Yes, Margarita Guy was great .gif) |
Jurassic World • Page 25
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MrSensible 26,517 posts
Seen 1 day ago
Registered 16 years agoSomething I haven't seen mentioned much - I really enjoyed Irrfan Khan's character in this, he was quite likeable. -
Note for future summer blockbusters: have a Margarita Guy play a guitar which shoots fire -
Margarita guy, in heels! -
I feel the urge to once again point out that Margarita Guy was Jimmy Buffett. -
Jimmy Buffett plays flamethrower guitar? -
RabbitHead 140 posts
Seen 6 years ago
Registered 6 years agoGood article from a movie effects expert about movies with crappy effects. It bashes a lot of movies, but by far the most is Jurassic World. If you read the article, it shows off the examples quite well. Frankly, it's just baffling anyone would think Jurassic World has good effects. It displays all the hallmarks of shitty big budget CGI gone off the rails.
http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-expensive-films-end-up-with-crappy-special-effects/
#5. Color Grading Makes Everything Look Like A Fantasy
Movies like Transformers and The Hunger Games are so aggressively teal and orange that they look like big-budget adaptations of a Spencer Gifts blacklight poster. As we've explained before, the reason for this is that those two colors are on opposite sides of the color wheel, and as such are immediately pleasing to human eyes. Since human skin best resembles orange more than anything else on that wheel, color graders had an easy starting point to completely ruin every film they work on.
If you're wondering what I mean by "color grading," take a look at this comparison between two similar scenes in Jurassic World and Jurassic Park:
Notice how everything in Jurassic World has a foggy layer of desaturated blue over it? It's subtle, and we've gotten used to it because every movie does it now, so just for shits, I swapped the two styles for comparison ...
For the life of my family, I can't fucking figure out why anyone would want to watch a movie that's filtered to look like someone refusing to remove their Ray-Bans. The reason you don't see this in Jurassic Park or other '90s movies is because it hadn't been invented yet. Color grading was made popular by the Coen brothers after CGI became the go-to special effect, when they decided to use color grading to make O Brother, Where Art Thou? look like an old sepia-toned photograph. But their point was to detract realism from the finished product, whereas Jurassic Park was (originally) about creating larger-than-life creatures in a real-world setting.
#4. CGI Was Originally Used As A Last Resort
Except for four minutes of screen time, every special effect you see in Jurassic Park was either an animatronic or Jeff Goldblum's enchanting chest hair. And while it might have just been a budget issue or the technological limitations of CGI at the time, the system worked, goddammit.
The moment we need to see a close-up is when they switch to a robot, even though it in no way interacts with the surrounding environment. This is something the filmmakers went out of their way to do even though both the T-rex animatronics were such fatties that they actually built the sets around them instead of trucking them from place to place.
And that's the thing about animatronics: Even though they're cheaper to make, they're really hard to use. It's basically a foam condom stuck over a Truckasaurus skeleton trying to emote, and the process eats into the workday faster than a modular wall and Internet pornography. But the result is an in-camera lighting reference for the digital artists and close-up shots that don't look like the movie Spawn. The only animatronic we've seen so far in Jurassic World has been obscured by leaves like they are embarrassed that it's even in the film. Meanwhile, it appears that Terminator Genisys has completely forgotten that, despite ushering in the age of CGI, Terminator 2 was like 80 percent surprised-face Robert Patrick puppets.
Shit, sons -- even Jurassic Park III knew to rely on head-to-toe animatronic raptors, even though that meant having one talk to Sam Neill like the goddamn Sinclair family.
Meanwhile, in the Jurassic World trailer, every single dinosaur is CGI, no matter how close we are to them. When Chris Pratt is interacting with three Velociraptors that are right in front of his face, they might as well be cartoons, because they're right next to a living, breathing person constantly reminding us all what a living, breathing being actually looks like:
Compare that to the "clever girl" scene from the original Jurassic Park, which was basically just Stan Winston throwing a robot at a dude.
That's always going to look more convincing, because we know that robot is physically there, biting Muldoon's head. But let's say Jurassic World does have amazing animatronics to match the CGI. They also better know how to film them, because ...
#3. Most Films Forget That A Camera Needs To Physically Exist
I'm not sure when, but somewhere down the line directors forgot that movies are still supposed to take place in real life, and they turned the camera into a coke-fueled Lakitu from Super Mario 64, just zooming around wherever the fuck it feels like. The audience needs the camera to physically occupy some kind of actual space for us to maintain a frame of reference, or else, once again, everything just looks like a freaking cartoon. For example, take a look at this scene from The A-Team, even though I'm like 70 percent certain that The A-Team was just a practical joke everyone played on Liam Neeson for his birthday:
Soak up that Merrie Melodies, dick-slapping nonsense. As Furious 7 so elegantly demonstrated, we love to see fancy vehicles plummet from the sky like God's forsaken Hot Wheels -- only Furious 7 knew that we need to see that shit for real in order for it to have any kind of effect. Not only did The A-Team use CGI to phone in the madness, it made sure the cinematography was so cartoony that even people with catastrophic head trauma couldn't possibly mistake it for being real.
