Thank you.
I was thinking itâs pretty crazy there was no sequel to E.T. Maybe everybody else knows this, but Spielberg and the other original E.T. writer did write a treatment, but it obviously didnât get made.
Jurassic World Dominion
3/10
Donât see this movie unless youâre forced to. Itâs everything wrong with modern tentpole movie making. Itâs somehow an international spy thriller where explanations of why people are doing things take a back seat to car chases and planes flying mixed in with the monotonous park has failed and the dinosaurs are loose. The dinosaurs in this movie are relentless, theyâre chasing and attacking the protagonists every couple of minutes and those dinosaur honks and screams that only appeared a couple of times in previous movies are blaring every couple of minutes. My ears felt assaulted.
Also itâs odd that in modern cinema you can have a high res ultra 4k CGI dinosaur and have less suspension of disbelief than you do with an animatronic.
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CGI seems to have gotten noticeably horrible in recent years. Or else Iâm just old and nostalgic. Iâve seen big-budget action movies that are effects-driven and yet they still seemed totally unconvincing.
I feel like in the older days of meh special effects (especially for monsters/creatures etc.), they used to pull out all the stops in creatively obscuring the mediocrityâŚtheyâd play with the lighting, atmosphere, speed of movement, mix in closeups of something they really spent a ton of time on but doesnât have a lot of moving parts, etc. The final scene of Jaws kinda shows what happened back in those days when you abandoned that strat and show your shitty animatronic creature in full view.
Now they can generate these super high res creatures and theyâre super proud of them so they get shown front and center all the time, but they still kinda fall in the uncanny valley so it doesnât work. Itâs almost like they need to pull back a little and use some of those old tricks to obscure them a bit more.
CGI has become so much cheaper and easier over the years that itâs replacing things normally done by practical effects.
I donât always agree with The Critical Drinker but he nails it
I think part of it is that no one involved in making the fifteenth Jurassic Park film actually gives a shit, so why not put in the bare minimum amount of craft into the effects.
It was one of those Kong vs. Godzilla movies I saw where the CGI of the monsters was aggressively disappointing, and I usually never care about that sort of thing. Iâm obv not expecting brilliant cinematography from a cash-grab monster movie, but the monsters punching each other should at least look cool.
It occurs to me that as someone at the tail end of Gen-X Iâm one of the last people who will remember going to movies specifically for the effects. It was a whole genre back then: JP, Terminator 2, Tornado, etc., movies where people raved about how realistic the effects look. We all take that sort of thing for granted now.
Special effects are worse for the same reason itâs a bad idea to buy video games day 1 now. Studios have a set release date and a time crunch. Not everything gets done to standard anymore, the important part is to get it out and meet your date. Video games often have numerous patches to make a game playable these days. Movies will not have every effect be perfect, itâs more important itâs out July 4th and then the sequel or next movie ILM is doing is out shortly after.
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The thing is the effects, or at least the dinosaurs, in this are good. By good I mean extremely high resolution, detailed and the modeling seems like itâd take a lot of processing power. The dinosaurs didnât seem to be obviously put in post production, like they didnât seem obviously non existent, but also at no point did I actually believe dinosaurs existed in this world.
The only times the dinosaurs âfeltâ real is when they used animatronics even though they are more obviously fake because they moved more clunkily and jerkedly than a CGI dinosaur. Also so much of the scenes, not just the dinosaurs, felt hauntingly post produced that my mind just rejected the whole scene out of hand even while abstractly knowing how high res the dinosaur is.
Yeah this is what I was saying before about them still falling in the uncanny valley. Sometimes itâs a case where the CGI stuff is just so high-res it almost looks âmore realâ than the real people and things around it (if that makes sense) so the whole effect falls apart.
I think another factor is that the more analog the special effects are, the more realistic the reactions of the actors are. When the actors move like theyâre interacting with a green screen, the whole thing comes across as fake.
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True. This was famously blamed for some aspects of the shitty performances in the Star Wars prequels.
Itâs one of the reasons the Mandalorian is so much betterâŚthe use of the Volume as well as practical puppets and ship cockpits, etc makes it so much easier for the actors to actually act without seeming to stare off into space.
Thereâs no substitute for practical effects. Even JP made heavy use of top-notch practical effects alongside the CGI.
Agreed. Wish I wasnât super underwhelmed about every other aspect of that show (and all the Disney SW TV stuff really).
A good director has made this work though. Dune was great! I loved BR2049 as well.
Just another âTop Gun: Maverick is awesomeâ post. My kids, who knew nothing about the original, loved it too. Itâs great.
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I think itâs a very solid movie that manages to be overrated due to nostalgia and because it exceeds expectations for a sequel by not being awful.
Still definitely a movie everyone should go see, and I really enjoyed it. I just think people have gone overboard with the praise of it.
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Very likely. The nostalgia element is strong, both in the story and in the style of moviemaking.