Jurassic Park Franchise (1993-?)

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Michael Kerpan
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Re: Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

#51 Post by Michael Kerpan » Thu May 29, 2014 11:14 am

> I can't see how anyone can't enjoy Jurassic Park unless you find escapist
> entertainment repellent,

I can find some escapist entertainment enjoyable -- but I never cared for Jurassic Park. So shoot me. ;-}

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Re: Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

#52 Post by Movie-Brat » Thu May 29, 2014 2:02 pm

domino harvey wrote:So the forthcoming Jurassic World actually sounds like it might be promising. From the director
Culture’s numbness to technology and all it’s amazing advances was the second element they wanted to explore. “Those two ideas felt like they could work together,” he added. "What if, despite previous disasters, they built a new biological preserve where you could see dinosaurs walk the earth…and what if people were already kind of over it? We imagined a teenager texting his girlfriend with his back to a T-Rex behind protective glass."
I buy this, hard. And it makes sense when you think about it, aside from being like a meta commentary, of course people will be bored. It's nothing new after 22 years.

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Re: Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

#53 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Thu May 29, 2014 7:23 pm

Those are the best kinds of sequels, when it's done right anyway.

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domino harvey
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Re: Jurassic Parks

#54 Post by domino harvey » Sun Nov 23, 2014 2:39 pm

Teaser for Jurassic World, full trailer premiering during football on Thanksgiving

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Re: Jurassic Parks

#55 Post by pzadvance » Tue Nov 25, 2014 1:32 pm

Full Jurassic World trailer looks pretttty silly

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Re: Jurassic Parks

#56 Post by domino harvey » Tue Nov 25, 2014 4:08 pm

In addition to the earlier mentioned chameleon dino, it looks like the filmmakers have finally lifted even more of the untapped good ideas from Crichton's novel the Lost World (which again bears almost no relation to the movie that got made with the same title), including the motorcycle chase and the gyro-thingy

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Re: Jurassic Parks

#57 Post by Arrow » Tue Nov 25, 2014 5:20 pm

Though for a film about a dinosaur that's presumably more scary than a real dinosaur it sure has a tensionless trailer.

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Re: Jurassic Parks

#58 Post by domino harvey » Tue Nov 25, 2014 5:35 pm

I concede it was not thrilling in the slightest, but everything I've read about the filmmakers indicates that they know what they're doing, so I hope it's just the typical trailer faults and not the film. Even if it sucks I'm still glad we're getting a summer tentpole led by Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt, who will at least be an entertaining pair while not outrunning CGI

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Re: Jurassic Parks

#59 Post by mfunk9786 » Tue Nov 25, 2014 6:07 pm

And one that's not about fucking superheroes

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Re: Jurassic Parks

#60 Post by malpractice » Tue Nov 25, 2014 7:37 pm

There's stuff in there that's exciting just as a JP/Dinosaur nerd like myself but i can concede it's not that great of a trailer, but i am still excited to see it.

If you have been following the Jurassic Park franchise for a long time, it's also just fun to see what stuff that has been pitched over the years was re-purposed for this movie. The Chaos Effect was a JP toy line from the late 90's that started as a sequel pitch about a group of scientists creating new dinosaurs from splicing the various genes together and creating a mutant breed of dinosaur. That idea has been brought up as a potential sequel idea by the producers ever since then and it's interesting to see they finally found a way to incorporate even a piece of it. John Sayles wrote a draft of Jurassic Park 4 in the early 2000's which was about Dino-Soldiers and became a bit of a joke in online circles over the last decade but even pieces of that draft look to have been incorporated into this version. The whole aquatic dinosaur eating the shark sequence is straight out of the Jaffa's JP4 draft which was also the first draft to throw out the idea of the park being open to the public again. Also as domino mentions above, bits and pieces of Crichton's books get repurposed here and there too. Just more evidence that an idea never truly dies in a Hollywood franchise, it's just gets appropriated.

All that said, i still think there's a good movie here and everything i have read from the director and the producers sounds like this is on the right track for what a Jurassic Park movie should be today. Also the fact we are going to get to see Dinosaurs on the big screen again (in glorious 70mm IMAX no less) is a cause for celebration in my book.

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Re: Jurassic Parks

#61 Post by Arrow » Tue Nov 25, 2014 8:54 pm

domino harvey wrote:I concede it was not thrilling in the slightest, but everything I've read about the filmmakers indicates that they know what they're doing, so I hope it's just the typical trailer faults and not the film. Even if it sucks I'm still glad we're getting a summer tentpole led by Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt, who will at least be an entertaining pair while not outrunning CGI
I hope it's good, I'm a big fan of the first one though I doubt I could defend that stance to the satisfaction of the forum, and I still haven't seen the third one.

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Re: Jurassic Parks

#62 Post by domino harvey » Mon Apr 20, 2015 5:39 pm

Second trailer... my cautious optimism is plum used up. This looks awful.

