I am well a where of how scientifically inaccurate the "dinosaurs" in this movie are, what I meant was that the creatures looked good graphically speaking.
Movie review rant 2018
- Thread starter Chlidonias
- Start date
And arguably that is precisely why the scenes where they are onscreen are so effective - a version of the original film where we were seeing dinosaurs out the wazoo from the very beginning would have stripped the Brachiosaurus/Giraffititan reveal some way into the film of all emotion and effect.
Or to put it another way.... Jaws only gives 4 minutes of screentime to the titular Great White and the original Alien only gives 3.5 minutes of screentime to the Xenomorph
by your logic this would make them far inferior to films such as Sharknado and Alien Resurrection.....and one of your three examples of "most realistic looking prehistoric animal ever" is the godawful hybrid
It's been done. Meet TYRANNOSAURUS REICH......
Fair pointOr to put it another way.... Jaws only gives 4 minutes of screentime to the titular Great White and the original Alien only gives 3.5 minutes of screentime to the Xenomorph
While I disagree with it being "godawful," fair point....and one of your three examples of "most realistic looking prehistoric animal ever" is the godawful hybrid
Oh dear GodIt's been done. Meet TYRANNOSAURUS REICH......
Don't knock the Sharknado films, they are crap but also well worth watching. It's like car crash TV but with flying sharks, I love them. To be fair, they are only worth watching once each but still worth watching that one time!
And they gave rise to one of my favourite parody videos ever; Reggae Sharknado* 
*You may need to watch the original Reggae Shark first...
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This arguably could be the reason of the dino extinction
I don't think thats it either, considering how the Earth is a sphereI think this was?
~Thylo
.
You're both wrong.
Wrong again, as it is a reptile dysfunction, so a reptile disfunction isn't accurate (or correctly spelled).
Well. the time periods don't match, so I don't think that's right.
I think that the dinosaurs died because a meteoroid hit a sphere earth..
You might be onto something there
My favorite Dinosaur theory is that the meteor was sent to Earth by aliens to clear it of the dangerous dominant lifeforms. Of course the meteor wasn't a meteor at all, actually, and was instead a spaceship carrying the first who could now thrive on the newly reset planet.
~Thylo
~Thylo
I reckon that aliens came along and gave the dinosaurs the common cold, which wiped out the dinosaurs. Many years later the aliens came back, having lost their immunity to the common cold, started attacking people, and then got wiped out by the virus of their own making! Boom! I've just managed to tie Jurassic Park to War Of The Worlds, bringing two Spielberg movies together AND getting us back on to movies!
If none of that makes sense then my bad, it's really late and I'm on some pretty strange tablets at the minute!
If none of that makes sense then my bad, it's really late and I'm on some pretty strange tablets at the minute!
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I originally wasn't going to respond to this because, as @Hipporex says, this is a personal opinion and everyone is entitled to that, however I figured it might be worth discussing my views in an actual conversation-format as opposed to in a really angry rant
I've already broken this opening apart at length in my rant post so if anyone wants a detailed look into why I personally find it awful read back a few pages. I will say that this scene does do a good job at building some tension. Unfortunately there's just so much wrong with this scene in terms of it completely breaking continuity and many aspects of it making absolutely no sense, as well as Rexy somehow looking worse than she did in the original film, that I couldn't appreciate what they were going for.
As @Batto and @TeaLovingDave point out, part of what made the original movie and so many other monster movies so impactful and allow them to stand the test of time is the fact that you see so little of the actual monster. It builds tension and makes the scenes where they finally reveal themselves so much more memorable. Using a more modern movie, a huge reason the final fight scene in the 2014 Godzilla movie (which I absolutely love) is because you don't actually see Godzilla fully until this confrontation- the anticipation built throughout the film. Now I've never viewed the JP franchise as monster movies per say, not the original couple films anyway. In the first two films the Dinos were not monsters, they were just animals. There were no good or bad Dinos, they all just behaved similarly to how real animals might behave in a similar circumstance (more on that later). Since they're animals and not monsters, it makes sense that you'd see more of them in a realistic setting, so that's a fine argument to make. The problem I have here is that their presence is nonsensical and nothing more than a shallow marketing play. Part of this movie's marketing is that it would show more prehistoric animals than any of the past movies, but most of them are there for a few seconds at most. They just crammed as many species as they could into each frame for nothing more than the sake of having them, and probably selling toys. A lot of the scenes in this movie, particularly in the first half, just have so much stuff crammed into them that it's nothing more than "visual noise" to me. It's a problem the StarWars prequels had, too. Not to mention they continue to break their own continuity. There are species in this film that have never been in any other JP movie before, and various species that were canonically not kept at the Jurassic World park. Did you know that Brachiosaurus is not a species JW was supposed to keep? In the marketing surrounding the first JW movie they even say that after the failure of the original park InGen had all the Brachiosaurus killed off, but FK wanted to rip off the Brachy scene from the first JP film and have that emotional(?) scene where it dies so they not threw one back into this movie, but they've since claimed that that animal is the same individual as the one from the JP scene! Not to mention this movie inexplicably doesn't have some species that were present in the original JW movie for some reason.
This is purely subjective but I find the JW films to have the worst-looking CGI and more poorly designed Dinos than any of the original JP films (JP3 has a couple scenes in it with worse CGI but overall it's better). The few animatronics they use also look fake as sh*t. The design for the Indoraptor is very cool, I'll give them that.
I agree. JWFK is not the first movie in the franchise to do this (as you said Lost Kingdom took their third act off the island, and also the ending of JP3 was showing some Pterosaurs getting off the island) but they are going all in and that is an excellent decision. Unfortunately their insistence on Dino-soldiers shows me that they have no idea what to do with this idea. They have also painted themselves into a corner with there only being about two dozen Dinos of about 14 different species (in the movie they say 11, but this is wrong and idk why they gave us the wrong number because they literally CGIed more than 11 species into scenes off the island) all in Northern California (even though Blue ends up in Arizona by the end of the movie..).
I found bother of those scenes rather silly but, again, them taking the setting off the island and to new locations ina very good move.
Agreed, but when your story and script is trash (imo) a pretty picture does not a film make. This argument is one of the main ones for why people think The Last Jedi is a great movie, but it ultimately does not hold up because the visuals, while obviously important, are really only a reflection of how much money a studio had, not how good the story actually is.
The issue here is that the screenwriters more or less swapped her and Owen's personalities with absolutely no character development to set this up. No she is not a wimp and is, in general, a better character but she is also a completely different character.
The problem here is that JW did NOT give us the kind of relationship between Owen and Blue that this movie shows, this movie simply tells you it did. In JW Blue has a small amount of respect for Owen but they are in no way friends and she tries to eat him at one point. Owen even makes multiple comments about how fragile their bond is and any kind of confrontation would sever that. The example he specifically uses is if she gets tranquilized, so of course when that exact scenario plays out in FK and then she goes on to get shot at point blank range, bleeds out for hours, and starts to hemorrhage, she'd be totally keen to risk her life defending him...
A Dinosaur under no circumstances should be able to be compared to something like the Xenomorph, period.
There were a few moments here where I considered putting the following in, but here seems like the best spot. As I said earlier, in the original JP films, the Dinos were not movie monsters, they were animals. The carnivores weren't going after the heroes, they were just hungry and/or defending their territory. We have scenes like the T. rex hunting Gallimimus to cement this point. The herbivores weren't being protecting our heroes, they were just hand-reared or didn't perceive Humans as threats, and if they did they reacted accordingly. We have scenes like the sick Triceratops being calm around its keeper and the Stegosaurus herd attacking Sarah when she scared a calf to cement that point. In the JW franchise, you have carnivores literally mass murdering Humans and other Dinos just 'cause they real bad. Meanwhile, you have the herbivores which are the "good guys" and thus either don't bother or even go out of their way to protect the heroes. Of course then there's the good carnivores (Blue and Rexy specifically) which appear out of thin air in order to save the day at the last minute every single time. Conversely we have the evil carnivores (the hybrids in these films) whose sole purpose is to murder harder than any murderer has ever murdered. The Indoraptor relentlessly hunts down a child with literally no reason given for it. That scene where it creeps into Maisie's room is really well shot, looks beautiful, and is fantastically suspenseful- it also makes no sense. An animal shouldn't be acting like Freddy Kruger intent on scaring a little girl before she kills her...
