Hacker Cinema
Jurassic Park
1993 · Film · 127 min
Part of Jurassic Park Collection
Directed by Steven Spielberg
A wealthy entrepreneur secretly creates a theme park featuring living dinosaurs drawn from prehistoric DNA. Before opening day, he invites a team of experts and his two eager grandchildren to experience the park and help calm anxious investors. However, the park is anything but amusing as the security systems go off-line and the dinosaurs escape.
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439 comments on Hacker News
I guess it's a sign of getting old when I see the world classic and expect Gone With the Wind and Casablanca, but instead the list has Arrival, The Martian, and the Bourne Identity. The Sixth Sense is on the list for the US and it's a movie I coincidentally rewatched last night, again finding it to be a masterpiece.
In any case, very different list in Canada: Rocketman, Ford v Ferrari, Little Miss Sunshine, Catch Me If You Can, Jurassic Park, and the Proposal.
Totally.
FSN was a 3D file system developed by Silicon Graphics. The interface shown in the movie was customized for cinematic effect.
Jurassic Park also used real Silicon Graphics machines on the set.
The only movie I've ever enjoyed after reading the book was Jurassic Park. I've never seen the Dune movies or most other book-based movies, but honestly The Martian and Project Hail Mary were tempting. I'll probably surrender to one of those two someday.
In my small town Blockbuster was amazing. We had one or two video stores with tiny libraries and were poorly run before that. When Blockbuster opened we were ecstatic and mindblown by the selection. Blockbuster would often carry 30 or 40 copies of new releases and you could actually have a good shot at finding Jurassic Park or Batman or whatever the week it came out on VHS (this was early 90s). The mom and pops near me never did that and they were often disorganized and unclean.
Blockbuster may have not been the best for finding old niche classics but if your goal was to find anything mainstream released in the 80s or 90s it was great.
Many clerks were passionate about the movies even at Blockbuster, as it was one of the best places to get access to movies at a time when it was a lot of work and effort to even get ahold of a few hundred titles back then.
I'd leave aside Memento as it's a small independent movie, very different from Nolan's movies from Inception on. I'm curious what you mean with "explores the thematic, cinematic and psychological meaning" of "succession".
Personally, I don't find he explores any abstract idea- his movies (Inception and Interstellar specifically) are pretty inconsequential action movies- basically fantasy adventures for an audience aged 12-14, but with the outward appearance of serious movies as the characters are grown ups, and there is no hint that the audience is supposed to be children (compare for example with Jurassic Park, that does include children as main characters). But they are nothing more than fantasy adventures.
The first uses of GCI in movies are from the 70s and the 80s [1] way before than Jurassic Park. AI in videos is what? 3? There will slop and failures along the way but we are still very early on
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-generated_imagery
> Everything in the set was real. We couldn't fake any of it, because audiences are so sophisticated now in their knowledge of computers.
It’s funny he said that because when I first saw Jurassic park as a computer nerd kid, I was calling out the “this is UNIX, I know this” scene where she then flies around the file system in a 3d rendered file browser as typical movie computer BS.
Turns out it was a real application running on a real SGI machine, and ironically I was calling it out specifically because of my knowledge of computers (not having any idea about SGI machines at the time but having a ton of experience with DOS and Windows 3.1). My family who didn’t have much computer knowledge didn’t think anything of it.
The control room in Jurassic Park was honestly beautiful - and something about those shaving cream cans really crystallized the aesthetic for me, weirdly. I had no idea that it was taken so seriously, I just remember thinking "damn, that's actually pretty realistic" when I re-watched the movie a few years ago.
It feels like 1990s movies were the heaviest on computers/gadgets. Jurassic Park has a programmer as a main character, GoldenEye has two.
When I watched Jurassic Park when it came out, I got so enamored with the computers in the movie, especially the SGI, that I adjusted the looks of our DOS GUI library[1] so it would look more like it. (I had already a liking to OSF/Motif then)
[1] https://github.com/ssg/fatalvision
> It is unclear how Jurassic Park crew got their hands on a Motorola Envoy
The head of frogdesign (Hartmut Esslinger) ended up running into Spielberg on a plane and showed it to him. The one in the movie is an original mockup.
Source: https://www.therpf.com/forums/threads/jurassic-park-tablet-device-on-nedrys-desk.169883/#post-2929104
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46752261
Same, I was born in '81, and JP is a cornerstone of my childhood, more-so than any other movie I can think of. I saw that movie at the theatre more than any other, at least 6 times that summer.
My favorite was at a drive-in in Kentucky. We used to rent boats at Lake Cumberland over the summer, and one night we watched JP at a drive-in. I remember the drive back to the dock late at night, driving through the woods, and imagining it was a Jurassic jungle. Then, back on the houseboat, going reading through my "Making of Jurassic Park" book with a battery operated book light.
I really appreciate the attempt by Chris & Jack to make Julysixth Park a thing.
I enjoyed Star Wars, but I kind of feel like a lot of my feelings towards it are just reflected nostalgia from the writers and comedians who grew up a generation before me.
Jurassic Park may not have been the first movie I saw in theaters, but it was still one of the movies of my childhood. The magic of it, and the experience of where we saw it -- the Mesker Park amphitheatre, in an outdoor showing, and then walking back to the car in the dark, past the Mesker Park Zoo, looking into the dark foliage and imagining dinosaurs.
Aside from Jurassic Park and the other roles mentioned, I also liked his role in the Merlin TV two part movies. Now I need to rewatch both…
Jurassic Park was the first movie I saw as a twelve year old boy at the cinema, and it not only made me a huge fan of the series but as a boy I was really into dinosaurs and it was really something to see them being "real" on a big screen for the first time.
"I have a theory that there are two kinds of boys. There are those that want to be astronomers, and those that want to be astronauts[...]That's the difference between imagining and seeing"
Thank you for everything, doctor Grant.
There have been a few movies that each revolutionised CGI in their own way. The Last Starfighter, flight of the navigator, tron, jurassic park, toy story, Terminator 2
>In 1993, Jurassic Park came out and revolutionized the use of CGI in films
I thought Terminator 2 did this. At least around where I lived everyone talked about T2 and questioned how they did this or that. JP? Not really.
I don't know about the film, but the Jurassic Park novel is set in 1989.
I know I'm probably missing a joke, but Jurassic Park came out in 1993.
Still, Doom was released after the movie, so unlikely it would be in Jurassic Park.
Believe it or not, there is 6 minutes of onscreen CGI in T2 and only 6 minutes of onscreen CGI in Jurassic Park. The 80s and 90s were magical with practical effects. So many things were difficult to imagine how they were pulled off.
In the last 20 years, everything’s just CGI. Movies like Mad Max: Fury Road and Fall Guy are few and far between.
Apparently it's available to stream for free:
> Steve 'Spaz' Williams is a pioneer in computer animation. His digital dinosaurs of JURASSIC PARK transformed Hollywood in 1993, but an appetite for anarchy and reckless disregard for authority may have cost him the recognition he deserved. Directed by Scott Leberecht
Jurassic Punk (2022) 80mins
https://watch.plex.tv/movie/jurassic-punk-2022
Recommend "Jurassic Punk" (2022) - the documentary about Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams who is featured in this interview. It covers T2 as well as Jurassic park and goes into the politics inside ILM,
My initiation was the first Alien movie on VCR. I watched it maybe in 1990 or 1991, but definitely before I reach 10 years old. It was also the first movie that I watched. The movie scared the shit out of me for months afterwards.
When looking back, all these movies (Alien, Terminator 2, and Jurassic park) were very well done. They never tried to achieve anything that was out of reach back then, and story-wise they were simply very entertaining. They didn't rely on, say, pornography (some movies clearly had too many naked men/women) to appease to their customers. The characters felt like real human-being who can hate and love strongly. They were done so well that it felt like nature. Movies nowadays couldn't do that anymore, somehow.
Jurassic Park really is a great example of “movie magic.”
Really enjoyed the article, even though it's not a new topic to me, but still it was very interesting, very nicely written and I still managed to pick up a couple of new details.
To be fair to Jurassic Park, though, at least in the book the quirks of T-Rex's vision were explained by the details of genetic engineering (the base DNA used was some kind of amphibian, that allegedly had this problem — still not very scientifically plausible, but not quite as silly as in the movie). It goes a long way to emphasize that in the end these are not real dinosaurs, these are human-made abominations.
