Why the original Jurassic Park's dinosaurs still look better than the ones in the sequels
Aux Features Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park is one of the most important movies in modern history, which is why it’s been a bummer to see how its sequels have paled in comparison. The original’s power is explored in a new video essay from Films&Stuff, which chronicles the way director Steven Spielberg used scale and framing to make his prehistoric monsters so magnificent, and how the modern Jurassic World films just haven’t been able to do the same.
As the above video points out, the original is “a master class in blocking and cinematography,” with each frame asking “what does the shot say and how does it make you feel?” Spielberg’s unique sense of scale extends beyond the dinosaurs, too—from the helicopter rides to the “Jurassic Park” sign to the waterfall, this land is just bigger than the one in the sequels. The humans are in the dinosaurs’ territory, not the other way around.
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It was one of my bigger issues with Jurassic World (aside from WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA? WHO? SERIOUSLY?). The island feels claustrophobic at times. There are places I’m sure it’s intentional, but it’s a large island. It shouldn’t feel like a bunch of soundstage sets with no real connectivity. Even scenes in the park just didn’t feel like the same “park” – like at some point during production the director changed his mind or something.
100%. They never even really show you the contours of the park except for a few quick flyovers, which is to say you don’t even have a mental image of what it’s supposed to be.Of course, that’s small potatoes in a movie where people at a theme park are not only allowed to drive themselves around in-between dinosaurs, but literally LEAVE THE RIDE AREA in those same vehicles, but hey.the movie is a giant piece of shit.
That’s one thing that made the original so tense. The lodge was a speck on the island; the who point was you went out into these huge habitats and observed what was going on around you. Once things went off the rails it was a man v nature survival flick.
Jurassic World had a single good idea: The guy in the control room wearing the original Jurassic Park tshirt, and people telling him it’s in poor taste. I guess that wasn’t an idea, more of a gag. The movie had one good gag.The rest of it is almost like an experiment in insulting the audience – literally, in the sense that it’s about park visitors (or, ya know, moviegoers) being too dumb to appreciate regular dinosaurs, so they need a SUPER-DINOSAUR! But it also presents a reality consisting entirely of screenwriting cliches. There’s a moment early on where the Neglectful Business-Mom steps out of a meeting to take a call from her family, and (even though it’s a small meeting between obviously high-ranking people in the company) one of her coworkers knocks on the window and taps his watch, the way people do in movies.
It was far too“successful” at the box office for a lot of people to recognize it now but as far as I’m concerned it’s the poster child for shitty, wholly unnecessary reboots/sequels. It’s the anti-Blade Runner 2049
I see you missed the terrible plot point that the kids were sent away so that mom and dad could hash out the divorce to… surprise them with when they returned? Yeah, I’m pretty sure that was her lawyer telling her to come back into negotiations.
So she was paying him to be that rude? Seriously, the people behind that movie have never met a person with a non-Hollywood job. I would appreciate the humor of a family shuttling off their kids to an aunt who shuttles them off to a personal assistant who loses them when the dinosaurs run amok, except that a) the movie seems unaware of how absurd that chain of events is and b) the older kid, in particular, was written by uniquely, almost supernaturally irritating. The sentient screenwriting manual that created those characters never stopped to consider how self-absorbed yet protective siblings are at that age.
in the sense that it’s about park visitors (or, ya know, moviegoers) being too dumb to appreciate regular dinosaurs, so they need a SUPER-DINOSAUR!
What are you talking about, it LITERALLY happened in the real world. Why do you think zoos took such a huge dip in popularity from 1988 till 2016 when CRISPR-9 finally let us make cool giraffopotamuses?
That shit drives me NUTS. I’ve been in plenty of meetings that everyone involved would consider important and people come and go all the time with no comment from the other participants.
The thing that bothers me about the shirt gag is were the fuck does Claire get off telling him the shirt is in poor taste when she actually opened the park those people died in? and oversaw the creation of a super-monster T-rex.
The film made a ton of money. The 2015 original, which brought the “Jurassic Park” franchise back after 14 years, made $208 million for its opening weekend before going on to become one of the highest-grossing films of all time.
https://money.cnn.com/2018/06/24/media/jurassic-world-fallen-kingdom-box-office/index.htmlJurassic World (2015) // $1,671,700,000.
Spielberg ain’t the best for nothin’Although his DP on that film ought to get some credit, too.
Interesting and great point- his DP (Dean Cundey) was nominated for an Oscar for Cinematography for Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Seems like there’s some genius to having the guy who could make a cartoon wabbit convincingly inhabit space do the same for your giant scary dinosaurs.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005678/awards?ref_=nm_awd
He was also DP on John Carpenter’s The Thing. That was the perfect physical effects film because, if such a being were to exist, there’s no reason why it couldn’t naturally have rubbery skin and/or maybe have trouble controlling that texture when it’s imitating a human under stressful conditions like being hit with fire. The lighting and Al Whitlock’s matte paintings helped with all that too. Props to Rob Bottin.
