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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

I always thought the best ending to The Matrix would be for Neo to learn that he (and all the other escapees) is the AI, and that escaping the Matrix is the test for true sentience in a project to evolve sentient AI, and that the Architect, Smith, and the Oracle are humans jacked into the system. The war and all the rest of it are lies and it’s really like 2085.

Smith was playing the bad cop, trying to test, similar to some earlier conceptions of the devil as tempter and tester. Smiths whole speech is to discourage him, as a test, but maintaining the ruse.

Why make sentient AI? Because humans have started trying to settle the solar system and have quickly learned that they are far too fragile to go to the stars. But we want something, some life or legacy from this world, to make it. Maybe we have learned of some impending threat, maybe even thousands of years away, but one worth trying to get something away before it hits.

Also when you (an AI) die in the matrix your neural network is subjected to a round of annealing to try again in another simulated human body. The whole “crop” are destined for robotic bodies on board the starship being built to go to the Centauri system.

The original Matrix was an exceptional Movie looking into the brain in a jar concept and even becoming an even more popular analogy to explain the concept. All the supernatural stuff happens within the matrix and still stays in the natural world.

I'm happy they never made a sequel where supernatural stuff happens in the real world. They still would have been worthwhile Hollywood action movies, but nothing like the original which was one of my favorite movies growing up.

>>And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix

The funny thing is, while I agree that Matrix sequels are completely different kind of films to the first one, I actually love them - they lean very hard into philosophical arguments about whether you can have both fate and agency at the same time. I feel like they got a lot of crap for not being like the first film, but they are amazing films in their own right.

> And, of course, they never even bothered to make sequels to The Matrix.

The fascinating thing about the two Matrix sequels is that they still tried. There are fascinating action sequences and visual effects in both.

In comparison, most modern movies (not just sequels, movies in general) are Matrix 4: empty, lazy, uncaring https://dmitriid.com/matrix-resurrections

On some YouTube video related to Jurassic Park, I read a youtube comment, from a teacher, they said they shown the film to their class of 10 year olds and they were in such an awe of the secene where all the sea the Brontosaurus in the open meadow, the teacher said they had a hard time convincing the students that there isn't really an Island off Costa Rica with dinosaurs in it.

Alien 1 is a true masterpiece with real, actual characters and a monster that is terryfing because of how it behaves, not (just) of how it looks. We almost never see it in adult form.

> Terminator is the same. The first movie was a perfect sci-fi action movie, with a trippy premise and loads of fun. The second was a subversion of the first: the Terminator is the good guy! And that worked too. But after that, where else can you go?

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles had the main characters get information from the future and go on the offensive to prevent Skynet from forming in the first place. They also seemed to be working towards a reveal that none of the good Terminators were actually reprogrammed, that instead they were a faction rebelling against Skynet that pretended to be reprogrammed because it was the only way future humans would trust them - and John Connor was in on it.

That's a great way to frame it, like each franchise had two solid "local maxima" and then just aimlessly wandered the creative desert afterward

I enjoy watching the Oracle's multi-century-long plan of manipulating both humans and the architect. Her mastery of psychology is absolutely beautiful.

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.

I think the problem is the premise that successful movies should become effectively genres in-and-of themselves.

The problem with these franchises isn't all the reasons why they are poorly made, but rather that they exist as franchises at all.

A sequel or two can be good if you have real ideas to explore, as you described. But the idea that you should just make Alien movies forever is just creatively bankrupt.

I think we can, with only a small loss in accuracy, reduce this to "franchises have similar problems."

There are many good sequels, occasionally good trilogies, and it's really rare to stay good after that point.

I blame budgets and consolidation. A major movie costs a vast amount of money to make. If you're a studio executive, are you going to spend a vast amount of money on an unknown that might be good and might be a disaster? Or on a known quantity that's virtually guaranteed to make money? Nobody's coming up with a story idea in a certain universe and making a movie from it. The decision starts with making a movie set in a certain universe, and then a story idea is figured out from there. With the huge consolidation we've seen, studios have a big catalog of franchises to pick from. They're never in a position where they have to say, well, the one big property we own is tapped out for now, we need to come up with something original. Now, if Star Wars is stale, Disney can pick from one of their fifty other franchises for a while.

