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The other thing that differentiates Spielberg's original work from all that's followed is the way it explored the details. From the sourcing of the amber, to th

The other thing that differentiates Spielberg's original work from all that's followed is the way it explored the details. From the sourcing of the amber, to the need to have paleontologists, botanists, and lawyers check Hammond's work, to the inclement weather, to the social interactions and workplace frustrations of the staff -- it all felt like much more of a living, breathing park than any of the renderings since. Like someone took out a sheet of paper and said, "If someone actually built this thing, what problems would they have to deal with?" 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.

xhkkffbf 1y ago
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.
- n3storm 1y ago
  Thank you. Nobody read the book? The problem with dinosaurs is the problem with Hollywood in general: lack of original ideas and good storytelling.
- mpalmer 1y ago
  Adaptation is a creative act. If it were a simple matter of not deleting things, why haven't we seen more totally faithful adaptations of well-written, detailed speculative fiction? Choosing to include details like this is a risk, because it means X% of the production's budget goes into making this detail apparent in the final cut. Painstaking production design work, location scouting, etc. Working through the details is a big part of the process, and Crichton gets the credit. But translating his detailed world faithfully to the screen is neither simple nor easy, nor does it automatically make your movie a box office success.
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    > why haven't we seen more totally faithful adaptations of well-written, detailed speculative fiction? Because people always think they can "fix" it to make it better.
    - 542354234235 1y ago
      No, it is because you can’t tell the same story in a different medium and expect it to work. Things that work in a book, like a character’s internal monolog, don’t work in a movie. Just taking that “facts” from a book and filming them almost never works. You have to look at the theme, tone, and the overall message being portrayed in the book and make a movie that captures those. The book has two tyrannosauruses, but is that important? Or is the singular focus on one tyrannosaurus work better in a movie? In the book, Hammond falls into a ditch and is eaten alive by compies. Would showing that in the movie been the best way to convey to the audience his downfall due to his own hubris, or would have felt more like a “cool dinosaur death”? Maybe it is better to show him looking old, sad, and defeated taking one last look at his park, before being helped into the helicopter by Dr. Grant. Him being slightly startled when Grant takes his arm shows how lost in thought he was, and the audience can imagine what thoughts are running through his mind about how his life’s work and legacy came to such utter ruin. Adaptation is an art and there is no one right way to do it, and the more I here people talk about “make it just like the book” the more I realize people have very little understanding about what makes good movies, or good stories in general.
      - WalterBright 1y ago
        > have very little understanding about what makes good movies I've seen many thousands of movies, and that does give me knowledge about what makes a movie better. For example, music makes a huuuuge difference, even if one may not even be aware of the music. For example, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings would be diminished considerably without their very good soundtracks. You can see this with the Hobbit movie - a lousy soundtrack, which severely damaged the movie. 2001 was greatly enhanced with the soundtrack. I read that Kubrick spent hundreds of hours listening to records searching for the perfect music. It paid off handsomely. What would "Blade Runner" be without the Vangelis soundtrack?
mpalmer 1y ago
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.
- optimalsolver 1y ago
  Lord of the Rings doesn't dwell on the day-to-day details of how the various kingdoms functioned, and yet it's still a great story.
  - Detrytus 1y ago
    I disagree. It does not dwell on economy, or technology, but at least we have pretty good overview of social fabric and power structures: how kings get to power, how they make decisions, how they raise armies, how they deal with allies, etc. Another thing: Bret Devereaux has some very detailed analysis on his blog ([1],[2]) of various LOTR battles/war campaings and it seems that Tolkien was meticulous about getting details of the warfare right, like how far and how fast can army move, what the commander can and cannot know at given time, and how medieval style battles are actually won/lost (including the impact of morale). Compare that with the mess that are two last seasons of Game of Thrones... [1] https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondor/ https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondo... [2] https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helms-deep-part-i-bargaining-for-goods-at-helms-gate/ https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helm...
  - vkou 1y ago
adrian_b 1y ago
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.
- jfengel 1y ago
  Sadly, that is often a consequence of trying to turn a novel into a three hour (or less) film. Since then we're seeing a lot more studios willing to take a chance on a TV series of perhaps a dozen hours, which seems to map better into a novel. Roughly that's a chapter or two per hour. Perhaps a Jurassic Park TV show reboot would do better than an increasingly hokey set of sequels.
  - Loughla 1y ago
    We also have the mix of both where they make an amazing show based on novels then ruin the entire world with terrible writing when the source material runs dry. Glares at Game of Thrones
    - jmb99 1y ago
      GoT still blows me away. You had about as close to an infinite budget as you can get in television, access to some of the best writers on the planet, as well as general guidance from Martin, and yet somehow you end up with season 8 (and 7, and to a lesser extent 6). It wouldn’t surprise me if Winds of Winter never gets published due in part to the TV series’ writing, which is to me the biggest loss.
jccalhoun 1y ago
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?
- defrost 1y ago
  Indulging the notion that money is no object; perhaps a mix of * using pre existing lava tubes, and * hiring the engineering teams that tunneled under Sydney harbor and elsewhere for rail expansion, the teams that did the London sewer and new London rail tunnels, and * not hiring The Boring Company.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
christophilus 1y ago
He got so many details right, and yet still created that UNIX meme. That’s amazing.