Then, there's the raptor chase scene from Jurassic Boogaloo, which has the camera zipping around like it's in an XFL game:
There's no edge to shooting Velociraptors like a pod race. It doesn't serve any purpose beside making me disappointed in creatures I used to pretend to be when I was 10 and sometimes at 30. This is one of many situations where having a camera that can pass through any physical object on-screen detracts from anything on-screen having any kind of presence -- it's just another reminder that what you're seeing isn't real, like that cavernous goblin-shanty from The Hobbit:
By sweeping the camera hundreds of feet through the environment, everything comes off like a model train set with tiny people composited in. The irony is that old-school miniatures were shot in a way to avoid looking tiny, something digital artists have completely forgotten about -- especially in Jurassic World, it seems:
In these cases it's not that the CGI is undetailed or shitty, but rather that it's all-encompassing. The creatures aren't bursting into the real world because there's no real world to penetrate. Instead they shot some extras over a green screen and stuck them at the bottom like a particularly bad episode of Mystery Science Theater. And as directors opt for more and more digital sets, suddenly every movie looks like regular people inserted into a computer-generated cartoon, instead of CGI elements dropped into a real world. Even Jurassic Park III knew that when you're putting a digital creature into a real environment, you don't just say "fuck it" and make everything CGI. And seriously -- how many times do I have to use Jurassic Park III as a positive example? That entire clown show of a movie was incited by a parasailing accident.
#2. Modern Movies Forget We Can Tell When Something Looks Fake
Now replace Schwarzenegger with a hulking CGI dinosaur (shouldn't be hard) and you see why people get so mad at Jurassic World. It's not that the original Jurassic Park looks better because the CGI is better, but rather that the original film knew to hide its effects. With the exception of the extremely dated Brachiosaurus scene, most of the effects in Jurassic Park are hidden by rain and darkness.
Jurassic World, on the other hand, sticks the digital puppets right in our faces like it's a banana cream pie filled with teeth:
They're literally shoving us down the CGI's throat as if to say "HEY LOOK! LOOK AT THIS!" so that we can't help but point out any and all imperfections. And since not even the freaking environment around those dinosaurs is real, it's comically easy for people to notice that the effects don't look right. I mean ... they couldn't spring an extra day to shoot real water? Even Lake Placid did that:
Yeah ... remember that piece of shit? The late 1990s effects of a horrifically bad giant crocodile movie should have the lasting power of a snowball in my pants -- and yet even this piece of hot garbage had the modesty to quickly cut away from what little CGI they used. And considering that it's not inexplicably tinted orange and blue, takes place in a real environment with real splashing water, and is aware of its visual limitations -- I actually prefer this shot to the Jurassic World orgy of Mosasaurus eating a shark, if only because it understood that the presentation of the effect is just as important as the effect itself.
#1. Big Effects Sequences Are Supposed To Be Treated With Awe
The original Jurassic Park spent minutes on the Tyrannosaurus' approach. When we finally see it, we spend another several minutes on the thunderous horror of a dinosaur tearing a jeep apart as it frantically tries to eat all of the characters on-screen. The Lost World repeated this in the scene where the Tyrannosaurs knock Jeff Goldblum's trailer off a cliff, and even dumb ol' Jurassic Park III spent a lot of time on showing us exactly how much of an airplane's ass a giant dinosaur would kick (answer: all of it). Now look at this ungodly shit from Jurassic World:
Sure, that looks pretty awesome, but destruction on that scale should blow our fucking minds. The response to dinosaurs wrecking a helicopter should be nothing short of paralysis, but this scene has no sense of gravity or consequence. There's no scale to it. There's even going to be a scene where (minor spoilers) a Pteranodon picks up a woman and literally drops her into the mouth of the Mosasaurus. It doesn't matter how real the CGI looks, because that scene belongs in a fucking Sharknado movie. It's an absurd cartoon orgy.
And so that's why some people are saying that the new Jurassic World "looks fake": The CGI is powerful, but the people who made it clearly don't have enough respect for that power. I know I'm just quoting Malcolm at this point ... but shit. They really were so preoccupied with whether or not they could have 88 dinosaurs throwing exploding helicopters at each other that they didn't stop to think if they should. -
Scurrminator 9,045 posts
Seen 3 months ago
Registered 16 years agoBut clearly no one gives a fuck. -
richarddavies 8,312 posts
Seen 6 hours ago
Registered 13 years agoWas going to go watch this, this weekend but after I watched this review I might give it a miss. He makes some good points.
