrote:
| How about a World War 2 flick where Nazis breed dinosaurs to
| fight in the war?
| OJFord wrote:
| 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.
| xoxxala wrote:
| The sequel to Iron Sky has a tyrannosaurus-riding Hitler.
| Trailer has a clip from that scene.
|
| https://youtu.be/NuI-KU70pvM
| ryandrake wrote:
| We just had an animated movie about animals[1] with zero dialog
| win an Oscar.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film)
| OJFord wrote:
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| The other alternative is for time travellers to be marooned in
| the past. (A la Homer Simpson who wishes he didn't kill that
| fish.)
| zhynn wrote:
| 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!
| jtrn wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Hollywood hasn't told an original story in decades. It's all
| sequels and remakes.
| pomian wrote:
| All the good story tellers went to work at computer game
| companies.
| bruce511 wrote:
| 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."
| poulpy123 wrote:
| Ian Malcom was a cool nerd which was uncommon (and maybe still
| is)
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Also, he really wanted to bone the female paleontologist.
|
| I mean, that WAS a motivation.
| hank808 wrote:
| "Why are there no good dinosaur films?
|
| Dinosaurs don't dialog
| euparkeria wrote:
| 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?
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| Sharlin wrote:
| (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.)
| tmtvl wrote:
| Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds is technically a dinosaur
| film.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Thread winner.
|
| Let's go home.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| 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.
| 47282847 wrote:
| I'd argue Zombies and Vampires are an archetypical trope of
| the human Shadow. The narcissist, the undead that consumes
| other humans.
| krapp wrote:
| 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.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| 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.
| krapp wrote:
| 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.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| 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.
| interloxia wrote:
| The series Terra Nova (2011) tried the back in time approach.
| windward wrote:
| 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.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| 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. =)
| shusaku wrote:
| 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.
| imgabe wrote:
| 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.
| dluan wrote:
| Beyond asking why is there no good Dinotopia movie, where the
| hell is the Redwall tv show?
| alganet wrote:
| Why is Hacker News talking about dinosaur films?
| GMoromisato wrote:
| 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.
| bartread wrote:
| > 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.
| prawn wrote:
| 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.
| Avicebron wrote:
| 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.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| 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.]
| LexGray wrote:
| 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.
| montagg wrote:
| 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.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| 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.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| 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.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| I like that!
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| 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)
| GMoromisato wrote:
| 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.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| 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.
| tuna74 wrote:
| It is even possible that she modified Neo/Neo's implants
| in order to have this ability.
| lupusreal wrote:
| 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.)
| maxsilver wrote:
| > 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.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| 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"
| DennisP wrote:
| 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.
| MisterTea wrote:
| 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.
| regularfry wrote:
| 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.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| 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.
| bobbles wrote:
| 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
| jzebedee wrote:
| A similar feat to The Phantom Edit:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Edit
| anton-c wrote:
| 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.
| XorNot wrote:
| 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).
| lelanthran wrote:
| They could have done a prequel: where did the Oracle come
| from, the existing crew of morpheus, trinity, etc.
| hdjdjdbdgsud wrote:
| There is the Animatrix.... Specifically it has a history
| reel like that.
| MDGeist wrote:
| I did not entirely hate the sequels, but I feel like the
| Animatrix was better and kind of flies under the radar.
| slg wrote:
| >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.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| 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.
| slg wrote:
| 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.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| 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..
| slg wrote:
| 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.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > 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).
| aredox wrote:
| 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...
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| 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.
| devilbunny wrote:
| 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.
| triceratops wrote:
| Why can't you buy the idea from whatever forum poster?
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| 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_Zim
| mer_Bra...
|
| [2] https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc
| /articl...
| aredox wrote:
| 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.
| staticman2 wrote:
| 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.
| tuna74 wrote:
| "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.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > As the originators of the Matrix franchise, the
| Wachowskis certainly fit that description.
|
| Evidence points otherwise. The Wachowki Brothers made an
| excellent first movie, and then clearly lost all their
| creative ability.
| tuna74 wrote:
| I would claim that Matrix 2&3, Speed Racer and Cloud
| Atlas are incredible movies. What are your opinion on
| those movies?
| dfxm12 wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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".
