As discussion of the movie "Jurassic Park" is threatening to overwhelm
the "At the Movies" item, I'm entering this item and inviting folks to
make their comments about "Jurassic Park" here.

74 responses total.

To get the discussion back on track, here's what we said in the "Movies"
item (reformatted somewhat for clarity):

#5 Lawrence Kestenbaum (polygon)
 
   "Jurassic Park" was interesting but, overall, a bit disappointing.
 
   Contrary to the critics' appraisal, it is not the scariest movie
   ever made.  It's no scarier than your average plain vanilla
   action/adventure movie, with lots of narrow escapes, and all the
   good guys survive.
 
#7 Aaron Larson (aaron)
 
   re #5:  It is interesting to compare the movie and the book,
           although neither is a masterpiece.
 
#9 the Maniak (sensei)
 
   The scariest movie ever made?  Jurassic Park?  <laughs>  Who uttered
   that tripe?  Sheesh...
 
#10 Steve Maser (hawkeye)
 
   I thought "JP" was the scariest -- or, rather, "most tensest" movie
   *I've* seen since "Aliens".  And I've seen a *lot* of movies.
 
#11 Jennie Dailey (griz)
 
   Chris went to see "Jurassic Park" and told me I'd hate it.
 
#12 Lawrence Kestenbaum (polygon)
 
   Why?
 
#13 Josh Grosse (jdg)
 
   I haven't seen it, but to paraphrase a number of bad reviews, "Great
   special effects, terribly preachy, poor script, bad
   characterization."
 
#15 liza reese (krishna)
 
   Jurassic Park was a pretty good movie, but it had it's faults.  I
   thought the plot ended up to be too "happily ever after" concerning
   numerous narrow escapes.
 
#16 the Maniak (sensei)
 
   You'd probably hate it, Jennie.  :)
 
#23 Patricia Snyder-Rayl (pegasus)
 
   Bill and I liked Last Action Hero much better than Jurassic Park.
   We were both disappointed with JP. The ending was too contrived and
   implausible.
 
#24 Leslie Smith (arabella)
 
   I saw "Jurassic Park" a couple of weeks ago.  I found it to be
   *very* scary.  Can't compare it to much, since I usually avoid scary
   movies.  (I didn't see any of the Alien movies.)  The dinosaurs were
   great.  The story and characters were not so great.  Gee, with all
   the money they spent on the film, you'd think they could have gotten
   a better script.
 
#41 Brian D. howard (ldiot)
 
   I saw jusassic park 4 times and going to see it again this weekend I
   hope
 
#50 Rane Curl (rcurl)
 
   Jurassic Park:
 
   I thought the book was superficial. The movie omits nearly half the
   book (especially all the build-up). The characters are all trivial.
   But the dinosaurs are another story! They were beautifully done, to
   the extent that I stopped wondering *how* they did them so
   realistically. But how did they get Cretaceous plants (all the
   emphasis was on DNA from blood)?
 
#51 Aaron Larson (aaron)
 
   I guess there were bits of pollen and leaves in that amber, as
   well....
 
   Don't think too hard about the science in Jurassic Park.
 
#52 Valerie Mates (popcorn)
 
   (no puns please)
 
   Ran across an article that says the video graphics in Jurassic Park
   were done with a new technique called Metaballs.  Traditional
   graphics modelling is done with polygons; this new technique uses
   spheres instead. The classic Metaball example is the human torso:
   you can use thousands of polygons to model it, or you can use 47
   metaballs and end up with a smoother and more lifelike image.
 
#53 Kent Nassen (kentn)
 
   Well congratulations to polygon on his marvelous graphics ability.
 
#54 Lawrence Kestenbaum (polygon)
 
   <polygon bows>
 
   Actually, when I thought about it, the most impressive special
   effects in Jurassic Park weren't the gigantic carnivores stomping
   around, but the scene with a baby dinosaur hatching out of an egg,
   with a bunch of awed humans helping it along and fondling it.
 
   I guess it was all done with computer graphics, smoke and mirrors.
   But, damn, it looked real.
 
#55 Aaron Larson (aaron)
 
   (Yeah.  Just don't change your loginid to "metaball," okay?  ;)
 
   Many of the scenes in Jurassic Park were done with models.  If there
   was a lot of rain splashing off of the dinosaur or if there was
   direct contact between the actors and the dinosaurs, you can be
   pretty sure it was a model and not computer animation.
 