I don't know much about the movie industry, but I think the biggest commercial successes for early CGI was possibly Jurassic Park? I don't think it would have been nearly as good if it had all just been done with puppets.
Likewise, there's been a ton of movies since that could in theory have been done purely with SFX instead of VFX, but which is probably must better from having used VFX/CGI, titles like The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Inception, Avatar, etc.
Obviously there was also charm in titles like E.T. and Gremlins, and I think there might still be a market for movies like that, such as the 2019 Netflix series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (I loved the 1982 version as a child, though this sequel wasn't for me).
I guess the question is: will generative AI allow new movies to be made, the same way that CGI has? Or will it just be an economic shift: the same quality CGI but at a fraction of the price?
There may still be people out there who believe that AI will never be able to create CGI as good as humans can, these might be the same people who used to say that CGI can never look realistic. And if you work in VFX, I bet that you can spot a fake mountain with the slightly incorrect shadows in the distance easily, but as a simple movie watcher, I really don't see it, especially when it's only on screen for like 3 seconds.
The UNIX scene was funny and probably included because of some marketing arrangement with SGI. I haven’t seen mentions of UNIX in other movies.
For context: in Jurassic Park, there is a scene where a 12-year-old girl sits in front of an SGI workstation to deactivate some doors (or similar) and says, “I know this! This is UNIX; it’s easy”, and uses a 3D UI to navigate files. At that time, an SGI workstation was very expensive and not something you could learn at home, and UNIX-like OSs weren't as common. The scene was like someone saying “I know this it’s a nuclear reactor, it’s easy”
Jurassic Park 1993 introduced UNIX to the mainstream world. Movies of that era showed SGI Sun, Cray or CM computers. All gone. I miss those days.
You know that, and I know that, but for someone who started working more recently the difference between CORBA and punch cards might be a little blurry because they're both so far back they've never seen either. It's like kids asking how the dinosaurs in LEGO Jurassic world were animated, because they don't move like real toys, and noting how much easier the 1993 live action Jurassic Park filming was because back then they could just film real dinosaurs. Feels weird, but makes sense from their perspective.
> Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something.
From Crichton's book Jurassic Park, which like most of his books is about the perils of technological advancements.
They used the quote in the movie, slightly tweaked.
> but you have made no argument about how those transitions made us better off.
Are you kidding?
> Cars
I make weekend trips to the beach and mountains. I can have a nice big house and drive around the metro and visit all kinds of places. I take my family and my dogs with me.
> Internet
The best thing in the entire world. The highlight of my life. My career, my entertainment, how I met my wife. I don't know what you're on about.
> CAD
Pretty much all materials, mechanical, consumer, and industrial innovation. You're welcome.
> Electronic music, DAWs
Dude, most of my favorite music is this. Most of my favorite indie artists only exist because of this.
> Digital
I take so many photos. I wouldn't if it was stupid film. Memories are amazing.
> CGI
Jurassic Park.
Lord. Of. The. Rings.
I use CG in my films.
I wish I could wave a magic wand and wish all of you to a different earth. It's super annoying being around so many negative folks all the time.
Oddly, I found the bios as interesting as the behind the scenes photos (though I enjoyed the full life T-Rex on the wall!)
Jurassic Park came out before Pulp Fiction, and stars Samuel L Jackson:
> Jackson made his indelible mark on film with his portrayal of a crack addict, Gator, in Spike Lee's "Jungle Fever." For this searing characterization, Jackson received the first Best Supporting Performance award ever given out by the judges at the Cannes Film Festival. Jackson's versatile career, which includes film, television and stage work began...
Thirty years later, to me, he is indelibly associated with Pulp Fiction. Bios like this are a mark into how people were seen in the past. I's fascinating seeing what an impressive career he had (he was a stage actor, too, which I -- I'm really marking my generation with this whole comment -- only learned reading this) that has been almost erased by the subsequent career trajectory he had.
I am with you on everything but the TV speakers. They are awful because TVs are so thin. They are running into pure physics. Get a nice soundbar, and it's a huge upgrade. Get one with separate rear speakers and a sub, and it's pretty great.
But the experience is way better than when we were kids. Watching Jurassic Park on a 19-inch CRT with mono audio was nothing like going to the theater. The delta between home and cinema was massive. Now I have a 77-inch OLED with 4K HDR and an Atmos sound setup. I'd take my home setup over a generic cinema screen. Only the premium large format is a noticeable upgrade. It's hard to justify shelling out a ton of money for the movie and snacks for similar audio/visual quality to home, and the risk that the person next to me is checking their phone the entire time (happened a year ago, and it's super distracting in a dark theater).
I buy popcorn kernels in bulk at my local grocery store, and we go through a lot of popcorn. It might cost $10 a year in kernels to regularly eat popcorn at home when you pop it yourself.
Few franchises that span generations?
The entire current zeitgeist of popular media is about zombifying your parent's IP. It's Nintendo's entire business in fact. Sure, usually they are doing good work with that IP, but they are the outlier in the industry. Everyone else is shitting out remakes of what your daddy played that don't even understand the original material, or like Halo, remakes of what your daddy played which was already a mediocre remake.
Halo 1 came out the month after 9/11. It's old enough to have graduated college and started a family. It will be resold soon.
Jurassic Park was dug up out of the grave to crap out several more movies. Star Wars is inflating a couple good plot lines into an entire Universe of "Content". Even reality shows are made up of people who were contestants on older reality shows. Pixar is making yet another Toy Story.
Aliens is still going, long after it's reanimated corpse was overplayed.
One of the premier television series, that just finished, was all about nostalgia for living in the 80s, with some silly plot tacked on that apparently even the writers didn't care about.
Even our propaganda, like Top Gun, is basically the same script as an 80s movie with minimal changes.
It feels like the entire media ecosystem is designed around reselling content to my parent's generation before they finally kick the bucket or satisfying the nostalgia of that generation's early children. Even the President's administration bitches about things like the 90s USDA food pyramid that only affected that 13ish year segment of the population and was deprecated, twice, since then. Our authoritarianism is nostalgia based, for the time that generation was children, and things were "Simple" and "Good", because they were children and got to live the lives of kids.
> Aren't all the AI companies saying that AI poses even a greater threat to humanity?
20-30 years ago eco-terrorists bombed and burned down a number of biological research laboratories and other targets, because of the perceived risks of gene technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Liberation_Front#Notable_attacks:_1998%E2%80%932009
Given all the current talk (and the famous scifi movies) about the risks of AI, I am a bit puzzled how there are no similar activists groups trying to sabotage AI facilities.
What is it that made the risk from gene manipulation feel so much more real and leading to actions, than the current AI risk? The Terminator movie franchise is more famous than any scifi movies about gene technology. (Edit: I guess Jurassic Park franchise surpasses The Terminator.)
Yeah, and Jurassic Park wouldn't have been a movie if they decided against breeding the dinosaurs.
I have to admit I'm flip-flopping on the topic, back and forth from skeptic to scared enthusiast.
I just made a LLM recreate a decent approximation of the file system browser from the movie Hackers (similar to the SGI one from Jurassic park) in about 10 minutes. At work I've had it do useful features and bug fixes daily for a solid week.
Something happened around newyears 2026. The clients, the skills, the mcps, the tools and models reached some new level of usefulness. Or maybe I've been lucky for a week.
If it can do things like what I saw last week reliably, then every tool, widget, utility and library currently making money for a single dev or small team of devs is about to get eaten. Maybe even applications like jira, slack, or even salesforce or SAP can be made in-house by even small companies. "Make me a basic CRM".
Just a few months ago I found it mostly frustrating to use LLM's and I thought the whole thing was little more than a slight improvement over googling info for myself. But the past week has been mind-blowing.
Is it the beginning of the star trek ship computer? If so, it is as big as the smartphone, the internet, or even the invention of the microchip. And then the investments make sense in a way.
The problem might end up being that the value created by LLMs will have no customers when everyone is unemployed.
I mean actually the FSV that you refer to is a clone of the SGI IRIX utility, fsn, that was actually depicted on a live computer in the film.
SGI was well-known to the film industry, because their IRIX systems were basically the sine qua non of graphics workstations and powerhouses. SGI invested heavily in the graphical capabilities, including 3D rendering, and therefore when the industry graduated from Amigas with the "Video Toaster" they slid into SGI systems quite nicely.