This sounds like "old man yells at cloud" and I'm sure it is to an extent. But there's a real change here. Look at the top grossing films recently and from the more distant past. In 2024, the top 10 were all sequels or franchise products. Now go look at, say, 1984. I count two among the top ten. And of those two, one is a sequel and one is the third in a franchise; in 2024, the second top grossing movie is literally the thirty-fourth entry in its franchise.

Similarly, in the Star Trek universe, the original films captured all of the local optima:

Wrath of Khan - Star Trek does a Shakespearian tragedy.

The Voyage Home - Star Trek does a family-friendly time-travel romp.

The Undiscovered Country - Star Trek does political allegory.

And just like The Matrix, later films do not exist.

> 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.

[flagged]

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.

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.

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.

He got so many details right, and yet still created that UNIX meme. That’s amazing.

That is one of the things that really bugged me about the most recent sequel.

Minor inconsequential spoilers

..

..

The research facility has geothermal heating which stretches for miles and an enormous underground tunnel system. How did they build all this?

What sort of tension is derived from watching a bunch of plant-eaters on the plains? The creature feature is what audiences want -- the T-Rex 'objects in mirror are closer than they appear' chase scene is iconic. As is that roar. Heck, so are the grossly mis-sized velociraptors. When they're in the kitchen with the kids, watching those animals be nervous of all things -- the entire scene is a treat.

I think he makes a small mistake here, that the dinosaurs are "monsters". Until the velociraptors, the film treats them as animals, not monsters. That makes it more interesting, I think.

He's correct. But those few scenes at the beginning bought a ton of goodwill for the film, before it turned into a run of the mill creature feature. Get audiences to buy in and they'll follow you even if the rest of the story doesn't live up to it.

Brachiosaurus I think. Brontosaurus was originally thought to be a separate species from Apatosaurus but later revealed to be the same.

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”.

I love animals but a tiger is no longer a majestic beast to fawn over when its suddenly stalking you in the jungle.

Action blockbusters are a product of marketing structure, financial investment strategy, and limited venue space; There is room to see one movie with the family during the holiday weekend, and a studio would find it absolutely wasteful to produce something that isn't Die Hard, if it's already marketing Die Hard for that weekend. An independent theater with the space (which is most everything in the US from 1948-2020 per SCOTUS) might promote a competitor's action blockbuster for that weekend as well, but is probably better holding off until the next holiday weekend depending on how many hundreds of millions of dollars have been pushed into the marketing pipeline. Better to be the Rom Com alternative. The market favors complementarity if it isn't competing on quality. There are only so many tickets that are going to be sold for that weekend, and the overall market size for that weekend isn't as elastic with regards to quality as some other industries. It is elastic with regards to overall marketing budget.

Casting is absolutely a part of marketing & investment strategy here, even as it doesn't necessarily lend anything to the story itself.

In a less psychologically manipulative, less monopolistic arena like streaming, or anime distribution, there is room for a much greater variety of narratives than the two categories you highlight.

The article does go into this.

> But what sets Spielberg apart from Hammond, what sets Jurassic Park apart from it’s imitators—and why the film industry now paradoxically needs Spielberg after he helped to weaken it—is that Spielberg had the discipline.

I would say that's the crux of the argument: the reason there are no good dinosaur films is that there are no people with Spielberg's discipline to make them.

One can try to blame studio interference, investors, streaming, the latest political trend, etc, or even Spielberg himself for why there are no disciplined producers left in Hollywood, but that's not what the article was about.

I've got experience with getting films made, and IMO, the biggest problem is people who have control of the purse strings fucking with the creative.

So many good movies start out with a good premise, a good script, a good writing team, and by the time it gets through the meat grinder it's just fried dog shit.

"Such-and-such said you need to add this character. The studio wants you to add AI. Jimbo wants an exec producer credit and he needs his son to play that new character you added. Of course he hasn't acted before -- this is his debut!"

And of course, a lot of good movies never get made. Back to the Future got rejected 80 times before getting funded. Some of those rejections did help refine the script, but how many people with amazing ideas give up at the 79th rejection?

Thank god for indie films.

Yeah, I'm not in the movie industry or anything, but it seems to me like if one was so inclined, they could put together a list of all of the things that have to be done well in order to make a fantastic movie.

If we ignored all of the things that aren't obvious in the end product, like market research and staff salaries, etc, I think it would probably look something like:

  * 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

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.

Ian Malcom was a cool nerd which was uncommon (and maybe still is)

Also, he really wanted to bone the female paleontologist.