EDIT: Amazing how the original, a film released 22 years ago, has better special effects than anything in this trailer

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Re: Jurassic Parks

#63 Post by Drucker » Mon Apr 20, 2015 7:00 pm

Also, why are they still using the same audio effects? The raptor noise is still the same as what they used in the kitchen scene from the first movie.

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Re: Jurassic Parks

#64 Post by malpractice » Tue Apr 21, 2015 1:44 am

Well i saw Dinosaurs eating people in that trailer, so that still makes it the most important movie being released this year.

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Re: Jurassic Parks

#65 Post by Roger Ryan » Tue Apr 21, 2015 8:11 am

It also seems like the most exploitative 3D movie made in a while: virtually every scene represented in the trailer has some kind of creature lunging directly at the camera.

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Re: Jurassic Parks

#66 Post by Feiereisel » Tue Apr 21, 2015 10:49 am

This and the upcoming Mission: Impossible film don't particularly interest me as a moviegoer, but both seem to be fascinating examples of how long-running franchises kind of adapt themselves to cinematic trends to expand (and exploit) their fanbases and turn a profit.

The first Jurassic Park and Mission: Impossible films are squarely genre pictures in the same vein as their sequels, but are both tenser and more sophisticated than the subsequent entries. They're great films on their own terms, Jurassic Park, especially. The original JP orbits horror; most of it is thrilling, but there are a few sequences (the Rex paddock; the raptors throughout) that are constructed to scare the viewer, and whereas the original features a small group of distinct (though not especially complex) characters--World has crowd dynamics--more people in imminent danger.

The original Mission: Impossible, though globe-trotting, also focuses on a smaller group of people in direct danger--it's been a while since I've seen it, but if I recall correctly, it's a bunch of IMF agents' identities at stake rather than the entire world. Impossible is arguably the lighter of the two films, more of a caper than a spy film--adrenaline-amped Hitchcock, given De Palma's involvement--but it does open with Hunt's team being unexpectedly and brutally eliminated. Like JP, it's also incredibly well-constructed: the famous CIA set-piece is iconic, but takes place almost entirely in one room...hilariously minuscule when compared to the shots of Hunt holding on to the side of an ascending aircraft from the Rouge Nation trailer. Again--the franchise has amplified the action to itself up to account for the expanded stakes.

The threat to cities, planets, and populations is intrinsic to a lot of popular contemporary films, both good and bad. This deserves way more unpacking--the crowds functioning as on-screen audience substitutes; the threatened-populations as elements that seem to directly reflect how people--filmmakers and filmgoers--make sense of the post-2001 world. This may be partially subconscious, too, and thus somewhat unavoidable, and doesn't necessarily make for a bad film--but it's worth considering as the summer blockbuster season ramps up, I think. And it's always worth thinking about how film and larger culture intersect. We want the world saved, and we want it saved a lot. This is interesting.

Also of note: both series lack unified creative teams; different directors, different styles--Spielberg doubles everyone else's output with two stints as director.

The interchangeability is reflected in the production, too: World seems to be consciously recasting and recalling elements of the first JP film. Pratt seems to be a Grant/Muldoon hybrid, with a dash of Malcolm's grinning doubter thrown in--one character stitched together from three types, a ready-made masquerading as a rounded character. Less charitably: a copy-pasted paper with just enough words and syntax changed to beat a plagiarism detector. But M:I engages in this recasting and recapitulation as well: Jon Voight, Anthony Hopkins, Laurence Fishburne, and Alec Baldwin don't literally play the same character, but serve the same function--motivator/sub-antagonist--to greater or lesser extent, depending on what the film's plot calls for.

The most recent World trailer also features explicit callbacks to shots and scenarios from Jurassic Park--the mega-dino's claws smashing through the roof* of the little touring sphere, the raptors entirely, the computer control room drama, etc. I have a hard time assessing it: though I suspect it's earnest, the "clever" references and callbacks almost always strike me a substitute for creativity. That said, I'll admit that basing my assumptions of quality on trailers is a bit unfair...even though everything I've seen--especially with regard to World--sets off the crap-alert bells in my head. At the very least, the marketing campaign is guilty of attempting to sell the film by engaging a collective nostalgia for good things.

These both look like Avengers films, too--team-based, expansive action/adventure movies with just enough substance not to be called "escapist entertainment." They also both feature high- and low-profile Marvel stars, which makes the connection even more direct. I'm not accusing the films of being creatively bankrupt (...yet), but it's interesting that when it comes to making and marketing these films, there seems to be a playbook that I'm only now seeing come into focus. I don't know--probably the worst thing is that there seems to be an appetite for it on the audience side. A lot of things are being inexplicably resurrected, rebooted and retooled**, and I'm not sure how much of the blame even lies with the filmmakers.

--

*Can you call it a roof? A hull, maybe?

**If it isn't already obvious, the just-announced Full House re-whatever--a premise unworthy of a tossed-off SNL bit let alone an actual series--is intensifying my grouchiness and cynicism, here.