So it stood to reason that a couple of them would show up in an actual film. How plausible it was to have SGI systems on-site at a Jurassic Park type lab? I don't know, but seems reasonable, if they were also crunching DNA numbers.
I love Jurassic Park, the movie, because it was so wildly ahead of its time in so many ways.
Also, mandatory https://jurassicsystems.com.
Very cool. I saw Jurassic Park in the cinema and remember thinking that the Unix system that they used was some Hollywood fancy, but I learned much later that it was actually a prototype of a gui [0]. It appears that Spielberg was well-connected to tech people at the time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer
> Nowadays, movie fans seem much less impressed by CGI in films. There's a general distaste for a perceived overuse of CGI in favor of practical effects, and there are a lot of complaints that recent CGI is less-convincing and more fake-looking than it used to be, even in the biggest budget films.
Funny it says this right after mentioning Jurassic Park. I, an avid JP fan that was blown away by the movie (and the book) when I was a dino-obsessed teenager, always thought that it was the non-CGI dinos the ones that didn't look that realistic (even if the "puppets" were fantastically done, it was more about the movement/animation). Although we have to keep in mind they used those mostly for close up shots where CGI would've looked even worse.
Memories of Blockbuster are a fine example of a generation gap. I hated Blockbuster. It was a shameless, corporate takeover of the video rental industry, populated by mom and pop stores and small chains.
I started visiting video stores long before Blockbuster opened their first monstrosity in my city. The Friday/Saturday night visits were always immense fun. Browsing the VHS covers, seeing all the bizarre horror and borderline adult films was an experience. I’d spend hours just browsing, then end up renting something I’d seen a dozen times before.
Choice wasn’t limited but typically they only had a few copies of each film, unlike the Blockbuster method of having a wall with a million copies of whichever blockbuster crap just came out.
When the first Blockbuster opened, I went to check it out and it was such a sterile, soulless store. 10k copies of Jurassic Park or whatever. None of the cool horror flicks I’m used to seeing elsewhere. Overpriced candy and drinks.
It’s weird seeing people reminisce about Blockbuster, but I guess that’s what they grew up with. Feels like they missed out, that the experience was hijacked by corporate goons.
Tarantino talked about how Blockbuster strategically opened a store near the store he worked in back in the day. So it was a deliberate attempt to put small video stores out of business.
People reminisce about malls the same way, not having experienced the decline of the high street and downtown areas, filled with unique businesses. Malls, then Walmart, literally destroyed the soul of small town America.
I’m happy that Netflix killed Blockbuster. They deserved it. And I’m happy that Amazon and online shopping are killing malls.
My favorite movie quote as it pertains to software engineering has for a long time been Jurassic Park's: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
That’s how I feel about a lot of AI-powered development. Just because you can have 10 parallel agents cranking out features 24/7 and have AI write 100% of the code, that doesn’t mean you’re actually building a product that users want and/or that is a viable business.
I’m currently in this situation, working on a greenfield project as founder/solo dev. Yes, AI has been tremendously useful in speeding things up, especially in patching over smaller knowledge gaps of mine.
But in the end, as in all the projects before in my career, building the MVP has rarely been the hard part of starting a company.
Does a director make a movie? Serious question. Can we say that Steven Spielberg made Jurassic Park? Can we say the George Lucas made Star Wars? Directors rarely act in their own movies, write their own scripts, operate the cameras, operate the lights, operate the mics, edit the final cuts, write the scores, play the scores, create the VFX, do the film printing or the marketing. They prompt Biological Thought Models to do those things and cobble the results together. Really nothing a director traditionally does is actually physically making a film.
And yet, I don't see a problem with saying directors made their movies. Sure, it was the work of a lot of talented individuals contributing collectively to produce the final product, and most of those individuals probably contributed more physical "creation" to the film than the director did. But the director is a film maker. So I wouldn't be so confident asserting that someone who coordinates and architects an application by way of various automation tools isn't still a programmer or "writing software"
American cinema is awash with special effects since Jurassic park or so .. with a few good films in between :)
I've not seen the latest Jurassic Park movie, but I've seen a clip with velociraptor's with feathers, and maybe quetzlcoatalus too? Along with colourful skin on eg compsagnathus.
They seem to have moved on a bit, they're balancing audience expectations with latest research, I expect.
You've highlighted a very cogent comparison!
Dinosaurs in the first Jurassic Park were fairly well represented considering what we knew in the late 80s. But our knowledge of dinosaurs has grown, with feathers being the most emblematic change. Yet the Jurassic Park movies steadfastly refuse to put feathers on their 3D monsters in the current movies, because viewers do not expect feathers on the T-Rex.
We might be at that point with repainted statues. Museum visitors are now starting to expect the ugly garish colours.
The vast majority of CG is replicating stuff like set design or replacing a location shoot. We don’t usually call that an “effect” when it’s not done with a computer. And even then… it continues to deliver “bad matte painting” often enough that spotting such failures in the wild isn’t hard (nor was it hard with bad matte paintings!)
[edit] my point, anyway, isn’t that any given effect is better. It’s not even necessarily that the movies are better (The Passion of Joan of Arc barely had effects at all, and didn’t have synced sound, for god’s sake, an it’s incredible—of course CG-having movies can be great) but that I tend to find the overall effect of those movies better. Those “seamless” mundane CG effects shots of things like composited computer-generated rooms or streets rarely get the kind of attention a real set does, and the movies suffer for it. Nobody had to move around the space with their real body and think about it, and it usually (usually! Not every single time) shows, if not in anything wrong, exactly, then in the degree to which it’s perfectly forgettable and fails to contribute anything but filling screen space.
[edit edit] more to the point, peak practical wins at convincing effects in the Big Damn Action Moment. But only peak, and that was a tragically brief span. Point me to a CG sci-fantasy space fight that looks better and/or more like a real thing that’s happening than the battle above Endor in return of the Jedi (you’ll notice I didn’t pick the earlier two movies, as Jedi is where they really perfected it all—though even the first has some shots that are quite convincing!). Like truly if you know of one I’d love to see it. I never have. They all look plainly computer generated. I’m not saying every frame of those SFX shots in Jedi is perfect, but it looks overall more real than anything similar I’ve seen done in a computer. Like you’d think in about 40 years it’d have been surpassed multiple times, but no. They all look CG.
Or, like… put the best 50% of practical shots in Jurassic Park against the best 50% of CG-heavy dino action shots in any Jurassic Park from 3 on. They’re more convincing than any of the CG shots. (Some, from the field of all practical effects shots in the film, are not convincing! But a hell of a lot are, and not just better than the median CG effect in later JPs or something, but better than all). We struggle to touch the tippy-top peak of that craft with computer effects, still today.
> Sam Neil writes hilariously about the filming.
That piqued my interest, so I searched for it but Google AI told me to give up. :-/
Sam Neill has not written about the filming of The Hunt for Red October; he was not in the cast of that film, which starred actors like Alec Baldwin, Sean Connery, and Scott Glenn. He is, however, known for his role in Jurassic Park, and there are interviews where he discusses that experience and his work with Steven Spielberg.
I don't buy this. Watching hi-res remasters of old films (Alien, Catch Me If You Can, Jurassic Park) you get incredible definition without damage to suspension of disbelief.
I think this comment[1] above really highlights what bothers me about modern shows and movies, but in short it's not the high def, it's how it's used.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46062911
To me, that is kind of the essence of contemporary AI. It's showy but lacks any point or spirit whatsoever. For instance, imagine the morphing was on beat with the music - suddenly it's actually quite neat. As is, it just looks like some fairly low effort prompts. Even the dancing seems relatively low effort and makes minimal effort to play to the scene or music in any way outside of a vague sort of liquidy theme. It just feels very disconnected.
Take, for contrast, the original Matrix. The reason the effects in that movie were revolutionary is not because of them just looking neat, but because they fit extremely well into the movie, and were supplemented by other effects that bumped them up to the next level. CG tends to age horrrrrribly (for anybody over 40, watch the original Jurassic Park again...) but the original Matrix lobby scene [1] still actually looks pretty decent, and I think that's because it had spirit. Note how so much love is put into the choreography, even small things like the footsteps being on beat with the background audio at the start of the scene, the military style marching drums when the paramilitary forces enter the scene, and more. It's just great.
