Really, the only significant criticism you can stick to this film is that it wasn't as strongly mature and/or dark as the novel it was based on.
Otherwise...it hits all the right buttons with the id (tense action scenes), ego (Doctors Grant and Sattler), and super-ego (Doctor Malcolm).
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It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing .
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To be honest there have been very few big production dinosaur movies that followed Jurassic Park:
- We had the JP sequels which were all inferior
- King Kong was about the ape not the dinosaurs (and it wasn't a very good film anyway)
- Disney's Dinosaur was an animation film
- A couple of other films with lower production values like Will Ferrell's Land of the Lost and Brendan Fraser's Journey to the Center of the Earth (all sucked)
Maybe I'm forgetting some?
Anyway, no studio or director ever tried to top JP it seems.
For within each death there is always a new life, a new beginning - Dillon, Alien 3
A similar situation holds true for zombie cinema. Pretty much no film about the mindless undead since 28 Days Later or perhaps Dawn of the Dead (2004) has managed to impress just as much if not moreso.
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It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing .
At least we have The Walking Dead series there.
Not even TV series have touched dinos. Only Terra Nova, but I haven't seen any episode yet and I haven't read many positive reviews for it.
For within each death there is always a new life, a new beginning - Dillon, Alien 3
There was also the cheesy UK show Primeval - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0808096/reference
The ridiciliously bad Terra Nova, The Lost World - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0240278/reference , Dinotopia - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0310443/reference , The 70s classic Land Of The Lost - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071005/reference and its reboot 20 years later - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101130/reference
Probably forgot some
Now, I really want a film based off of Mark Schultz's comic "Xenozoic Tales" aka "Cadillacs and Dinosaurs".
The basic premise is that after a series of cataclysmic natural disasters (most of which if not all were caused by mankind's destructive industrial practices), man went underground in these large shelters meant to house enough people to repopulate the Earth and stayed there...for centuries.
Eventually, the descendants of the original inhabitants leave the shelters to find a world vastly different from how the "ancients" described it: decidedly prehistoric in environmental makeup and in regards to the fauna. Yup, dinosaurs are back.
Many years pass (though not quite as many as the last time around) and humans are now thriving in newly erected towns/colonies/cities on the surface.
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There's much more to the setting, but that's the basic outline.
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It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing .
Hm.
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It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing .
Clearly you never saw 'Planet of Dinosaurs'.
Here, it's so good it's on youtube!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59rozGjtzh0
Seriously, in its own way, it's a lot of fun.
😁
For within each death there is always a new life, a new beginning - Dillon, Alien 3
This is definitely the greatest dinosaur film ever. :)
RIP
Jeff Hanneman
1964-2013
That could be true for quite a few genres/sub-genres.
- No shark movie has surpassed Jaws.
- No tiny creature flick has surpassed Gremlins (I argue Critters is just as good, but you'd be hard-pressed to find more of those fans than for Gremlins).
- No snake movie has surpassed Anaconda to my knowledge.
- No extraterrestrial film has managed to surpass Alien, at least as long as you're considering it a horror movie.
- Nothing from the 90s onward has surpassed the great slasher uprising of the 80s.
Cena doesn't overcome any odds. He's a wrestler with a God Mode cheat on.share
Carnosaur had some of the gory people-eating scenes you wish Jurassic Park had had. Plus, it had Diane Ladd, Laura Dern's mother.
shareI agree with the OP. This film may not be perfect but it was the best dinosaur film ever made.
It's not depressing that no other dinosaur film topped Jurassic Park because at least one has. The Lost World: Jurassic Park topped it.
shareI disagree, jmhammerstein. The sequel did not have the same impact as the original. I am still not quite sure why - was it maybe the typical Hollywood formula of going overboard with everything in sequels, since they crammed just too many dinosaurs in it? Or the fact that Sam Neill and Laura Dern were absent as the main protagonists? - but the first "Jurassic Park" still remains pure magic. I wish the sequels were as good as this film. I truly wish.
I am pretty sure there are some great dinosaur scripts out there. But unfortunately, Hollywood funding needs to find their way to them. I wish they would try with at least one (original!) dinosaur movie each year, and then sooner or later they would make a couple of great ones by default.
This way, though, we only have sequels and prequels, and thus great dinosaur movies are still a scarce commodity.
(Making independent movies about dinosaurs is theoretically possible, yet problematic due to budget constraints, which is a pity)
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That's a good one.
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It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing .
A big part of it is believability. It seems any kind of "middle of the Earth" or "lost continent" style movies are impossible to suppress reality to make a good film. If there was an 'inner Earth" or another large island or continent out there, surely we would've found it a long time ago. Therefore, the amount of stories you can use for dinosaurs are extremely limited. It boils down to science making dinosaurs (like JP), or traveling to another world to find dinosaurs (and that type of sci fi has a huge failure rate in Hollywood). Making another 'mad scientist' type of dino movie would be considered a JP ripoff.
It would be next to impossible to dig up a good story that audiences would latch onto.
Way I see it, there are six ways to bring dinosaurs into the picture.
1. Time travel. Either the dinosaurs are brought to the present or people from the present (future?) visit the past to see the ancient lifeforms.
2. Genetic engineering.
3. Magic.
4. Virtual reality.
5. Dreaming/hallucination. This is arguably an offshoot of virtual reality...in spirit.
6. Extraterrestrials. Basically: Alien Saurians.
What other options exist?
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It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing .