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.

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.

  "But consider what could have been. There is a scene very early in the film where Neill and Dern, who have studied dinosaurs all of their lives, see living ones for the first time. The creatures they see are tall, majestic leaf-eaters, grazing placidly in the treetops. There is a sense of grandeur to them. And that is the sense lacking in the rest of the film, which quickly turns into a standard monster movie, with screaming victims fleeing from roaring dinosaurs."

*I'm sure I got the species slightly wrong, the long-necked extra-big ones

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.

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."

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.

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.

If you recall, the opening scene has a dinosaur being transferred from a container to a pen. If you haven't seen it for a while, you might remember seeing the attack. I know I did.

But go back and watch it, you might be surprised.

===

Also, I challenge you to find a better technical exposition scene than Mr. DNA. Seriously, if you can think of a better technical exposition scene, I'd love to know it.

The 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.

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.

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.

While movies are art, they are primarily an entertainment product, especially when they cost $65-200M to make. Jurassic World is selling really well, so they aren’t going to change the product to produce “better” art.

It is interesting that Jurassic Park are the only (non animated) dinosaur movies to get much traction while JW is taking in so much money. But it’s got to be tough to come up with a dinosaur movie concept that doesn’t sound like a JP knockoff and doesn’t confuse viewers.

Maybe Marvel will make a Savage Lands movie. But I don’t think this what the author wants.

This is from the book. They filled in missing DNA with frog DNA and the park's dinosaurs were insensitive to movement as a result. This is only hinted at in the movie during the animated Mr DNA sequence.

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.

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.

I like how we go right straight to a guy who can tell us the precise feet per second that an adult T-Rex can run, but then just omit that information.

They are so so SO good, they have so much care about the science while also being delightfully whimsical and the art is beautiful. Please check them out!

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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHPjVgYDL6Y

I also enjoyed this comparison:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CofZ7xjGyI8

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.

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.

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.

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.

    An unmanned spaceship hurtles towards certain destruction – unless the Doctor can save it, and its impossible cargo … of dinosaurs!

I haven't seen it since though

Dinosaurs don't dialog

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.

Should be:

> As a kid, dinosaurs are just monsters. As an adult, they are still just monsters.

Or even:

> Dinosaurs are just monsters.

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".