There's no reason AI can't play a major role in these artistic pipelines, but that's the thing - there's a huge difference between making something showy, and making something that feels like it has spirit, like something that is art. And it's for this reason that I don't think artists are going anywhere.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2eCmhBgsyI
I have seen tons of great movies made after 2010, but must admit I’m having trouble thinking of any blockbuster-type movies that stand up to the best of the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
Does Fury Road count? I dunno. The closest I can get aside from that are a couple Tarantino movies. Jurassic Park, the first Mission Impossible movie, Aliens, Jaws, hell even Independence Day. Nothing’s quite up there. Lots that are a kind of janky B-movie sort of good, but nothing as solid as those. Almost all are marred by lots of CG that might look ok at the time but seem dodgy and very distracting within 5 years max, for one thing (to be fair, Jurassic Park suffers from that in a couple scenes, too)
The push to expand repressive copyright laws because machines can learn from human produced text, code and art is going to hurt us all in the long run.
People usually say contemporary media sucks because of commercial pressures, but those commercial pressures and conditions wouldn't exist without the expansion of copyright.
Yes, giant studios are struggling to introduce new ideas like 1993's Jurassic Park. But that doesn't mean Shane Carruth (of Primer fame) can't. And he could have if Jurassic Park had been released any time between 1790 and 1900.
Our stilted media landscape is directly downstream of prior legislation expanding copyright.
Expanding copyright even more so that text / art that looks stylistically similar to another work is counted as infringing will, in the long run, give Disney's lawyers the power to punish folks for making content that even looks anything like Disney's many, many, many IP assets.
Even though Steamboat Willie has entered the public domain, Disney has been going after folks using the IP, https://mickeyblog.com/2025/07/17/disney-is-suing-a-hong-kong-company-over-their-mickey-mouse-line-of-jewelry/ / https://mickeyblog.com/2025/07/17/disney-is-suing-a-hong-kong-company-over-their-mickey-mouse-line-of-jewelry/
The "infringement" in this case was a diamond encrusted Steamboat Willie style Mickey pendant.
Questionable taste aside, I think it's good for society if people are able to make diamond encrusted miniature sculptures of characters from a 1928 movie in 2025. But Disney clearly disagrees.
Disney (and other giant corps) will use every tool in their belt to go after anyone who comes close to their money makers. There has been a long history of tension between artists and media corps. But that's water under the bridge now. AI art is apparently so bad that artists are willing to hand them the keys to their castle.
This whole thread reminds me of when I saw my first Windows-based ticket dispensing machine at a movie theater. Early in the year there was a screening of the Star Wars trilogy at the Cinema at the North Park Mall in Dallas. Every geek for miles beat a path to the theater. When I got there the line was moving along reasonably quickly and was maybe 20 people deep. No problem. You get to the front of the line, hand over a $10 for two $5 tickets and the cashier pressed the "dispense ticket" button twice. Two tickets came out immediately and you were on your way.
Later that same year Jurassic Park premiered at the same location. Again, every geek for miles around beat a path to the theater. But this time when I arrived, the line was hundreds of people deep and it took about 45 minutes to get to the head of the line (good thing we got there early.) When I got up to the cashier I found they had a new Windows-3.1 based ticket dispensing system. You said how many tickets you wanted and the cashier moved the mouse over a text field, took their hands off the mouse to type "1" or "2" or whatever. If you bought a child's ticket or a senior ticket, that went in a different form field. Then the cashier put their hands back on the mouse, scrolled down and hit the "calculate" button. It told them how much cash to take. They took their hands off the keyboard to collect the cash and then pressed the "dispense tickets" button. Thankfully, the system seemed to actually dispense tickets without crashing. (Windows 3.x had a very bad reliability reputation.)
What had taken 10-15 seconds with the "old school" interface now took about a minute.
Never let anyone tell you "the new system" is better just because it is new.
[[ Also, about this time I remembered Jef Raskin going on about keyboard interfaces, but this was long before the publication of The Humane Interface. And I know we're using the initialism "TUI" in this thread to mean "Text UI", but some people use it to mean "Tactile UI." No one ever got fired for recommending a React Single Page App optimized to quickly swap pages on the current model iPhone. Whether or not that's the best interface for the application is irrelevant. ]]
The reason most creative media is good is because you see the vision of a creative team or individual.
If the vision is diluted due to lack of control afforded by AI tools, then the tools won’t be used.
Many times in Hollywood have we seen directors spend unjustifiable amounts of money in the pursuit of creative control.
Hand camera tracking a dinosaur in Jurassic Park, developing a novel diffraction algorithm for THE ABYSS, hand-drawing 3-Dimensional computer animations for 2001, creating an entire scale model practically for a single fight scene in LOTR.
AI allows you to get anything. The best movies are a direct reflection of a particular vision. AI can’t provide this and I see no way to solve it.
A natural response is - well directors already outsource some creative control to VFX artists so why not to a machine instead.
Because an artist can control everything. Even if the artist is prompting a model, at the end of the day an artist can drill right down to the tooling itself (photoshop for example) and exactly achieve the vision.
I don’t see AI achieving this granularity while maintaining its utility. It’s a sliding scale of trading utility as a time saving device for control.
If you lean too far to the control side, well you might as well fire up photoshop. If you lean too much to the utility side, you sacrifice creative control.
When looked at under this lens the utility of AI generation is actually limited as it solves a non existent problem. One can think of it as an additional piece of tooling for use only as a generational tool where there is less need for control, such as for background characters.
The team at Red Barrels, for example, train a local model on their own artwork to automatically generate variant textures for map generation. Things such as this. No need to be doom and gloom about this stuff.
I see a lot of whitewashing of Charlie Kirk on social media at the moment that this quote reminds me of. The guy made a killing from speaking hate and then he got killed by hate himself. Like the guy that's always in the jurassic park movies, that doesn't think letting the t-rex out will be much of a problem, and then he get's killed by the t-rex and everyone else needs to deal with the t-rex of hate and far wingism walking the streets.
This is like watching a Jurassic Park movie and proclaiming “if nobody can tell the difference between a real dinosaur and a CGI dinosaur…” when literally everyone in the theater can tell that the dinosaur is CGI.
When i first used netflix at my friends house, I immediately used the search bar and looked for Jurassic Park... what kind of movie service doesn't have JP, i thought. It must be around 10 years ago, and I never used it once afterwards.
It probably does. But you've seen how fast these drones are right? It's the speed of aliens in the alien movie or a velociraptor from Jurassic park and much more maneuverable, smaller and can come at you from all dimensions.
Now imagine a swarm coming at you, each with explosives.
I don't really know why that "understandable". We see this with so many TV shows and movie francises. There's a reason why there's only two seasons of The Office in the UK version, but it's just beaten to death in the US version. Same with The Simpsons, Futurama, Big Bang Theory, pretty much the entire Marvel francise, Star Wars, Jurassic Park and so many more shows and movies.
You just find yourself in the corner yield "Please stop, it dead! It's been dead for years!" For example Star Wars, that francise is completely ruined, but the fans are insufferable and just keeps pouring money into something that quite frankly sucks by now.
Why must everything be milked dry to the point where we start hating it?
Global Foundries just bought MIPS, so perhaps there is life in the old architecture yet.
https://gf.com/gf-press-release/globalfoundries-to-acquire-mips-to-accelerate-ai-and-compute-capabilities/
Edit: the article starts with the above press release.
It spends substantial time on the Nintendo 64, but not much on the "Emotion Engine" of the Sony PS2 (which was a more advanced MIPS CPU).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_Engine
There was some design oddness that plagued early MIPS and SPARC that future architectures avoided.
https://www.jwhitham.org/2016/02/risc-instruction-sets-i-have-known-and.html
One place where everyone saw the work of MIPS was the original movie Jurassic Park, on an SGI Crimson.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Crimson
The use of color is atrocious in new movies. It's the era of high contrast and contrasting colors. They depend on it to make something look 'expensive' and 'premium' even though to me it looks really bad. And played out. Give me washed out greens like My Neighbor Totoro or yes, Jurassic Park, anyday.
It's a self-reinforcing thing. New movies want to look 'new', no matter if 'new' is bad.
Yet the Jurassic Park franchise is just as strong as ever.
Thinking Machines CM-5 in Jurassic Park (1993):
https://www.starringthecomputer.com/appearance.html?f=11&c=15
Jurassic World Rebirth passes $500 M in revenue:
https://www.koimoi.com/box-office/jurassic-world-rebirth-worldwide-box-office-hits-major-milestone-becomes-6th-highest-grossing-film-in-the-franchise/
The T-Rex bit is not a joke, the line is said seriously. Also, watch Jurassic Park. Good movie.