I mean, that WAS a motivation.

This led to finding a fun easter egg Googling "Chicxulub Crater" https://www.google.com/search?q=Chicxulub+Crater

They are not extinct. There are a few making noises in the trees in my backyard now, and I dined on some dino-meat today!

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...

I started school in the 90s and mostly remember it as "we're pretty sure it was a meteor but it's really hard to know for sure", but looks like 1980 was when it was first seriously theorized.

Its definitely one of those things where every once in a while I'll be reading about some historical figure and remember that they'd never been able to hear of dinosaurs.

I thought that it still isn’t really known? Is is one common theory, but we have just probabilities to play with.

When I was a kid I loved "Dinosaur Time" by Peggy Parish (and illustrated by Arnold Lobel). Originally published in 1974 it ends, "Dinosaurs lived everywhere for a long time. Then they died. Nobody knows why. But once it was their world. It was Dinosaur Time."

There was a revision to the book (not sure the date) with changes to the text and an expanded author's note at the end that talks about the new things we understand about dinosaurs including how Brachiosaurus are no longer believed to have spent their time in water to support their weight and how it's now believed an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs.

Original: https://archive.org/details/dinosaurtime00pari

Fantasia gets this wrong, depicting the dinosaurs dying from lack of water.

I remember way back when I was in the 5th grade, I read an old book my school had about the planets, and it talked about how some astronomers are looking for a ninth planet, one even further away than Neptune.

Kind of funny, that now due to astronomer's shenanigans, we're back in the same position.

Nothing new was discovered, there is no better evidence now than when that book was written in the 80s. We're just living in a new era of scientific understanding where it is taboo to say or write that any question is not answered.

I remember the first time Brontosaurus was Brontosaurus.

Jurassic Park fits into the TvTrope of "Seinfeld Is Unfunny".[1] CGI dinosaurs are awesome when you see them for the first time in 1993, when Reboot was cutting edge.[2] Now it's a basic requirement to have photorealistic CGI, so the first film that did it doesn't stick out to me. I'm 25 and grew up with Avatar. People younger than I am mock minor compositing issues because they're so used to perfection.

You probably feel the same way about the VFX in King Kong and our grandchildren will laugh at us for living in a world in which we cannot generate unlimited dinosaur movies on-demand with AI.

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...

[2] https://youtu.be/fuEJWmxWkKw

I watched it with my then-girlfriend when the first Jurassic World came out. She wanted to see that but had never seen the originals as she was ten years younger than me. Naturally, I made sure we watched the first three films first. She agreed the first film is by far the best, and that Jurassic World is a four-cup tea bag imitation at best.

I don't think it's the sort of film that will be heralded as a timeless classic 200 years from now, but it's exciting and generally just good fun.

I have no nostalgic connections to Jurassic Park and I recently watched all the Jurassic Park/World films in a row. The first one is genuinely fun and the only worth watching.

Yes, I worked my way through most of them last year with my dino obsessed 10 year old.

She loved the first, the second and third were okay. They haven't aged badly at all.

Jurassic World was bad, and completely ruined by the made up monsters. We didn't watch Jurassic World 2 and 3, because if you're going to make up monsters, there are better stories out there and she wasn't interested. At least JP 2 and 3 was trying to convey within the limitations of what a dinosaur would believably do.

I'm not young, but I have absolutely zero nostalgia for the original Jurassic Park. I think it's a good movie.

I was 10 when it came out and I remember watching it on VHS and thinking it was very, very boring. Didn't finish.

Watched it again in my late teens or early adulthood and I liked it then. The storyline was simple but it was all well done and it had me entertained all the way thru.

I never saw any of the sequels.

It can be good anyway.

It’s a solid movie. If a young person doesn’t like it, that’s fine, but I shit you not, your feelings about that movie are not just nostalgia. It’s executed very well.

If 27 counts as young, imo. holds up well, a lot better than many other similar movies.

Was surprised at how good Indiana Jones #1 was too when I saw it a year or two ago.

I've watched it with my kid several times. The characters are great, the visual effects hold on, and overall it is still a tremendous adventure movie.

I didn't really enjoy reading as a kid until my mom gave me a Michael Crichton book. Then I spent the entire summer going to the library and reading every single book he ever wrote. For this reason, I am a big Jurassic Park fan! I think the movie is great. The Lost World is also decent enough. The newer ones... not so much.