xhkkffbf 1y ago

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.

n3storm 1y ago
Thank you. Nobody read the book? The problem with dinosaurs is the problem with Hollywood in general: lack of original ideas and good storytelling.
mpalmer 1y ago
Adaptation is a creative act. If it were a simple matter of not deleting things, why haven't we seen more totally faithful adaptations of well-written, detailed speculative fiction? Choosing to include details like this is a risk, because it means X% of the production's budget goes into making this detail apparent in the final cut. Painstaking production design work, location scouting, etc. Working through the details is a big part of the process, and Crichton gets the credit. But translating his detailed world faithfully to the screen is neither simple nor easy, nor does it automatically make your movie a box office success.
- WalterBright 1y ago
  > why haven't we seen more totally faithful adaptations of well-written, detailed speculative fiction? Because people always think they can "fix" it to make it better.
  - 542354234235 1y ago
    No, it is because you can’t tell the same story in a different medium and expect it to work. Things that work in a book, like a character’s internal monolog, don’t work in a movie. Just taking that “facts” from a book and filming them almost never works. You have to look at the theme, tone, and the overall message being portrayed in the book and make a movie that captures those. The book has two tyrannosauruses, but is that important? Or is the singular focus on one tyrannosaurus work better in a movie? In the book, Hammond falls into a ditch and is eaten alive by compies. Would showing that in the movie been the best way to convey to the audience his downfall due to his own hubris, or would have felt more like a “cool dinosaur death”? Maybe it is better to show him looking old, sad, and defeated taking one last look at his park, before being helped into the helicopter by Dr. Grant. Him being slightly startled when Grant takes his arm shows how lost in thought he was, and the audience can imagine what thoughts are running through his mind about how his life’s work and legacy came to such utter ruin. Adaptation is an art and there is no one right way to do it, and the more I here people talk about “make it just like the book” the more I realize people have very little understanding about what makes good movies, or good stories in general.
    - WalterBright 1y ago
      > have very little understanding about what makes good movies I've seen many thousands of movies, and that does give me knowledge about what makes a movie better. For example, music makes a huuuuge difference, even if one may not even be aware of the music. For example, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings would be diminished considerably without their very good soundtracks. You can see this with the Hobbit movie - a lousy soundtrack, which severely damaged the movie. 2001 was greatly enhanced with the soundtrack. I read that Kubrick spent hundreds of hours listening to records searching for the perfect music. It paid off handsomely. What would "Blade Runner" be without the Vangelis soundtrack?

mpalmer 1y ago

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.

optimalsolver 1y ago
Lord of the Rings doesn't dwell on the day-to-day details of how the various kingdoms functioned, and yet it's still a great story.
- Detrytus 1y ago
  I disagree. It does not dwell on economy, or technology, but at least we have pretty good overview of social fabric and power structures: how kings get to power, how they make decisions, how they raise armies, how they deal with allies, etc. Another thing: Bret Devereaux has some very detailed analysis on his blog ([1],[2]) of various LOTR battles/war campaings and it seems that Tolkien was meticulous about getting details of the warfare right, like how far and how fast can army move, what the commander can and cannot know at given time, and how medieval style battles are actually won/lost (including the impact of morale). Compare that with the mess that are two last seasons of Game of Thrones... [1] https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondor/ https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondo... [2] https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helms-deep-part-i-bargaining-for-goods-at-helms-gate/ https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helm...
- vkou 1y ago

adrian_b 1y ago

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.

jfengel 1y ago
Sadly, that is often a consequence of trying to turn a novel into a three hour (or less) film. Since then we're seeing a lot more studios willing to take a chance on a TV series of perhaps a dozen hours, which seems to map better into a novel. Roughly that's a chapter or two per hour. Perhaps a Jurassic Park TV show reboot would do better than an increasingly hokey set of sequels.
- Loughla 1y ago
  We also have the mix of both where they make an amazing show based on novels then ruin the entire world with terrible writing when the source material runs dry. Glares at Game of Thrones
  - jmb99 1y ago
    GoT still blows me away. You had about as close to an infinite budget as you can get in television, access to some of the best writers on the planet, as well as general guidance from Martin, and yet somehow you end up with season 8 (and 7, and to a lesser extent 6). It wouldn’t surprise me if Winds of Winter never gets published due in part to the TV series’ writing, which is to me the biggest loss.

jccalhoun 1y ago

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?

defrost 1y ago
Indulging the notion that money is no object; perhaps a mix of * using pre existing lava tubes, and * hiring the engineering teams that tunneled under Sydney harbor and elsewhere for rail expansion, the teams that did the London sewer and new London rail tunnels, and * not hiring The Boring Company.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

christophilus 1y ago

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