Having never seen Jurassic Park (yeah, right?) I'm guessing the preposterousness to an unaware onlooker is played for effect.
This is a more recent phenomenon. This is literally just repeating a punchline so that it tells the audience - "that was the punchline, you can laugh now."
I've seen plenty but I can't give any specific examples. I mention Kill James Bond [0] because they specifically point it out in the movies they watch. Although they don't watch any Whedon movies, in talking about it in movies where it happens a lot they cite Whedon as particularly guilty of this.
[0] https://killjamesbond.com/
I swear I must be the only person on the planet that enjoyed all six of the Jurassic Park/World films.
The article does go into this.
> But what sets Spielberg apart from Hammond, what sets Jurassic Park apart from it’s imitators—and why the film industry now paradoxically needs Spielberg after he helped to weaken it—is that Spielberg had the discipline.
I would say that's the crux of the argument: the reason there are no good dinosaur films is that there are no people with Spielberg's discipline to make them.
One can try to blame studio interference, investors, streaming, the latest political trend, etc, or even Spielberg himself for why there are no disciplined producers left in Hollywood, but that's not what the article was about.
I admit that I didn’t read the entire thing, but god I disagree with the first half so hard.
A couple months ago I decided to read Jurassic Park. I loved the movie as a kid - saw it in theaters at 10 years old.
The novel did have some interesting components to it that weren’t in the film. The first sections go into the financial politics of Silicon Valley in the 80’s, and it makes for really fun reading as a technologist. There are also sections of code in the novel, and Malcolm points out a fairly obvious bug in it. That was neat.
But the film elevates the story in so many ways that it’s difficult to overstate. Book Malcolm is a humorless blowhard who pontificates with these endless monologues that made me roll my eyes. It’s presented as deep insight but it’s fairly obvious “humans want to conquer nature but they can’t”. Which is pretty much the same message that’s conveyed in the film, but at least the film doesn’t sound so pretentious. In contrast, movie Malcolm is unforgettable.
The change to Hammond from book to film is also an improvement IMO. He’s more sympathetic as an idealist who’s simply gotten in over his head. If novel Hammond had been the first to die I wouldn’t have cared at all, he was a pure asshole.
I could go on, but this one line from the post really stuck out: “Jurassic Park did its part in the slow demise of the American blockbuster ecosystem”. What the fuck is he talking about? Jurassic Park is one of the best movies ever made - the endless parade of crap movies that have come out since aren’t crap because of Jurassic Park. They’re crap because we compare them to Jurassic Park.
Dinosaurs are only on screen for 15 mins of a two hour plus movie. It isn’t good because of the CGI, it is good because it tells a compelling story. If you don’t care about the characters, then you don’t care when they are in danger. If the world doesn’t feel real, then the best CGI won’t make a dinosaur feel real. Tastes change and Jurassic Park will feel more dated over time, but that is because storytelling evolves. The Count of Monti Cristo is still an amazing read, but it is dated. Beowulf is so dated that it is hard to be compelling to a modern audience.
I didn't really enjoy reading as a kid until my mom gave me a Michael Crichton book. Then I spent the entire summer going to the library and reading every single book he ever wrote. For this reason, I am a big Jurassic Park fan! I think the movie is great. The Lost World is also decent enough. The newer ones... not so much.
They're going too deep into detail. This is another example of getting lightning in a bottle on the first try. Jurassic Park was done very well by Spielberg. The bar was set extremely high for another. But regression to the mean takes hold, and you see a worse result on the second, third, and nth attempt. Popular movies that have snapped this trend are also guilty of survivorship bias.
Luckily, teenage-me had not read the book, and adult-me didn't want to read it having realised film adaptations always disappoint, so the Jurassic Park movie has remained vividly etched in memory.
I'm not young, but I have absolutely zero nostalgia for the original Jurassic Park. I think it's a good movie.
I was 10 when it came out and I remember watching it on VHS and thinking it was very, very boring. Didn't finish.
Watched it again in my late teens or early adulthood and I liked it then. The storyline was simple but it was all well done and it had me entertained all the way thru.
I never saw any of the sequels.
> But Ebert’s opinion that the film lacks “a sense of awe and wonderment” is—I’ll say it—stupid and wrong, and to a puzzling degree. When John Williams’ theme swells as the Brachiosaur hoists on its hind legs in front of Grant and Sattler; when the newly freed T. rex bellows into the night through its hybridization of baby elephant, alligator, and tiger’s roar, as thunderstorm rain clatters onto its shadowy, animatronic head, Spielberg’s reverence for these grand beasts pulsates like a beating heart. Say what you will about what Spielberg did to Hollywood, say what you will about a literal theme park film’s contribution to theme-parkifying the blockbusters of decades to come. 30 years since Jurassic Park dominated the box office, the bottom line is this: The film still looks incredible, still feels incredible, is kinda the reason why we go to the movies in the first place.
I disagree and side with Ebert on this. I'm old enough to have seen Jurassik Park 1 in theaters when it first came out, and I remember being underwhelmed by it all, finding the story a bit ridiculous and the dinosaurs artificial and unbelievable.
I also remember having an argument with a friend who was working in a special effects company and telling him I was unimpressed, and him calling me a fool: "you're crazy, this is the best of the best today!" and me shouting back "I don't care if it's the best there is, I only care if I can believe it".
I think the main trick is that they set out to make the best and most impressive movie(s) they could with every tool available -- practical effects, old-school camera angle tricks to make the hobbits look small, hordes of extras and well-crafted props, as well as groundbreaking CGI.
Same with Jurassic Park, come to think about it -- there's famously more animatronic dinosaurs in that movie than CGI.
As opposed to relying on one shiny new tool to take care of everything. I think with The Hobbit they got over-enamoured with the notion that you can do anything with CGI.
More recently, Andor is a good example with its mix of CGI and massive sets; The Mandalorian is a bad example with its over-reliance on the "Volume" LED stage.
For me only we have 3 Jurassic Park movies. The rest are like the joke in The Matrix resurrections : Capitalism grinding stuff to make more money.
On some YouTube video related to Jurassic Park, I read a youtube comment, from a teacher, they said they shown the film to their class of 10 year olds and they were in such an awe of the secene where all the sea the Brontosaurus in the open meadow, the teacher said they had a hard time convincing the students that there isn't really an Island off Costa Rica with dinosaurs in it.
There are no good dinosaur films because films are basically about people. Jurassic Park works because it allows for the conceit of people and dinosaurs coexisting.
In my opinion, this is the reason:
> Still, these disaster-monster films do need people at the end of the day. A movie with only dinosaurs is just a kids’ film and the dinosaurs are talking to each other.
If it's not a kid's movie with talking dinosaurs, then it has to either be a time travel movie where humans go back to the dinosaur era, or else a movie where dinosaurs are resurrected in the modern era like Jurassic Park. And Jurassic Park is iconic enough that nobody can really use that premise again.
I refuse to accept these criticisms of Jurassic Park!
That it wasn't perfect and deeply scientifically accurate is almost laughable compared to all it did achieve, and in way back 1993 of all things.
I've loved dinosaurs since I was just a little kid, and that movie is responsible for 80% of it.
But also,
"Roger Ebert gave Jurassic Park a mixed positive review back in 1993, writing that it lacked “a sense of awe and wonderment,” “grandeur,” or “strong human story values.”
What? I enjoy Roger Ebert's opinions on many films but here he just fell on his face. Spielberg truly did give it a sense of wonder, perfectly distilled in that one single scene that to this day sends shivers down my spine and beautifully captures the essential wonder of science making reality out of seeming magic.
You all know the one: when the jeep first parks and the look of utter shock on Sattler and Grant's faces when they behold the brachiosaur.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WROrnCt8NF4
If that scene doesn't move something inside you, then you've strangled your inner child years ago.
It was Crichton who completely failed at a sense of wonder in the novel version. Achieving it in the film was pure, very evident and typical Spielberg craft.
But then Chrichton was always terrible at creating any sense of emotional richness in either his characters or stories, despite them being wonderfully entertaining as techno thrillers.
I have no nostalgic connections to Jurassic Park and I recently watched all the Jurassic Park/World films in a row. The first one is genuinely fun and the only worth watching.