#56 Marc Unangst (mju)
 
   According to someone in alt.folklore.computers, check out
   comp.graphics and comp.graphics.animation for info on the animation
   in JP.
 
#57 Rane Curl (rcurl)
 
   Nah. Lets talk about it here. How did they do the scene with the
   herd of whatevers (big turkeys...;->), grammasaurs, or something,
   running past the actors?
 
#59 Bruce Allen Price (bap)
 
   Went and saw Jurassic Park for the second time.  I was still not
   impressed with the animation.  That is, it was good, but not
   appresiably better than past dinosaur animation I have seen.
 
   Accept of course the long distance scenes, i.e., when we see the
   first dinos, or the herding dinosaurs.  also noticed several errors,
   such as the scene where the rover goes over the edge of the T. Rex
   compound.
 
   When the jeep arrives to investigate, the first scene shows part of
   the wall missing where the rover was pushed over by the T. Rex, then
   the next scene shows the good doctor yelling over the wall and seing
   the jeep er, rover below, but the wall is intact.
 
#61 John H. Remmers (remmers)
 
   (As "Jurassic Park" discussion is kinda overwhelming this item, I've
   entered a new item just to discuss "Jurassic Park".)

On a tabloid sleaze gossip note, I understand that Laura Dern and Jeff
Goldblum have been romantically involved since they made the movie.

re 1:59:  Where have you seen comparable animation?

3:      Oh, come on, didn't you ever watch "Land of the Lost"? :)

What was that? Grammasaurs? They hadn't been breeding for *that* long.

        Yeah, land of the lost, classic. Compared to that, the T-rex in
JP was just a guy in a big rubber suit.

        

WEll, for those who care :), Jurassic Park has made over $200 million
dollars, and broken a record for earning that much that fast. (Or something
like that.)

Apparently, the formula for a successful movie is to make 3time the cost
to produce it.  JP cost $60 million to produce, and has made over the
3 times necessary.

The thing that concerns me is that JP wasn't particularly good, but it's
a big blockbuster, with lots of hype.  So, since it brought in more than
the magic formula, we'll see more of these types of movies.

Hollywood loves to clone itself, and especially when the originial was a
a smash hit. The trouble is, the original wasn't such a great movie.

So, are we going to see more lukewarm movies with big hype and big bucks?

                        Pattie

Formula for a successful movie does *not* necessarily entail spending
3 times the cost of other movies.   El Mariachi (sp?) didn't cost anywhere
near as much as JP, but it did fantastically...  A good story told well
should do fine...but then that darn hype always seems to be necessary.

Ah, but merchandizing, and video sales, can make far more for your production
company than receipts from theaters.

Re #7: kentn
I believe you mis-understood what pegasus wrote in #6. She did not say that
a movie had to cost 3 times as much as other moveies to be successful,
rather she said that a movie had to *earn* at least 3 times what it cost
to produce in order to be considered a "success".

Yes, thanks Greg. :)

I heard this formula from some film critics discussing how much Super Mario
Brothers was going to be a flop.  Apparently, the studio needs to bring in
3 times the amount the studio put out to have the film made, for it to be
thought a successful movie.  They were all shaking their heads over the
amount of money put into SMB and that the studio had no hope of going
over this magic number.

My original ? still remains: Does the "success" of Jurassic Park mean
we're going to get more lukewarm movies with big hype and big bucks?

                        Pattie

Of course. Even: "Return to Jurassic Park" (after all, those dinos are
still there - and breeding).

We have been getting lukewarm movies with big hype and big bucks for years.
Jurassic Park didn't change anything.

Why can't we spend as much on a story as we do on efx?

Cyberpunk is here.  Style over substance.

#13:    It's probably because the American people are, on the whole, fairly
stupid and would much rather watch cool special effects than try to actually
sit still in a theatre for a whole hour and a half, maybe even more, and 
follow a good story.
        Also remember that teen-agers make up much of the target audience,
especially for summer films.  They tend to return again and again more than
most folks and are therefore extremely desireable.

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Jeff Goldblum was the guy in the black leather jacket.

Laura Dern was the female lead, the paleobiologist.

I don't remember the names of any characters.

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si....

polygon:  I read about the relationship i

I'm entering this discussion a little late, but re:scariness -- I saw JP
one week after being involved in a bit of vehicular mayhem that included
an inversion of horizontal orientation.  So, for me, the scariest part of 
the film was when Mr. Rex was flipping the Ford.  The sounds and feeling
wuz right on target.  (brrrrrrr)

There was a newspaper article recently (maybe y'day?) about hte
creation of sound effects for JP. Theater of the mind is alive
and well ........

