Comments | thebitterguy: It haunts me still

thebitterguy

It haunts me still

Dec 17, 2005 23:57

The first time I saw Jurassic Park, I left the theatre and my date and I could only say "wow" for a few minutes. Now, I know a lot of folks out there will disapprove of my enjoyment of the film (at this point, I wish I smoked, so I could gesticulate with my hands in a mildly disappointing manner). I honestly appreciate their opinions, but fuck ( Read more... )

cinema

Comments 24

antikythera December 18 2005, 05:10:54 UTC

Thank you. I'm not crazy with respect to this particular subject. Jurassic Park is still one of the few CGI-heavy movies out there that doesn't look like a cartoon, and where I can actually forget I'm looking at CGI instead of having to suspend my sense of disbelief.

It's very interesting to hear that someone else has made the same observation that I did independently. This is not nostalgia of the sort that makes Thundercats a much better show in your memory than it turns out to be when you get around to watching it again as an adult. Jurassic Park holds up over time, and almost everything else that's followed it looks like crap.

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antikythera December 18 2005, 05:32:39 UTC

I just had this memory in my head of Thundercats being a really gorgeous show, visually. When I went back to watch it again, it was badly animated with slow voices talking down to the audience. I turned it off in the hopes of keeping my good memories.

madmanofprague December 18 2005, 17:46:35 UTC

Same with me and the old Transformers cartoons. I guess you never really notice the crappy animation as a kid.

Thread 5

The CGI in JP was incredible... thothmeister December 18 2005, 05:12:12 UTC

... only some of the battles in Return of the King could challenge it for that sense of reality.

Storywise though... I'll always have my gripes about the "Ninja Rex" in the climax. A creature of such mass and size isn't noticable until it strikes? Uh... no. Still don't buy into that.

Re: The CGI in JP was incredible... sassy_fae December 18 2005, 15:38:57 UTC

The thing that made the CG in JP so incredible was that it was able to suspend the disbelief of the audience so well. The ninja rex? Never even noticed, I was too enthralled with the action :)

Re: The CGI in JP was incredible... thothmeister December 18 2005, 16:37:31 UTC

It happens when the velociraptors have the heroes trapped in a museum near the end... cramped quarters. Suddenly when they are cornered a T-rex magically appears to gobble down the 'raptors.

Re: The CGI in JP was incredible... thebitterguy December 18 2005, 16:41:16 UTC

Well, I'm sure she noticed the actual T-Rex, just never saw the logical incongruency of it teleporting into the middle of the room.

kinra December 18 2005, 05:58:18 UTC

When Jurassic Park was made, nobody had a "CG tolerance" -- what was being attempted was to create images that looked like real things, fooling the eye and visual processing cortex.

Since then, it's been "assumed" that there are, well, "tools in the toolbox". The wheel may well need to be reinvented each time in order to fool us like they did then.

thetathx1138 December 18 2005, 07:08:54 UTC

I think part of it was you had Spielberg riding herd, and the other part was that JP remains, to my knowledge, the only CGI built on practical FX technology and it was heavily mixed with practicals. They did the movements with a stop-motion model hooked up to a computer if I remember correctly. Since then, that procedure has been dumped for wholesale generation in the computer, which is a very flawed model to me.

Also, Spielberg mostly cloaked the CGI in darkness, rain, and fog. I wish more filmmakers had the brains to do this.

dawgstar December 18 2005, 07:20:58 UTC

I know what you mean. Like many kids, I was a dinosaur nut and the first time they gape at the dinos on the island, I wouldn't say I got teary but there was definitely a tiny burning sensation in the corner of my eye.

I wonder if a little of it is, that JP was trying to be "right" about dinosaurs (in the same was Crichton was in the novel, or at least attempted). The rest of them, eh, they don't care so much. We get them on the Sci-Fi channel original movies these days, for goodness' sake. With JP, though, one could think that very possibly almost maybe this is how they would act, so wow. YMMV, etc.