I have a simpler answer- the bad ones make money. All of the Jurassic World movies have topped $1B. Rebirth has been out 5 days and is already at $300M, twice its budget.
While movies are art, they are primarily an entertainment product, especially when they cost $65-200M to make. Jurassic World is selling really well, so they aren’t going to change the product to produce “better” art.
It is interesting that Jurassic Park are the only (non animated) dinosaur movies to get much traction while JW is taking in so much money. But it’s got to be tough to come up with a dinosaur movie concept that doesn’t sound like a JP knockoff and doesn’t confuse viewers.
Maybe Marvel will make a Savage Lands movie. But I don’t think this what the author wants.
I'm curious why your answer concentrates on the VFX so much. Of course those were critical to pull off Jurassic Park, but the movie is good because of everything else (story, writing, acting, kids notwithstanding, etc).
Yes, I agree – I've defended Alien 3 several times over the years. It does trail off a bit in the second half or so, where it sort of devolves in to a "run from alien creature"-type film, which is a bit of a shame.
A major problem, as I understand it, were studio execs insisting on repeating the previous films because that's what made money, apparently not understanding that "more of the same" was not necessarily going to be the same success, and that "bastardised film that leave everyone equally unhappy" also isn't. To be fair, perhaps they were too busy stealing money with creative accounting or raping scores of women.
And I suppose this is also a big problem in general: no one can make a "Jurassic Park" film without approval of a certain type of Hollywood exec, not for a long time anyway (everyone reading this will be dead). Even something remotely similar would almost certainly invite a costly lawsuit.
Come to think of it, this is probably also why feathered dinosaurs are such a taboo in Hollywood: "oh no, we might frighten the audience if we show them something unexpected, and that might result in less ticket sales!"
Jurassic Park fits into the TvTrope of "Seinfeld Is Unfunny".[1] CGI dinosaurs are awesome when you see them for the first time in 1993, when Reboot was cutting edge.[2] Now it's a basic requirement to have photorealistic CGI, so the first film that did it doesn't stick out to me. I'm 25 and grew up with Avatar. People younger than I am mock minor compositing issues because they're so used to perfection.
You probably feel the same way about the VFX in King Kong and our grandchildren will laugh at us for living in a world in which we cannot generate unlimited dinosaur movies on-demand with AI.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny
[2] https://youtu.be/fuEJWmxWkKw
Can any young person confirm that the original Jurassic Park is actually good?
Now that I'm approaching middle age, I can't help but note that a lot of pieces like this are written by similar people who likely have a lot of nostalgia (like me). Like, of course Jurassic Park from my childhood is going to be better than whatever recent stuff came out when I was an adult.
But is it actually better? I, like any human, am very good about justification and defending a position after the fact that I didn't rationally reason myself into beforehand. So all the highbrow technical explanations in this article could very easily be done just to defend the movie they liked as a kid.
> unspoken "show-don't-tell" internal logic
This is another axis separate or orthogonal to worldbuilding.
Recent Marvel and Disney films, the Jurassic Park and Star Wars sequels, and most Godzilla / Kong slop doesn't build believable worlds. The writers don't spend any time writing the universe that the story takes place in.
Lord of the Rings (the theatrical film trilogy), Game of Thrones (save for the last seasons), and Jurassic Park (1993) all build vast and credible worlds. Intricately detailed, living and breathing universes. Backstories, histories, technologies, warring factions, you name it. They then create believable characters that occupy those worlds and give them real character arcs within which they suffer, rise to prominence, grow, and die. Multiple heroes with multiple journeys. You're fully immersed in the fictional world, watching characters you care about occupying it. It's masterful storytelling.
Villeneuve's Dune has the same vast world and literature to draw upon as many of the other great epics, but he makes the rare mistake of not communicating anything to you about it. If you haven't read the books, much of the story is easily lost. He doesn't spend time on character arcs or even as much as dropping hints to what the subtitles of the world are. It's a super rare misstep, because most bad storytelling is from under baking the fictional world.
Then there's the mistake of sequels that try to expand on the mystery of the original world. The Matrix films and countless others have over-illuminated the mystery of their stories in trying to build universes. In doing so, the magic has been lost.
That's because Spielberg's movie has summarized Crichton's book, so it had plenty of material from which to draw details.
While I have greatly enjoyed the visual effects of Jurassic Park, seeing it for the first time has also greatly disappointed me, because in my opinion the movie script has been much, much worse than the book that I had read some years before that.
In the book, the catastrophe that happened at Jurassic Park had been convincingly presented as an unavoidable consequence of the complexity of the project, arguing thus that there are limits for what humans can create and control.
On the other hand, in the movie the main idea of the book has vanished. There was some mumbo jumbo about "chaos theory", but that was just ridiculous. Instead of that, the catastrophe of Jurassic Park was presented as a consequence of stupidity, incompetence and bad luck.
Perhaps those are more realistic reasons for causing the failure of something like Jurassic Park, but this change has separated completely the movie from the book that inspired it, because it has made the catastrophe look like an accident that should have been easy to avoid, dismissing silently the intended warning message of the book.
I’m not sure if “kicking in open doors” is an idiom in English, but this is a good example of that concepts. This is basically a rehearse of old tropes.
Hollywood has lost its story telling edge.
Jurassic park is inaccurate but successfully combines historical context with fictional storytelling, creating a sense of awe and reverence for dinosaurs.
Modern dinosaur films often suffer from heavy reliance on CGI and lacks soul.
The article is basically these points made over and over
So ironically the article is exactly what it accuses Hollywood of being: unoriginal and boring.
Because there's only one story to tell, for adults, and it's the Jurassic Park (et al.) story.
You can't tell a period story for adults, with dinosaurs birthed normally and no modern science, because then it's not a 'talkie', and we're about a century past it being possible to have the budget for a state of the art dinosaur-prop film with no dialogue.
I didn't see any references to Rebirth, and I see that this was published before the latest film came out, so I'm guessing the author didn't want to wait to publish in case anything in there would have changed the tone of this essay. Having seen it this past weekend, rest assured that it would not have.
There's a bit of backstory in the new one about how dinosaur zoos are closing, and that no one wants to see dinosaurs anymore. That premise struck me as strange, as people have been going to zoos for a lot longer than these fictional dinosaur zoos would have been open, and so I have to wonder if it was aimed as a little dig at audiences. The rest of the film ends up exactly as the post spells out. Hollow characters with forced exposition and mutant dinosaurs that you haven't seen in any book, making them just another monster in a monster movie. Maybe it's just that Jurassic Park was the first movie to really capture the size and scale, bringing these creatures to life, and in doing so, became the standard bearer and yardstick to which all future movies get compared to. You'll never get to experience that sense of awe and wonder again. Maybe in another few generations when the original JP falls out of the cultural consciousness.
A better analogy is memorized poems or music and I think there's actually considerabe case law on whether performing songs infringe on the author's copyright.
Movies are maybe less intuitive because most people won't reproduce a movie. There supposedly are people with "photographic memories" for example. And infringement is possibly not so much the capacity as what is actually done. Someone with a photographic memory could duplicate a movie but unless they actually do their capacity is not infringement. But you also have to consider that if it was viewed "lawfully" in the first place then the copyright holder has decided to let people view them. So the act of a brain seeing Jurassic Park is what the copyright holder authorized. Generally I don't think copyright holders have agreed to have LLM ingest their works.
Plays and opera are maybe more similar, because people to copy productions etc. But those don't feature encryption so the blob of unknown data doesn't feature in the analogy.
> If it contains the copyrighted material, copyright laws apply.
Not so fast! That hasn't been tested in court or given any sort of recommendation by any of the relevant IP bodies.
And to play devil's advocate here: your brain also contains an enormous amount of copyrighted content. I'm glad the lawyers aren't lobotomizing us and demanding licensing fees on our memories.
I'm pretty sure if you asked me to sit under an MRI and recall scenes from movies like "Jurassic Park", my visual cortex would reconstruct scenes with some amount of fidelity to the original. I shouldn't owe that to Universal. (In a perfect world, they would owe me for imprinting and storing their memetic information in my mind. Ad companies and brands should for sure.)
If I say, "One small step for man", I'm pretty confident that the lot of you would remember Armstrong's exact voice, the exact noise profile of the recording, with the precise equipment beeps. With almost exacting recall.