This response has been erased.

(Did anybody here read "Juristic Park" in last Sunday's Times?)

Yes I read it. It's on the Op-Ed page A13 in >Monday's< Times.
It's kind of the ultimate page-long lawyer joke. I loved it (sorry).

(Sorry for the error -- I was handed the column out of what I guess was
a mixed stack of both days' papers.)

(re 22 - Yep.  Thank god for seatbelts.)

The book version is great!  I imageded, that Sean Connery would do Ian Malcolm 
the book version makes him out to be more of a Connery type.

Weren't all the dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period and none
from the Jurassic? Why does Hollywood go out of their way 
to be inaccurate?

I believe you have to blame The Author for that, not Hollywood.
He named the book *and* put the specific dinosaurs in.
Typical lack of attention to detail...

Dinosaurs existed throughout the Mesozoic era, consisting (oldest
first) of the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. They all
became extinct before the beginning of the Tertiary period of
the Cenozoic era. Steosaurus did not survive past the Jurassic.
Others survived all the way to the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary.

Here's a trivia question: All around the world is a very thin layer in the
geologic record that contains the remains of whatever volcanic/meteoric
event ended the age of the dinosaurs. It is ussually referred to as the
KT Boundary Event. Now I'm aware that this is the boundary between 
the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, so why isn't it called the CT boundary?
(I don't know. I'm hoping someone else has the answer.)

Because it was really Kate Bush who killed the dinosaurs?  I don't know...

No!  Iridium poisoning!  It was the iridium in the meteor that killed them.

  Read Cosmos. Carl Sagan has som interesting theories as how the dinos
died. I don't recall reading about iridium.

I don't think anybody claims that the dinosaurs were killed by iridium
poisoning from the alleged meteor.  Rather, the iridium layer is a good
indication that Earth was struck by a huge meteor at about that time.  Iridium
is very rare on Earth, but much more common among meteors (don't ask me how
scientists know t this)

re 28-30: While rcurl is correct that Dinosaurs were around
throughout the Jurassic period, it is also the case that almost all
of the commonly-known Dinosaurs except Stegasaurus are from the
Cretaceous. So Crighton (not Hollywood) puts mostly Cretaceous
dinosaurs like T. Rex in his book, and nevertheless calls it
Jurassic Park. Why?  Maybe because it sounds better.
(Cretaceous Park?)

Re 31: I believe 'K' is used for Cretaceous because 'C' was already
taken for another era. Hmmm. 1-letter abbreviations. Do
paleontologists all use unix? ;-)

Re 35: Exactly. Alvarez discovered the higher Iridium concentration
in some clays found in Italy at the KT boundary layer. We are not
talking about huge amounts of Iridium, just a substantially higher
level than the background amount (which is precious little indeed).
Higher levels of Iridium have been confirmed throughout much of the
world at the KT boundary since then. (I think Alvarez's work dates
to the late 1970's but I'm not sure).

At that time it was already well known that meteorites have higher
Iridium concentration than the Earth. They just ran meteorite
material through a mass spectrometer.  Alvarez went on to claim that
a large meteorite impact explained both the KT Iridium and the
demise of many Cretaceous species (including the Dinosaurs, but many
many others). This caused enormous disagreement which lasts until
the present, but has mostly died down. While many don't swallow the
whole theory yet, the real sticking point was that no evidence could
be found of any impact dating to the KT (at that time). In the last
few years very convincing evidence has been found of an enormous
impact on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, right at KT boundary time.
Most now agree that Alvarez's theory is substantially correct.

As to what actually *killed* the Dinosaurs, there is still a lot of
disagreement. It may have been climatic (nuclear winter-like
conditions engendered by the ejected stuff from the impact).  Most
likely climatic changes killed off large parts of the food chain.
The KT coundary also saw the extinction of zillions of species.
Nearly everything took a hit.  I think more than half the
dinoflagellate species in the ocean disappeared. This is the base of
the ocean's food chain.

(sorry to drift so far from the movie :-)

Nope, it's ok. That's pretty much current theory as I understand it.

There's an article in the current New York Review about Jurassic Park
by Stephen Jay Gould.  He says he asked Michael Crichton about all
those Cretaceous dinosaurs in "Jurassic" Park, and Crichton said,
"Oh gosh, I never thought of that!"  

Heh.

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