Props to you for giving proper props to Rob Bottin, who really has a propensity for making amazing props.
Now that Bottin’s in real estate, I wonder how many nerds house hunting in Cali figured out what company he works for and went to them in hopes he’d be their agent.
Gawd I’d at least hope they’re asking him for (home?) makeover advice rather than representation.
He was also also the DP on the original Halloween, which captured maybe the best nighttime shots in cinema history despite being a low budget production by relative novices. There are scenes where Michael Myers is walking around in the actual, unsimulated dark, yet his outline and mask are perfectly visible. It’s astonishing and seems effortless.
He got DP’ed on that movie? How does that even work with a man?
This made me laugh.Anyway, dudes have two functional openings, so use your imagination. It probably also counts if you double up on any single orifice.
Well, I sketched out some probable scenarios on the whiteboard in the big conference room, so I’ve got a meeting with HR right now, and the security guards are putting all my stuff in a box.{pause}My God! I must be getting promoted!
Look up urethral soundings, and you’ll find out how some men have three.
uh, no
I think TP is where things would get complicated.
Don’t forget Phil Tippet. He was a stop motion animator at ILM who had a large hand in the chess sequence in the original “Star Wars” as well as the tauntauns and Imperial Walkers in “Empire Strikes Back”. He was originally hired to do the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park” using the revolutionary go-motion technique he used in “Dragonslayer” where a miniature figure is controlled by tiny servos so it is actually moving while being filmed. This created actual motion blur largely resolving the jerkiness that was a hallmark of stop-motion.Tippet had made huge improvements in the process and was deep into work on the film when he was suddenly told they were abandoning the process in favor of CGI. Tippet was reportedly so devastated he was bed ridden for weeks when ILM frantically called him back because no one could figure out why the CGI dinosaur footage they were getting looked so awful. Tippet took one look at it and pointed out that since the CGI was being created by computer technicians with no animation background it inevitably looked mechanical and devoid of life. ILM quickly brought Tippet back to create an animation program to train and supervise the technicians and the rest is cinematic history.A lot of people who worked on “Jurassic Park” have been very vocal about how Tippet and Stan Winston (who did the live action dinosaur animatronics) were grossly ignored for their contributions to the film.
yeah, being able to create a static realistic-looking shot is light years easier than creating a natural-looking animation of a living creature.
Their names on the Oscar trophy for Best Visual Effects would seem to refute that
YOU HAD ONE JOB, PHIL!
Scrolled down for this. Leaving happy.
Honestly I thought I would be one of like 20 people making this joke.
Thought I’d link to the documentary that talks about some of that.
I recall reading that the CGI animation in JP was actually done by Tippett’s stop-motion animators using input devices that were basically stop-motion model armatures with joint sensors on them instead of realistic latex exteriors. So they animated the dinosaur models by hand the same way they always had, and that movement data was sent to the computer frame by frame, rather than the models being photographed frame by frame. So the technique and skill were the same even though the technology differed.
Also, of course, because Spielberg expected he’d need to use stop-motion with all its flaws, he planned out the film to use Stan Winston’s on-set animatronics as much as possible and minimize the amount of animation that was needed. So the vast majority of dinosaur footage in JP was not CGI at all — the CGI was just for full-length shots, running and jumping shots, the brachiosaurs, things that couldn’t be done live on set. It looks so real because most of it is real and interacting directly with the actors. The problem is that too many later moviemakers didn’t understand that and assumed that CGI could do everything.
They don’t?
The really good looking dinosaurs are either puppets or appear in the rain at night. The brachiosauruses in broad daylight still look like weird rubber cartoons from another dimension.
Yeah, I’m sure all the points made in this video are valid, but I think there’s definitely a bit of nostalgia/snobbery thrown in, too. “I grew up with it; ergo it must be great!” Nobody’s going to make a video essay explaining why the CG xenos in Alien: Covenant beat the pants off of the crappy CG creature at the end of Species, though, because that’d just objectively be completely false.
I loved JP when I first saw it (at the tender age of 14) but even in that very first daylight shot of the brachiosaurs, the very first time I saw it, I thought they looked more like special effects than the lead-up hype had led me to believe.
They’re the least realistic-looking dinosaurs in the film, so it is a bit of a disappointment (at least on subsequent viewings – they were initially very impressive).
For sure, they’re kind of an outlier; everything else looks fantastic. But it is a little baffling that the very first full-CGI dinos we see don’t look as good as some of the later ones. Maybe they just couldn’t get it any better with that era’s tech (and skill). Full-daylight shots are harder than night shots (humans are better at instinctively identifying things that don’t look quite right in full sunlight than they are with things using artificial light).