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| 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.
| speed_spread wrote:
| I would have Christopher Nolan paint the world as seen from
| Agent Smith point of view.
| munksbeer wrote:
| > It would be like doing a sequel to "The Sixth Sense"--tag
| line: "He's Still Dead"
|
| What's this?
| GMoromisato wrote:
| If you have not seen The Sixth Sense yet, I envy you! Try
| to do so before you get any spoilers.
| Klonoar wrote:
| The Animatrix is the only other bit of Matrix-related media I
| consider to be real.
| nurettin wrote:
| My reaction when I watched it 20+ years ago: Hallucinogens
| were definitely involved.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Hallucinogens were definitely involved.
|
| If these result in better movies: why not?
| nurettin wrote:
| I didn't say "not". But I do have addiction in family and
| I wouldn't wish this on other families.
| Levitz wrote:
| Hallucinogens have a reputation for many things,
| addiction is not one of them.
| nurettin wrote:
| Sure, but tell that to the addicted people.
| bmacho wrote:
| 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.)
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > 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.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| See here I am anti-authoritarian thinking that the
| government should hand out psychedelics to people making
| art.
| globular-toast wrote:
| 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.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| >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...
| nso wrote:
| Maybe we will see them and the last three seasons of Lost
| before we die
| mindslight wrote:
| 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_.
| RajT88 wrote:
| My God The Matrix is The Internet.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| 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.
| euroderf wrote:
| I'll second this recommendation. And without spoilers. It's
| a very good film.
| leeman2016 wrote:
| I just recently watched it. Although the visuals may not
| match The Matrix, it was written very well. Found it
| pleasant.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Agree. I prefer _Dark City_ in fact. I watch it as an
| allegory though.
| Yizahi wrote:
| 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.
| ta1243 wrote:
| The reference is to an XKCD comic from 2009 -- 16 years ago.
|
| Ouch.
|
| https://xkcd.com/566/
| liotier wrote:
| > 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 !
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Once you embrace the Matrix trilogy as a trans allegory with
| blockbuster set pieces, it makes a lot more sense.
|
| "There are no sequels to The Matrix" then becomes trans
| erasure, which is... unfortunate.
| CobaltFire wrote:
| 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...
| sdenton4 wrote:
| 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."'
| zo1 wrote:
| Childhood core memory ruined. Joy.
| CobaltFire wrote:
| 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.
| fwip wrote:
| 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.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| In both cases the artists were, as one would say, working
| through some stuff...
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Turns out "You can't go home again" is a powerful
| storytelling frame
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| 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.
| bigyabai wrote:
| It's ironic that Americans get so upset when their peers
| find happiness or success in a way that has nothing to do
| with them. Your recent comment history rebukes the
| Wachowskis like you're a kid who just found out that his
| favorite action movie star is gay.
|
| There has to be some creative merit to _The Matrix_ if it
| 's living rent-free like this in your head 30 years later.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| 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?
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| 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.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| 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.
| arp242 wrote:
| 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!"
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| LexGray wrote:
| 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.
| regularfry wrote:
| Not only was there better lore in the comics world, there
| was better lore in the first version of the script.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| 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.
| nilamo wrote:
| I enjoy watching the Oracle's multi-century-long plan of
| manipulating both humans and the architect. Her mastery of
| psychology is absolutely beautiful.
| kuschkufan wrote:
| Agent Smith has both of them beat.
| mosquitobiten wrote:
| 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.
| wishfish wrote:
| 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.
| ggambetta wrote:
| Likewise, the highway chase in the first non-existent sequel
| is pretty epic.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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".