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Re: Jurassic Parks

#67 Post by mfunk9786 » Sat Jun 13, 2015 12:51 am

Jurassic World is one of the most exhaustingly stupid films I have ever seen. The screenplay feels like it's from a treatment by an 8 year old boy's doodles in his notebook margins, the dialogue tone-deaf at a level that rivals some of the worst of the sort of direct to video sequels that adorned 90s video store shelves and the plot... oh, that plot. That villain! Everything feels so low rent in this film, so suspenseless and charmless and product placement-packed (my god, cars are shot so you can see their goddamn logos at a low, TV ad angle), that I wonder if its success at the box office and "fresh" critical consensus will mark an unfortunate turning point for just how bad blockbuster films are allowed to be so long as they make a return on investment. I've never seen Michael Bay's Transformers films, for example, but I have a hard time believing that they're as utterly witless and charmless and fucking unimaginative as Jurassic World wound up being. My god, I hated hated hated hated this movie.

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Re: Jurassic Parks

#68 Post by theflirtydozen » Sat Jun 13, 2015 1:29 am

Feiereisel wrote:That said, I'll admit that basing my assumptions of quality on trailers is a bit unfair...
Not really in this case, considering I just sat through a movie composed of "trailer moments" linked together by shoddy direction and attempted themes critiquing consumerism (or cell phones? I really actually don't know what they were going for there, but thankfully they ditched it early) with some cringe-inducing product placement.

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Re: Jurassic Parks

#69 Post by mfunk9786 » Sun Jun 14, 2015 11:35 am


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Re: Jurassic Parks

#70 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Sun Jun 14, 2015 11:37 am

This clinched it for me.

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Re: Jurassic Parks

#71 Post by mfunk9786 » Sun Jun 14, 2015 11:40 am

It was such an unappealing way to distance viewers from the film, to set it in a hermetically sealed theme park - the best set piece involves characters being attacked while in a bulletproof hamster ball... why keep your audience at arm's length if you don't have to?

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Re: Jurassic Parks

#72 Post by cdnchris » Sun Jun 14, 2015 12:46 pm

It was an ad for EVERYTHING, not just Mercedes. At first I was trying to give it the benefit of the doubt that it was being tongue-in-cheek considering the "attempt" at corporate satire (RoboCop this is not, it's not even on par with the lousy RoboCop remake) in the plot, but I began to doubt they were that self aware.

The only good parts: Chris Pratt is fine, the hamster ball scene was pretty tense, the dinosaur fight at the end was nicely done, and the scene where the villain just starts getting into his big speech justifying his actions only to be distracted by something else was amusing. Otherwise the film just makes you realize how good Spielberg is at this stuff.

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Re: Jurassic Parks

#73 Post by mfunk9786 » Sun Jun 14, 2015 1:40 pm

The final dino fight was nicely done, but the pseudoscience in the original film is far superior to the idea that the other dinosaurs know which one is the evil dinosaur and wink at the humans as they assist them in solving the problem. What works so well about Jurassic Park is the idea that these are just creatures following their instincts and behaving much in the way that one might expect them to considering the circumstances. Jurassic World contains a moment when three velociraptors stand directly in front of what they're hunting, staring at it - the opening sequence of Jurassic Park with Sam Neill terrifying that kid by describing how velociraptors were believed to have hunted their prey flies entirely in the face of this - it's a nitpick, of course, but it's indicative of the way that this movie constantly professes its reverence for the original through t-shirts and buried trucks but never actually shows it.

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Re: Jurassic Parks

#74 Post by cdnchris » Sun Jun 14, 2015 2:11 pm

Oh yes, thank you for reminding me of the other issue I had with the film, which was, like you said, the whole thing where the dinosaurs all know who the bad dinosaur is and "work together" as well as all that "winking" that would go on between them and even human characters. I could buy maybe the raptors having some sort of bond with Pratt's character and using body language to communicate, and in the final fight I could buy the T-Rex attacking the bad dino because it was in his way at getting food. But all that winking and acknowledging between Pratt, the raptor, and T-Rex was way too much. I was surprised that one dinosaur didn't come out of the water and give a high-five to everyone.

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Jurassic Parks

#75 Post by Highway 61 » Sun Jun 14, 2015 2:41 pm

cdnchris wrote:Otherwise the film just makes you realize how good Spielberg is at this stuff.
No kidding. I'm embarrassed that I've spent most of my years as a "serious" film lover calling Spielberg a hack and pretending to be above the pleasures of his crowd-pleasing style. Jurassic World is the first summer blockbuster I've seen since Inception, and I gotta say that the movie's sloppiness really made me appreciate how lucky I was to grow up with directors like Spielberg, Cameron, and even Zemeckis and McTiernan.

The movie also made me appreciate what a gift to film John Williams has been. Now, I like Michael Giacchino, but his score here was terrible, and the way he reused the original theme made it appear as if he had no understanding of what made Williams's work so powerful and effective.
Of course, the film's massive box office success probably means we'll see Chris Pratt as a Coca-Cola-drinking Indiana Jones before the end of the decade. God help us.

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