I'm also pretty sure your brains can remember a ginormous amount of music. I know I can. And when I'm given a prediction task (eg. listening to a song I already know), I absolutely know what's coming before it hits.
It’s not sci-fi though. If Star Wars is sci-fi then Jurassic Park is a biology documentary.
Jaws. The Shawshank Redemption. Alien. The first Jurassic Park. My Cousin Vinney.
I would say that there is not a single scene that can be removed from these movies without negatively impacting the story/theme/narrative.
Some say that Star Wars IV and V fit this definition but I would say there is some eyecandy fluff that could be cut.
Just found display3d today, too.
Maybe it was an ascii CLI video of a 3d scene that I remember seeing.
Maybe molecule visualizations? Is it possible to discern handedness from an objcurses render of a molecule like sugar or an amino protein?
Could a 3D CLI file browsing interface useful enough for a computer green scren in a movie like Jurassic Park or Hackers be built with objcurses? wgpu compiles to WASM and WebGL
One of my all-time favorite movie quotes about the tension between science and technology is now more than 30 years old, but it’s still relevant today. The quote comes from Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm in Steven Spielberg’s timeless classic Jurassic Park.
As chaos erupts, Malcolm blasts CEO John Hammond: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
This line feels particularly relevant. Why? It offers a compelling perspective to think about how industries—particularly the insurance sector—deal with shifting market and social dynamics, the rapid pace of technological evolution, and the challenge of discerning which emerging technologies will most effectively address these changes.
Often, companies adopt tools without fully evaluating their long-term suitability or impact.
Could verus should.
The Escalating Technology Challenge in the Insurance Industry The insurance industry isn’t dodging velociraptors, but its technology is wreaking havoc.
Let me guess … you want dashboards that promise real-time insights into every facet of your operation, automation tools that slash manual workloads and free up staff, and an ever-expanding arsenal of sophisticated systems designed to streamline processes, enhance customer experience, and keep businesses ahead of the pack with a competitive advantage.
Am I right?
But here’s the rub: The sheer speed of innovation often leaves companies tripping over their own tech, struggling to figure out what works, what’s worth keeping, and what’s just a shiny distraction masquerading as progress.
Why Technology Evolves at Lightning Speed Let’s put this into perspective: What felt like cutting-edge technology three years ago is now teetering on the edge of being an antique.
The constant tech turnover is beyond frustrating and expensive.
I’ve got a personal stash of 200 DVDs and 500 CDs sitting in a box in my garage, relics of a bygone era with no player in sight to bring them back to life.
It’s a tangible reminder that even the most celebrated tools can demand so much time, effort, and money to implement that they risk missing the window of opportunity they were meant to seize.
(Sigh.)
In the insurance industry, this slow grind of adoption forces companies to constantly chase upgrades—whether it’s to manage risk, improve operational efficiency, or simply stay afloat in an increasingly tech-driven sea of change.
For example, if you want to launch a new underwriting team to capitalize on favorable market conditions with a fresh line of business, you would need a policy admin system, a rater, a claims system, and more.
But if those take two years to roll out, the chance to maximize those conditions might slip away—leaving you with tools that are still the right fit, just not ready when it mattered most.
There’s this revolving thought in everyone’s head “If I want a competitive advantage, I need to have the latest and greatest tech — now!” But here’s the truth: It’s a lot more nuanced than that. Click the URL to learn more...
Early Tom Clancy, before he monetized his name, was pretty amazing. The Hunt for Red October was published by the Naval Institute Press. [0]
It was also the first adult book I read. Probably around 6 or 7? Before Jurassic Park, which I read before that movie came out.
I'd asked my father if "There were books about other things, because kids books were boring."
He handed me Tom Clancy off his bookshelf.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Naval_Institute#Naval_Institute_Press
30 millions was nowhere cheap in the 90s. I guess inflation makes things look this way.
In the same timeframe Jurassic Park cost twice more to make and it was a very expensive movie at the time.
It was the first full CGI movie but others had been using it before that, Jurassic Park used a mix of CGI and puppets for e.g.
It was the basis of the plot of the first Jurassic Park movie. All shenanigans started because Dennis Nedry, the parc IT manager, disabled some security system at a bad time so he could sell some company secrets to concurrents.
There are interesting character analysis to do between the book and the movie version, where the book version or Dennis Nedry is way more sympathetic (even if flawed), he's a extremely talented IT guy who was undersold the amount of work to do in the park, kinda stuck doing unpaid overwork in a remote island and generally been fleeced by a way more villainous book John Hammond.
Do we need to always have big-budget films and productions? Perhaps we should live smaller, and enjoy local art and low-budget films. Do I really care that Jurassic Park was made? I could read the book and it's more detailed and imaginative anyways, and any lessons to be learned are definitely better when read than when watching a blockbuster CGI film with more effects than message.
Sure creative people will always create but the scope of that creativity will be limited if we do away with intellectual property. Steve Spielberg would probably always have created movies, but he wouldn't have been able to make Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan,or Indiana Jones without capital from the studio system, and the studio system wouldn't have provided him with that capital of they couldn't extract economic rents from the copyright for those films.
This already happens without AI, it's just that studios can only produce so many films given the budget, labor, and time constraints.
Tell me that any of the "Jurassic Park" films beyond the first were necessary. Or the "Lord of the Rings" films and shows beyond the original trilogy. These are products of the classical studio system. They keep trying to remake "Back to the Future" and as soon as Zemeckis dies, they'll have their way.
There will be amazing art made using AI, and AI will enable extremely talented creators that could have never made it in the classical studio system.
Don't be so pessimistic.
We're going to have "Obra Dinn" and "Undertale" equivalents in film soon. Small scale auteurs sharing their mind's eye with you.
> I am afraid that I might "overwrite/destroy" the good memories I have of the "feeling" of reading his books.
I recently re-read Jurassic Park. What I recalled as a gripping scientifically plausible thriller when I read it as a teenager, read today as a screechy anti-science polemic nestled behind a monster movie plot.
That said, I still enjoyed reading it! It’s definitely a page-turner.
And I found that my new reaction to the book did not lessen my memory of enjoying it as a kid. In fact it led me to some contemplation of my life and how I’ve changed over time.
The book didn’t change at all, in fact it was the exact same hardcover copy I got as a gift when it came out. I came to think of it as a sort of intellectual mirror that just reflected me back at myself. I’ve gone back and read some other science fiction books I enjoyed as a kid now as well, to see what I think today.
> “For us, our biggest goal is to create enough value that yes, you would be willing to pay for [Gemini],” Google TV VP and GM Shalini Govil-Pai told the publication.
> The executive pointed to future capabilities for the Gemini-driven Google Assistant on TVs, including asking it to “suggest a movie like Jurassic Park but suitable for young children” or to show “Bollywood movies that are similar to Mission: Impossible.”
That seems so incredibly useless it reads like parody. No, I will not be willing to pay for Gemini for that.
I can’t imagine ever asking questions like those in my life... and even if one day I were drunk, high, and concussed enough to ask, I wouldn’t need to ask my TV—I could just go to claude.ai on my phone instead because I already pay for it.
> Google is also working toward having people pay a subscription fee to use Gemini on their TVs, PCWorld reported.
> “For us, our biggest goal is to create enough value that yes, you would be willing to pay for [Gemini],” Google TV VP and GM Shalini Govil-Pai told the publication.
> The executive pointed to future capabilities for the Gemini-driven Google Assistant on TVs, including asking it to “suggest a movie like Jurassic Park but suitable for young children” or to show “Bollywood movies that are similar to Mission: Impossible.”
You don't even need LLMs for a recommendation system. Just matrix factorisation is enough for a very good recommendation system. A local transformer model is enough for the Text to Speech part.
Surely is the product (Google Play TV & Movies, Youtube Premium) is selling you video content, recommending content to spend your money on is just marketing not a user facing subscription service.
Imagine Spotify wanting to charge you on top of your subscription to get music recommendations.
It's a line from the movie Jurassic Park. Pretty sure they're just joking.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (best of the grandiose classics imo)
Deep Impact (the only good asteroid movie?)
Jurassic Park + Independence Day (peak Goldblum)
Total Recall + A Scanner Darkly (best Philip K Dick adaptation)
Gravity (great visuals / perseverance story)
Jurassic Park isn't just a good example of CG, it also a good example of making the right choices on practical vs CG (in the context of technology of the time) and using a reasonable budget. You can have great CG and crappy CG by cutting corners. Plenty of people that decry CG don't actually know how much there is, even in non-sci-fi movies like romcoms, just for post-editing. But when it is done well nobody notices, the complaints only come when it looks like crap. Great use of technology to achieve the artistic vision will stand the test of time.