| doubleg72 wrote:
| I didn't think lotr used cgi
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| 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.
| andrepd wrote:
| It does, absolutely everywhere? Down to fully CGI
| characters like Gollum.
| ekaryotic wrote:
| 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.
| darick wrote:
| That was on the set of The Hobbit, not LOTR, which used
| far less CGI
| trq01758 wrote:
| 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.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| 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...
| thorin wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Gollum? The Balrog?
|
| Pre-CGI it looked like this: https://www.galaxus.de/im/Fi
| les/1/8/4/9/5/2/0/9/gollum_serki...
| iainmerrick wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| 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.
| saalweachter wrote:
| 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.
| tuna74 wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| The moment when he picks them up off the mid-explosion
| truck gives me chills every time. The build-up is so good.
| wmeredith wrote:
| Except diesel doesn't explode like that. (I don't know
| what's wrong with me that I can't just enjoy movies.)
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| 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.
| saalweachter wrote:
| 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.
| saalweachter wrote:
| 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.
| Ntrails wrote:
| 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
| Ralfp wrote:
| 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 :|
| pferde wrote:
| 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.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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.
| chippiewill wrote:
| > 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.
| triceratops wrote:
| > I'm sure the franchise will get a "hard" reboot at some
| point.
|
| As the Matrix itself did, according to the Architect.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| 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.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _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
| mnky9800n wrote:
| 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.
| animal531 wrote:
| 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.
| knicholes wrote:
| It's always sunny above the clouds.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Unless it's night.
| knicholes wrote:
| Or an eclipse, but night and eclipses move on as
| expected.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| A hint at subverting the Cyberpunk genre with Solarpunk. Too
| bad there hasn't been any genre defining Solarpunk movie yet.
| lupusreal wrote:
| The most genre defining solarpunk media we have right now
| comes from pharma television commercials pitching
| antidepressants. Which I think is quite cyberpunk.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| So not the yoghurt commercial then?
|
| https://youtu.be/z-Ng5ZvrDm4?si=FfRDccxr6aOqumQ9
|
| Which commercial are you thinking about?
| lupusreal wrote:
| Tbh they all blend together into a homogenous mass of
| cynical corporate messaging to me. Feel-good visuals for
| you to associate with product.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _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.
| MattGrommes wrote:
| 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.
| troupo wrote:
| > 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
| HexPhantom wrote:
| 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
| billfruit wrote:
| 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.
| tuco86 wrote:
| 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.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| 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.)
| bambax wrote:
| 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.
| andrewingram wrote:
| 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.
| cm2012 wrote:
| 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.
| api wrote:
| 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.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| So then in this version, when someone escapes the Matrix,
| they're really just having their consciousness switched to a
| different simulated world?
| api wrote:
| 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.
| biofox wrote:
| 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.
| pavlov wrote:
| As a big fan of "The Motion Picture", I would argue that
| "2001 with Spock" is a local optimum for a movie too.
| biofox wrote:
| 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.
| throw0101d wrote:
| Don't forget _Galaxy Quest_.
| gdbsjjdn wrote:
| 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.
| gota wrote:
| 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)
| gdbsjjdn wrote:
| 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.
| haiku2077 wrote:
| 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.
| Kathula wrote:
| 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.
| jghn wrote:
| I really wish this series had kept on going. I felt it had
| promise
| haiku2077 wrote:
| 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
| dml2135 wrote:
| 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.
| Izkata wrote:
| > 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.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>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.