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StarchildHypocrethes 33,974 posts
Seen 11 hours ago
Registered 17 years agoI saw this last night and was a bit disappointed tbh. It lacked any of the sense of wonder Jurassic Park had and the plot was beyond b-movie bad. May have been the cinema I was at, but the effects looked a bit crap in 3D too. Was just a bit meh really, and I'd been so excited 
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SweetMrGibs 1,429 posts
Seen 3 weeks ago
Registered 10 years ago@RabbitHead
You are Comic Book Guy -
DUFFMAN5 26,891 posts
Seen 16 hours ago
Registered 17 years agoStarchildHypocrethes wrote:
Also watched yesterday in 2D. I would say a 7/10. Good chemistry between the leads and BDH is hot. Kids were terrible. I thought the cgi was good.
I saw this last night and was a bit disappointed tbh. It lacked any of the sense of wonder Jurassic Park had and the plot was beyond b-movie bad. May have been the cinema I was at, but the effects looked a bit crap in 3D too. Was just a bit meh really, and I'd been so excited -
RabbitHead 140 posts
Seen 6 years ago
Registered 6 years ago@SweetMrGibs
You are unfunny unoriginal twat.
I'm glad you're proud of being a dim wit. " OMG! Too much text! LOLZ what a nerd!"
Instead we get these gems.
SweetMrGibs wrote:
Dumbass.
Did Fincher have any involvement in Alien 3 Directors Cut? I love that version of the film - it makes much more sense.
Edited by RabbitHead at 13:07:27 17-06-2015 -
Finally seen it.
I'd say it's fairly good. There's some iffy moments here and there, but it does the job of being a monster type movie asked of it well. It explains certain things about the dinosaurs etc well, but I think the characters could of done with being a bit more fleshed out. The kids were okay and so was Owen and Clarie, but the antagonist felt a bit too comic book evil in his motives. Think I'd of rewritten that part so it's more of an internal disagreement on how to deal with said matter then some grand scheme.
Still, it's an enjoyable film that sits just below JP1 like others say.
I can actually see a where a sequel could stem from too. Wu and Vic were clearly working for someone else.
Edited by TSD at 20:16:31 17-06-2015 -
Mark1412 2,336 posts
Seen 4 days ago
Registered 13 years agoI thought it was disappointing too. The characters were really boring and there was no sense of awe. Might just be the fact I'm not 8 this time round but I watched JP recently and still loved the first reveal and the helicopter ride in. BDH was delightful though.
Also couldn't get over how shit the security procedures were for a park full of dinosaurs. Prodders ftw. -
aaron0288 652 posts
Seen 7 hours ago
Registered 13 years agoricharddavies wrote:
Why not go and make your own mind up rather than letting someone else do it for you...
Was going to go watch this, this weekend but after I watched this review I might give it a miss. He makes some good points.
Edited by aaron0288 at 20:18:02 17-06-2015 -
@Mark1412 the procedures weren't really the problem for me, it was more the lackadaisical way the escape was handled. It went to, oh! It's escaped...send the team in to oh...they failed. Right, let's leave the island. I think Vics character could of been better if it was him being aggressive with the staff and simply refusing to accept they've lost control resulting in making things worse or something.
Edited by TSD at 20:22:29 17-06-2015 -
twelveways 7,131 posts
Seen 2 years ago
Registered 15 years agoAre we spoilering this thread?
I enjoyed it a lot, it had flaws but once the dinosaur escaped the action was brilliant. as a dinosaur fan it was great seeing so many different kinds. It didn't have that wow factor like the first one did and that's because we already saw it done spectacularly in the first one. The film self-references this when they talk about the need to create a new dinosaur. They couldn't just remake the first and, with such big shoes to fill I think they did a really good job with the franchise. -
richarddavies 8,312 posts
Seen 6 hours ago
Registered 13 years agoaaron0288 wrote:
I'm guessing you've not watched the video...
richarddavies wrote:
Why not go and make your own mind up rather than letting someone else do it for you...
Was going to go watch this, this weekend but after I watched this review I might give it a miss. He makes some good points.
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Derblington 35,161 posts
Seen 2 days ago
Registered 17 years agoYour spoilers aren't spoilers...
Edited by Derblington at 21:00:14 17-06-2015 -
Duffking 16,964 posts
Seen 8 hours ago
Registered 15 years agoI enjoyed it. The actual escape was a bit contrived and the raptors were silly, but other than that it was great. -
aaron0288 652 posts
Seen 7 hours ago
Registered 13 years agoricharddavies wrote:
I did not.
I'm guessing you've not watched the video...
Now that I have.....gif)
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YenRug 4,553 posts
Seen 1 year ago
Registered 14 years ago -
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