Those specific jokes were fun, though others I thought were off. For example the Indoraptor smirking and winking at the camera was dreadful.
The problem with Maisie is that she is a half-baked clone of random qualities of all the past 'JP Children of Divorce', she had no character of her own, and she was only important because the script told us she was. Not to mention her whole "they're alive, just like me" makes for one of the worst scenes I've ever watched. In general, though, I just don't like kids in these movies. Tim and Lex worked well but after that they've all been annoying. Eric was ok, I liked that they did something different with him.
As a side note did Claire and Owen just kidnap her at the end of the movie?? Like they just left the mansion and took her with them. That is not their call, she had a caregiver who raised her and survived the movie.
The issue here is that the movie marketing this as Ian Malcolm's big return. Their promotional material told us he would play an important role but that role equaled about a minute and a half of him, correctly, speaking out against relocating the Dinosaurs and then getting booed at and called a murdering by the background characters.........
His existence makes no sense and, as you said, raises so many questions. The biggest one I have that no else seems to be asking, when exactly did he clone Maisie? She's what? 12 at most? That makes absolutely no sense because Lockwood and Hammond were supposed to have fallen out over her cloning before the events of the original JP. She should be at least 26, not less than half that.
Also as far as his death goes I don't know what he expected when telling a man who he caught illegally smuggling and selling Dinosaurs to call the police on himself...
Again, this is a subjective thing but Zara's death, to me, was insanely over the top, especially for a character we knew next to nothing about other than her being engaged and Claire's assistant. The majority of her screentime is her death scene. As for Wheatly, that whole scene is the epitome of the stupidity of this film. He sees people running for their lives away from the mansion and see a Dino escape into the woods. He then enters the room and decides to enter the enclosure of a unrestrained giant carnivore he knows nothing about and knows he did not catch on the island. He then leaves the door wide open and when suspects the animal might not be asleep, just stays put. Eli's death was plain over the top and nonsensical because there shouldn't have been any surprise Dinos to sneak up on him. He was standing in the middle of a completely open and well lit area yet completely misses multiple giant mega-carnivores heading right towards him? The only reason we didn't know about them is because they come from off-camera. This isn't the first time the movie does this with Rexy and a Carnotaurus either, they literally did that earlier on the island still and it's in the trailers. That roar also wasn't Rexy's roar which I found weird. It was distorted and muted, sounding pretty different from the iconic T. rex roar.
But the movie doesn't pose that question with Human cloning. Human cloning is mentioned in literally one line of dialogue when Mills tells the heroes that Maisie is a clone for literally no real reason, he just blurts it out. Then that's used as the catalyst for her releasing the Dinos on the world.
These are not Dinosaurs, though. With every movie they make these creatures act and even look less and less like real animals and more and more like the movie monsters they're making them out to be. Nothing about these are realistic or educational. The original film instilled a wonder of Dinosaurs in people and went out of its way to try to be as accurate as possible taking a creative liberty here and there with the raptors and Dilophosaurus. Every movie that's come out after that has been an increasingly lazy cash grab that losing sight of that idea more and more.
I'd be interested to see what you or anyone else has to say in response and I hope that didn't come off as me just hating on your opinion, that was not my intention and apologies if I did.
~Thylo
I've already broken this opening apart at length in my rant post so if anyone wants a detailed look into why I personally find it awful read back a few pages. I will say that this scene does do a good job at building some tension. Unfortunately there's just so much wrong with this scene in terms of it completely breaking continuity and many aspects of it making absolutely no sense, as well as Rexy somehow looking worse than she did in the original film, that I couldn't appreciate what they were going for.