I hated Alien: Covenant for so many reasons I can’t even remember what the xenos in it looked like.
Stupid. They looked stupid.
In a word, pixelated 🙁
I watched that one on a plane while drinking. I got a kick out of it. The cast was sort of inexplicable, and the overall vibe of the movie was weirdly laid-back, with crazy-ass violence every so often. That ending annoyed the shit out of me, of course.
Off-topic, but you are correct. What was that about?
The videos not talking about CGI quality, though, but about using cinematography to make your dinosaurs (whether animatronic, CGI, or otherwise) have the ideal impact on the audience.
“They don’t?”
They absolutely fucking do.
None of them look as bad as the raptors in World though. That scene where they’re running through the woods with Star Lord on his bike looks like it was shot by film students.
The daylight CG, in 2019, looks dated and flat, sure. The movements look more lifelike than a large portion of CG animation that comes out today though.
I’ll say two things in support of Jurassic Park 2 Lost World:The scene with the T-Rex pushing the trailer over the cliff is still a great, intense suspense scene.It is still WEIRD AS FUCK (conspiracy?!) that the two big blockbuster sequels of 1997 (the other being Speed 2) were both 1) lousy, and 2) prominently featured huge out of control ships crashing into major cities.
The scene where Julianne Moore is laying on that glass window as it starts to crack, and the huge 90s phone is about to fall onto the window and shatter it… brilliant suspense sequence. It’s just a shame that the most memorable scene in Jurassic Park 2 doesn’t have dinosaurs in it.
YES!
100% agree. The first half of that movie was great, but as soon as they left the island, it all went kaput.That trailer over the cliff, though? Pure gold.
I like most of the on the island stuff other than the little girl killing the raptor with her gymastics routine. The T-Rex poking into the tent and then the waterfall, and the raptors in the tall grass is good stuff in my opinion.
Does anyone know if there are transcripts to the video articles? I’d typically rather spend 3 minutes reading than 8 minutes watching.
Transcript:“Rawr! Rawr! Chomp-chomp. Rawr!”
Can you believe there are 3 pages describing Jeff Goldblum’s exposed chest hair in the jeep scene?
Turn on the closed captions and speed up the video?
Good idea, but I’d rather just read a straight transcript.
While I’m generally sympathetic with this sentiment, for something dealing with how a film is shot, you sort of need to see the shots.
In this situation, I studied the first Jurassic Park scene for scene and in most of the action sequences frame by frame back when it first came out. But, point taken.
A BRONKEYOSAURUS???
By sheer coincidence, I rewatched the original the other night; it truly does hold up. As noted elsewhere, the first scene of the brachiosauruses does look a bit rubbery, but nearly every other dinosaur in that movie — even the CG ones — looks a thousand times better than a lot of the shit we get now. On another note, I’ve seen Jurassic Park a million times, and the T. Rex scene still gets my heart pounding.
I was so happy that JP did the IMAX tour just as my son was the perfect age to watch it for the first time. Just a great experience and yes, the movie completely holds up.
Once the lights go out, it’s pretty much a perfectly executed, hour-long chase sequence broken into different parts. As a story, it’s a mixed bag. The setup is disjointed, the stuff about research ethics is kind of a jumble (in a very, very Michael Crichton way), and the conflicts escalate in kind of a schematic way. But it has one of the great WTF casts in history (seriously, a blockbuster with Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, and Richard Attenborough?), and the least interesting scenes at the beginning are elegantly directed. The early scene with the lawyer at the amber mine unfolds in a couple of subtle, extended tracking shots, and the scene with Neill, Dern, and Attenborough in Montana likewise uses some very long master shots to just let the characters breathe a little bit. Not many blockbusters are willing to do that. Also, they created their own distinctive typeface for the movie (and all the merchandise), which looks relentlessly 90s in the best way.
I wore my Jurassic Park shirt to my gf’s house about a month ago and as soon as I walked in her friend told me she hates Jurassic Park. We’re forcing her to watch it this weekend, because she obviously watched something else and thought it was Jurassic Park.
Think it was a perfect storm – CGI could just about handle the effects (and were being used on this scale for the first time – so for viewers was an instant wow), the master of animatronics were still around and helping out, Spielberg was involved etc.But what many forget is that this was the perfect story for these effects. The whole central conceit of the story is the wow factor – you’re going to see something you’ve never seen before. It means the characters played a part in us embracing the impact of seeing these dinosaurs for the first time – something not in the sequels.
Whoa, Spielberg is a better director than the guy whose pre-Jurassic resume was limited to one so-so no-budget indie rom com and then went on to make “Book of Henry”? Mind=blown.
If Isla Nubar was off the west coast of Costa Rica, and the helicopter is flying west at the end of the film… where the hell is it going?