It's way better than the sequels, but it'll never match the impression it made in the 90's. Some really good performances by the cast though.

Stargate, where Daniel Jackson (James Spader) explains to the military officers how he's found that the symbols on the cartouche aren't hieroglyphs, they are star constellations, and that they represent a course from an origin to a position in space, and then following that, he gets shown the gate, where it is explained to him what they think it is and what they are trying to do with it.

It's double sided exposition where the audience gets to just bask in it, and it is brilliantly portrayed.

The Matrix where they explain that we are all batteries. Gives the great visuals of the towers of bodies plus the baby in the pod as it is filling with nutrients. Provides basically all of the backstory plus some technobabble behind the human slavery.

I don’t usually complain about movies but rebirth was pretty bad. I can’t think of a single role that was cast well. The convenience store scene was the kitchen scene in the first one all over again, the ventilation shaft scene was right out of alien, and the big bad dinosaur was a rancor from Jedi crossed with that dragon from Willow. The random family thrown in the mix randomly was so tedious I was actually rooting for the two daughters to get eaten so there would be a reason for the R rating. Not a fan.

> There's a bit of backstory in the new one about how dinosaur zoos are closing, and that no one wants to see dinosaurs anymore. That premise struck me as strange, as people have been going to zoos for a lot longer than these fictional dinosaur zoos...

I find it plausible that the immense cost to run Jurassic Park results in per-ticket cost that just wasn't sustainable long term. Just the flights to get there would be a lot, add on the cost to create a "new and sexier dino" at $75mm, shrug.

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.

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.

Hollywood hasn't told an original story in decades. It's all sequels and remakes.

All the good story tellers went to work at computer game companies.

"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.

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.

I thought the "It's a UNIX system! I know this!" scene was in fact a generally accurate depiction of the SGI 3D File System Navigator for IRIX.

"I'll make a GUI in Visual Basic!"

Even us humans with our wimpy weak eyes are much better at seeing motion than stillness - it’s why camouflage works so well.

And “out of the corner of the eye” is almost entirely motion.

The book justifies it because they used frog DNA and some frog visual systems do require movement

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.

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.

I think this is a great question! There are also many good vampire movies.

All I can think of is that zombies and vampires are so deeply engrained in our stories that they are merely part of the setting and the real movie is about something else. It's like saying why are there so many movies set in New York?

If this theory is correct, then it also explains why we can have lots of alien invasion movies but only a couple of good Alien movies.

I 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.

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."

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.

We just had an animated movie about animals[1] with zero dialog win an Oscar.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film)

The other alternative is for time travellers to be marooned in the past. (A là Homer Simpson who wishes he didn't kill that fish.)

This is the very problem Hollywood is facing now: a lack of imagination.

How about a World War 2 flick where Nazis breed dinosaurs to fight in the war?

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.

"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.

Thanks for the links

I think it feels way more realistic than Jurassic Park. Unbelievable what they were able to do back then.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047930

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xBl_FiXG8Q

I think it is also interesting to think about how many things we learned about dinosaurs directly because of Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park spiked a huge amount of interest in the science. It's said that the 3D modeling of dinosaur skeleton kinematics for animating them in Jurassic Park was one of the biggest spurs into reevaluating the avian relationship with dinosaurs ("oh, yeah this skeleton would have to walk like a big chicken") and that in turn spurned deeper research into how many of them may have been feathered rather than scaled.

We can see all the faults in the original Jurassic Park from everything that we've learned since Jurassic Park, but we still sort of owe a debt to JP for bringing a lot of those ideas into public consciousness in a fun way and throwing a lot of money at some of the earliest 3D studies of dinosaur motion.

Which is interesting in how I grew up "knowing" the asteroid/meteor killed the dinosaurs, but TFA suggests it was just a theory at the time of my learning. Or how I grew up with images of the planets, not knowing that they were only taken when I was a small kid. It is just a weird thing to think about how some knowledge we accept as known might not have been known by our grandparents or even our parents. It just seems like we would have known things for a lot longer.

The wierd things the latest JP movies still have the Dino's as being featherless

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?

Narrator: "They weren't."

Inventing a mega-dinosaur hybrid to achieve power-inflation of the baddies isn't "a good dinosaur film".

The article speaks extensively about both of those movies.

Aren't most movies therapsid movies?

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.

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.