As @Batto and @TeaLovingDave point out, part of what made the original movie and so many other monster movies so impactful and allow them to stand the test of time is the fact that you see so little of the actual monster. It builds tension and makes the scenes where they finally reveal themselves so much more memorable. Using a more modern movie, a huge reason the final fight scene in the 2014 Godzilla movie (which I absolutely love) is because you don't actually see Godzilla fully until this confrontation- the anticipation built throughout the film. Now I've never viewed the JP franchise as monster movies per say, not the original couple films anyway. In the first two films the Dinos were not monsters, they were just animals. There were no good or bad Dinos, they all just behaved similarly to how real animals might behave in a similar circumstance (more on that later). Since they're animals and not monsters, it makes sense that you'd see more of them in a realistic setting, so that's a fine argument to make. The problem I have here is that their presence is nonsensical and nothing more than a shallow marketing play. Part of this movie's marketing is that it would show more prehistoric animals than any of the past movies, but most of them are there for a few seconds at most. They just crammed as many species as they could into each frame for nothing more than the sake of having them, and probably selling toys. A lot of the scenes in this movie, particularly in the first half, just have so much stuff crammed into them that it's nothing more than "visual noise" to me. It's a problem the StarWars prequels had, too. Not to mention they continue to break their own continuity. There are species in this film that have never been in any other JP movie before, and various species that were canonically not kept at the Jurassic World park. Did you know that Brachiosaurus is not a species JW was supposed to keep? In the marketing surrounding the first JW movie they even say that after the failure of the original park InGen had all the Brachiosaurus killed off, but FK wanted to rip off the Brachy scene from the first JP film and have that emotional(?) scene where it dies so they not threw one back into this movie, but they've since claimed that that animal is the same individual as the one from the JP scene! Not to mention this movie inexplicably doesn't have some species that were present in the original JW movie for some reason.
Good-Looking Dinosaurs: With one exception... (i.e. this scene)
I feel the prehistoric animals in this film, thanks to a combination of CGI and practical effects, are the most realistic looking they've ever been... (three examples)
This is purely subjective but I find the JW films to have the worst-looking CGI and more poorly designed Dinos than any of the original JP films (JP3 has a couple scenes in it with worse CGI but overall it's better). The few animatronics they use also look fake as sh*t. The design for the Indoraptor is very cool, I'll give them that.
I agree. JWFK is not the first movie in the franchise to do this (as you said Lost Kingdom took their third act off the island, and also the ending of JP3 was showing some Pterosaurs getting off the island) but they are going all in and that is an excellent decision. Unfortunately their insistence on Dino-soldiers shows me that they have no idea what to do with this idea. They have also painted themselves into a corner with there only being about two dozen Dinos of about 14 different species (in the movie they say 11, but this is wrong and idk why they gave us the wrong number because they literally CGIed more than 11 species into scenes off the island) all in Northern California (even though Blue ends up in Arizona by the end of the movie..).
I found bother of those scenes rather silly but, again, them taking the setting off the island and to new locations ina very good move.
Cinematography and Filming: This has to be the most beautifully shot entry into the series. Many of the island shot in particular were stunning.
Agreed, but when your story and script is trash (imo) a pretty picture does not a film make. This argument is one of the main ones for why people think The Last Jedi is a great movie, but it ultimately does not hold up because the visuals, while obviously important, are really only a reflection of how much money a studio had, not how good the story actually is.
The issue here is that the screenwriters more or less swapped her and Owen's personalities with absolutely no character development to set this up. No she is not a wimp and is, in general, a better character but she is also a completely different character.
The problem here is that JW did NOT give us the kind of relationship between Owen and Blue that this movie shows, this movie simply tells you it did. In JW Blue has a small amount of respect for Owen but they are in no way friends and she tries to eat him at one point. Owen even makes multiple comments about how fragile their bond is and any kind of confrontation would sever that. The example he specifically uses is if she gets tranquilized, so of course when that exact scenario plays out in FK and then she goes on to get shot at point blank range, bleeds out for hours, and starts to hemorrhage, she'd be totally keen to risk her life defending him...