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| mlsu wrote:
| 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.
| scop wrote:
| Had never heard this take. What a great write up. Thank you!
| lc9er wrote:
| 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.
| computershit wrote:
| > 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.
| mbonnet wrote:
| Great analysis.
| Hilift wrote:
| > 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.
| YinglingHeavy wrote:
| 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.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| > "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.
| card_zero wrote:
| 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.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| Found a source of others are interested:
| https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/fixational-eye-
| movement...
| card_zero wrote:
| You shame me into making the effort to quote from the book.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Dueling_Neuro
| s...
|
| > 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.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| 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.
| ragazzina wrote:
| This is a plot point in the excellent Peter Watt's novel
| Blindsight.
| losvedir wrote:
| 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.
| jjmarr wrote:
| 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
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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.
| happymellon wrote:
| The Seinfeld trope is overstated.
|
| There are plently of things to completely dislike about
| Seinfeld other than "other American comedies copied it".
| cco wrote:
| 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).
| happymellon wrote:
| > 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.
| cco wrote:
| 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.
| officehero wrote:
| 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.
| cco wrote:
| 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?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| "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?
| 542354234235 wrote:
| 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.
| montagg wrote:
| 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.
| arp242 wrote:
| 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.
| spencerflem wrote:
| My feelings exactly
| throaway955 wrote:
| 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.
| felipeerias wrote:
| 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.
| spencerflem wrote:
| 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.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| 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.
| happymellon wrote:
| 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.
| astura wrote:
| 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.
| whalesalad wrote:
| 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.
| worik wrote:
| Maybe not in films, but on TV is:
| https://thedoctorwhosite.co.uk/doctorwho/dinosaurs-on-a-spac...
| An unmanned spaceship hurtles towards certain destruction -
| unless the Doctor can save it, and its impossible cargo ... of
| dinosaurs!
| ggm wrote:
| 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.
| davidw wrote:
| 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.
| ggm wrote:
| It's probably passed through disappointing back to funny
| again.
| int0x29 wrote:
| I remain convinced that Jurassic World is just a Mercedes ad.
| surfingdino wrote:
| 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.
| verisimi wrote:
| > 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.
| mellosouls wrote:
| 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.
| topkai22 wrote:
| 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.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| "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.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| 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.
| closetkantian wrote:
| 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.
| strogonoff wrote:
| 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.
| hoseja wrote:
| Well there are no therapsid movies at all.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Aren't most movies therapsid movies?
| padjo wrote:
| 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.
| ivankelly wrote:
| > 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.
| HexPhantom wrote:
| 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."
| HexPhantom wrote:
| 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.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| 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.
| raywatcher wrote:
| Finally real journalism is back
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| 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.
| vegabook wrote:
| Primal, although it is a series and not a film, offers a
| counterpoint to most of these critiques.
| bambax wrote:
| > _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".
| ajaimk wrote:
| 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
| adityaathalye wrote:
| 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.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| 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.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| 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.
| LgWoodenBadger wrote:
| I loved Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend as a kid
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088760/
|
| I haven't seen it since though
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Jurassic Park and Jurassic World are overall very solid as a
| whole, so the entire premise of this article is null.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Inventing a mega-dinosaur hybrid to achieve power-inflation of
| the baddies isn't "a good dinosaur film".
| Jackim wrote:
| The article speaks extensively about both of those movies.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Don Bluth made "The land before time" and that's an excellent
| dinosaur film.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| 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.
| ep103 wrote:
| 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.
| qingcharles wrote:
| 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)
| ep103 wrote:
| 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.
| mapt wrote:
| 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.
| qingcharles wrote:
| 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?
| MillironX wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Thank god for indie films.
| gorfian_robot wrote:
| this guy clearly has not seen "VelociPastor"
| troyvit wrote:
| 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.
| margarina72 wrote:
| well there is Denver the last dinosaur...
| Triphibian wrote:
| An animated adaptation of Steve Bissette's Tyrant comic could
| solve this.
| bovermyer wrote:
| I swear I must be the only person on the planet that enjoyed all
| six of the Jurassic Park/World films.
| bobvylan wrote:
| There is one: "The Flintstones", with insufferable Rosie
| O'Donnell. She's so jurassic!
| fungiblecog wrote:
| Why are there no good films is a better question. And we know the
| answer. Hollywood no longer employs based on talent.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-07-08 23:01 UTC)