A Dinosaur under no circumstances should be able to be compared to something like the Xenomorph, period.
There were a few moments here where I considered putting the following in, but here seems like the best spot. As I said earlier, in the original JP films, the Dinos were not movie monsters, they were animals. The carnivores weren't going after the heroes, they were just hungry and/or defending their territory. We have scenes like the T. rex hunting Gallimimus to cement this point. The herbivores weren't being protecting our heroes, they were just hand-reared or didn't perceive Humans as threats, and if they did they reacted accordingly. We have scenes like the sick Triceratops being calm around its keeper and the Stegosaurus herd attacking Sarah when she scared a calf to cement that point. In the JW franchise, you have carnivores literally mass murdering Humans and other Dinos just 'cause they real bad. Meanwhile, you have the herbivores which are the "good guys" and thus either don't bother or even go out of their way to protect the heroes. Of course then there's the good carnivores (Blue and Rexy specifically) which appear out of thin air in order to save the day at the last minute every single time. Conversely we have the evil carnivores (the hybrids in these films) whose sole purpose is to murder harder than any murderer has ever murdered. The Indoraptor relentlessly hunts down a child with literally no reason given for it. That scene where it creeps into Maisie's room is really well shot, looks beautiful, and is fantastically suspenseful- it also makes no sense. An animal shouldn't be acting like Freddy Kruger intent on scaring a little girl before she kills her...
Those specific jokes were fun, though others I thought were off. For example the Indoraptor smirking and winking at the camera was dreadful.
The problem with Maisie is that she is a half-baked clone of random qualities of all the past 'JP Children of Divorce', she had no character of her own, and she was only important because the script told us she was. Not to mention her whole "they're alive, just like me" makes for one of the worst scenes I've ever watched. In general, though, I just don't like kids in these movies. Tim and Lex worked well but after that they've all been annoying. Eric was ok, I liked that they did something different with him.
As a side note did Claire and Owen just kidnap her at the end of the movie?? Like they just left the mansion and took her with them. That is not their call, she had a caregiver who raised her and survived the movie.
The issue here is that the movie marketing this as Ian Malcolm's big return. Their promotional material told us he would play an important role but that role equaled about a minute and a half of him, correctly, speaking out against relocating the Dinosaurs and then getting booed at and called a murdering by the background characters.........
His existence makes no sense and, as you said, raises so many questions. The biggest one I have that no else seems to be asking, when exactly did he clone Maisie? She's what? 12 at most? That makes absolutely no sense because Lockwood and Hammond were supposed to have fallen out over her cloning before the events of the original JP. She should be at least 26, not less than half that.
Also as far as his death goes I don't know what he expected when telling a man who he caught illegally smuggling and selling Dinosaurs to call the police on himself...
Again, this is a subjective thing but Zara's death, to me, was insanely over the top, especially for a character we knew next to nothing about other than her being engaged and Claire's assistant. The majority of her screentime is her death scene. As for Wheatly, that whole scene is the epitome of the stupidity of this film. He sees people running for their lives away from the mansion and see a Dino escape into the woods. He then enters the room and decides to enter the enclosure of a unrestrained giant carnivore he knows nothing about and knows he did not catch on the island. He then leaves the door wide open and when suspects the animal might not be asleep, just stays put. Eli's death was plain over the top and nonsensical because there shouldn't have been any surprise Dinos to sneak up on him. He was standing in the middle of a completely open and well lit area yet completely misses multiple giant mega-carnivores heading right towards him? The only reason we didn't know about them is because they come from off-camera. This isn't the first time the movie does this with Rexy and a Carnotaurus either, they literally did that earlier on the island still and it's in the trailers. That roar also wasn't Rexy's roar which I found weird. It was distorted and muted, sounding pretty different from the iconic T. rex roar.
But the movie doesn't pose that question with Human cloning. Human cloning is mentioned in literally one line of dialogue when Mills tells the heroes that Maisie is a clone for literally no real reason, he just blurts it out. Then that's used as the catalyst for her releasing the Dinos on the world.
These are not Dinosaurs, though. With every movie they make these creatures act and even look less and less like real animals and more and more like the movie monsters they're making them out to be. Nothing about these are realistic or educational. The original film instilled a wonder of Dinosaurs in people and went out of its way to try to be as accurate as possible taking a creative liberty here and there with the raptors and Dilophosaurus. Every movie that's come out after that has been an increasingly lazy cash grab that losing sight of that idea more and more.
I'd be interested to see what you or anyone else has to say in response and I hope that didn't come off as me just hating on your opinion, that was not my intention and apologies if I did.
~Thylo
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A couple things...
- @ThylacineAlive You didn't come off as hating on my opinion, you were only stating your own, which is the same thing that I'm trying to do.
- I'll agree that this movie has the most "logic flaws" of an entry in the franchise. A few examples: why would the mosasaur lagoon be connected to the ocean? when was Maisie cloned? wouldn't using an actually gun be easier then signaling the Indoraptor to attack? and the animals did act rather un-animal like in some situations. (then again the animals in this franchise have ALWAYS acted at least a little un-animal like. Perhaps the Jurassic World trilogy is just pushing it a little to much)
- There was no mention of Operation Clean Sweep (InGen's plan to kill all the Brachiosaurus) in the marketing for Jurassic World. It was however mentioned 22 years ago in the marketing for the second film in the franchise. We can only assume that the operation was called off before all of Isla Nublar's brachiosaurs were killed. (after all people have made assumptions to fill in some of the gaps in other franchises, so why can't we do it for this one?) Klayton Fioriti did a video on this subject
- I can understand how some people where upset that Malcom was in the movie for only a little bit. I 100% that the marketing team for this film gave some false promises and showed way to much. But like I said Malcom's little screen time didn't bother me because I was aware that he'd only be in it a little.
- Also, I too really liked Godzilla (2014).
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An Elephant's Journey
4.5/10
This movie follows the story of a bad teenage actor - I'm sorry, I mean a teenage boy named Phoenix - who lived in the US until both his parents die in the military. He then moves to South Africa to live with his aunt and uncle. He then gets lost in the African bush after chasing a Meerkat (somehow his uncle didn't notice). In the bush he meets a wild elephants and befriends it.
This movies has bad acting and the characters all make stupid decisions. You will be asking yourself questions like "Why does this kid think he can ride a wild bull elephant?", "Why does the thermal imaging camera not see Phoenix?", and "Why did the poacher not see Phoenix steal his gun?".
There is a plot twist they introduce halfway through the move, then never acknowledge again. It seems like they cut all the scenes that had to do with it.
In the end, the movie attempts to send a conservation message, and fails spectacularly.
However, some parts of this movies are cheesy in a way you can make fun of. If you have a group of people who all like animals and cheesy movies (like maybe a ZooChat meetup), this is an okay movie to watch. But I recommend NEVER to watch it by yourself.
4.5/10
This movie follows the story of a bad teenage actor - I'm sorry, I mean a teenage boy named Phoenix - who lived in the US until both his parents die in the military. He then moves to South Africa to live with his aunt and uncle. He then gets lost in the African bush after chasing a Meerkat (somehow his uncle didn't notice). In the bush he meets a wild elephants and befriends it.
This movies has bad acting and the characters all make stupid decisions. You will be asking yourself questions like "Why does this kid think he can ride a wild bull elephant?", "Why does the thermal imaging camera not see Phoenix?", and "Why did the poacher not see Phoenix steal his gun?".
There is a plot twist they introduce halfway through the move, then never acknowledge again. It seems like they cut all the scenes that had to do with it.
In the end, the movie attempts to send a conservation message, and fails spectacularly.
However, some parts of this movies are cheesy in a way you can make fun of. If you have a group of people who all like animals and cheesy movies (like maybe a ZooChat meetup), this is an okay movie to watch. But I recommend NEVER to watch it by yourself.
Put the plot twist info. in a spoiler section
~Thylo
~Thylo
I'd never heard of this and a quick Google reveals the film doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry!
I was surprised to see Liz Hurley is in it, maybe that makes it worth a watch?