I’m sorry, but you make an absurd argument.
You’re taking the best films of an era and comparing them to an arbitrary list of movies you don’t like? Adding to that, you’re comparing it to films in the infancy of a technology?
This is peak confusion of causality and correlation. There are tons of great films in that time frame with CG. Unless you’re going to argue that Jurassic Park is bad.
> Tell me you commented without watching the video without telling me you commented without watching the video.
I didn't watch the video. I watched the gaming landscape evolve over the past 20 years and I personally witnessed which games succeeded and which did not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games
The only bestseller on that list that predates the Wii with a female protagonist is Pokemon. The reason? Before the Wii, the entire market for games was masculine individuals. It was pandered to in it's entirety because it was not perceived that women used or wanted to use consoles and computers. The advent of the Wii (and moreover, the smartphone) radically upset that assumption. The market literally changed, and the approach businesses took changed along with it. Borderlands went from being a slapstick must-play to a goiter-sized shame pimple on the aging face of gaming overnight. There really are hundreds of such series that never stuck the landing when the market changed. To name a few, Quake, Spec Ops, Deus Ex, Need for Speed, Outrun, Tom Clancy, Star Fox, F-Zero, Oddworld, Crysis, Skate/Tony Hawk, Saints Row, Postal, XCOM, Shadow Warrior, Serious Sam, Red Faction, Unreal Tournament and Conkers Bad Fur Day all didn't survive. Meanwhile, Animal Crossing, Fortnite, Minecraft, Terraria, Stardew Valley, and Among Us are more popular than ever. Touhou outlasted Space Invaders - what does that tell you business-wise?
> There's absolutely nothing wrong with having entertainment made officially for one gender or the other
Not between us consumers, but for businesses there absolutely is; it makes less money. Why make a big-budget Barbie movie that men will be disgusted by when you can shit out another Star Wars film that couples and families will rush out to watch? The reason we don't see more Barbie like movies is that people don't think feminist mass appeal is enough to get significant audiences out the door, and they're absolutely right. People want Avatar, people want Jurassic Park. Horror flicks do well too. Anything that doesn't divide people along critical lines is much more profitable and has greater potential for mass-appeal. Top Gun is a funny pull since it's a movie that was only funded after the Navy realized it was a propaganda piece. As an indie script it went nowhere.
Look - I don't want my favorite series to go woke. But that ship sailed when Kojima left Konami, and the case is probably the same for your favorite series as long as it's owned by private capital and shareholders. I'm just telling it how it is, because you and I both know games are going down the shitter but we apparently disagree on what the motive is.
> Yeah you can. Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2, Black Myth Wukong, Dragon Ball Sparking Zero, etc
Quite famously, Warhammer is both a blatantly moronic series and a demonstrably woke one as well. Unless "non-woke" simply means "violent" to you, then I'm not sure what you mean here. Warhammer as a series is against imperialism, pro-diversity, pro-LGBT, is apologetic to communism, creates fictional races of bug-people to squash and mostly just ends up pitting different queers against each other in frilly painted outfits. Fitting that it's a series descendant of model-painting tabletop pansies. Eric Cartman says it best: "We're playing 40k, dude!" https://youtu.be/rIo7UYVwcAU
Black Myth Wukong is a poor man's pittance of a soulslike, and it'll be lucky if people mention it in the same breath as Lords of the Fallen. It pulled punches (much in the same way Warhammer as a franchise does) because it's a mass-market game that can't make subversive statements without pissing off the Chinese market. If you think both of these are tentpole "non-woke" games to you, then I have to admit that woke gamers are getting much better content than us masculine men are. At least they can tolerate Elden Ring without accusing it of being historically inaccurate for putting women in armor and making men hug one another.
Oh, and since you made it this far here's a blackpill; queer and diverse voices are destined to succeed in gaming because the entire market is hyper-saturated with manly titles that nobody wants to play. Even utterly dogshit games like Fortnite attain mass appeal by ditching the Call of Duty desaturated look and pitting Snoop Dogg against a dude in a bannana costume. Undertale charmed 10s of millions of gamers with a cat that needed money to pay for college. Non-manly games are a gold mine, and if the success of mobile gaming is any indication it's a vein that goes quite deep. It's not that men are inferior as an audience, it's that they've been pandered to for too long with little ROI. It makes no business sense trying to chase this shrinking audience, especially if it means more Cyberpunk 2077-like releases that just waste everyone's time and money.
What really makes me feel old is realising Jurassic Park is as ancient to my son now as the early 1960's movies my parents would show me from their childhood when I was a kid.
Hey some fellow green line enjoyers! I'm working on a small side project I'm calling a "Terminal-punk Fantasy Art Game" at spellkaster.app to scratch my cyber-itch.
Escape from New York has some amazing cyberpunk UI aesthetic, so does Jurassic Park and the 90's Lost in Space movie. Lost in Space in particular has some absolutely gorgeous scifi UI.
There is also a youtube channel called 'Datawave FM - midfi synthwave radio for retro computer funk' that has amazing music and visuals.
> would you write that you were the author of some open source project
They didn't drift out a message to sea. They wrote it on their handiwork. Would people write their names on their open source project? Yes, they would, and they do. In fact there are licences where the only requirement is that you have to preserve the name of the original authors on the project. This is extremely common.
This is the same. They thought they did a good job, were proud of it and signed it. The same way a painter signs a canvas or the crew writes their name in the credits of a movie.
They used a glass to preserve the paper in an otherwise inhospitable environment.
> Surely you don't think they are actually upset at some people none of us know for not writing a poetic message.
Why would I think they are upset? They are not upset. They are arrogant and demanding. Instead of accepting what it is (people who the history forgot preserving their own name attached to something they put a lot of work into), the commenter is wishing they did something more which would have been more appropriate according to the commenter's values.
> would you write something about your real feelings, the world around you, your thoughts and hopes and dreams, or maybe even share something about your town, your ancestors, your culture, the things you care about, etc.
Did Steven Spielberg wrote any of those into the credits of Jurassic Park? Or just wrote "Director: Steven Spielberg"? This is the same. The message is the lighthouse. The bottle is the signature. It is a "we did this". And they don't have to expound on the "this" because if you found the bottle you are standing in it/on it.
Most people believe this because it is said twice in the Jurassic Park movie (the idea being taken from the book), but it is not true. It is somewhat true for amphibians with very simple visual systems and limited hunting strategies, like certain frogs, which would at least be an in-universe explanation for Jurassic Park's haphazardly cloned dinos. But in the movie Dr. Grant claims it for the first time before even learning of the existence of the park, so they don't get any points for that. In reality, T-Rex for example is believed to have had incredibly good vision - much better than humans:
https://bioone.org/journals/journal-of-vertebrate-paleontology/volume-26/issue-2/0272-4634(2006)26%255b321%253aBVITD%255d2.0.CO%253b2/BINOCULAR-VISION-IN-THEROPOD-DINOSAURS/10.1671/0272-4634(2006)26%5B321:BVITD%5D2.0.CO;2.short
> maybe What is this, National Argument By Insinuation Day? :-\
I don't even have a dog in this fight one way or another, I just call out terrible and weak logical arguments when I see them. This thread is rife with bad arguments.
It seems people here thought "Jurassic Park bad," then twisted themselves into knots to come up with something to complain about. Bad form guys.
If you want to fool people (in a durable way that's immune to logic), write a book or movie they watch as a kid.
The Matrix ranks third in my list of 'wow' moments in the cinema.
Joint first is the opening of Saving Private Ryan, and brontosaurus (?) in the true-dinosaur scene of Jurassic Park (not the raptor eggs bit).
SPR's opening was just visceral, especially on a huge cinema screen.
And Jurassic Park's use of the subwoofer meant you really felt that first scene.
FWIW Lost in Space, the year before the Matrix had 'bullet time' in it and no-one seems to remember that.
How many fewer people would have gone into biotech had Watson and Crick never published their helical DNA paper?
How many fewer people would have gone into biotech had Jurassic Park never been made?
I have no idea how you compare those counter-factuals.
Had Watson and Crick not published that paper, someone else would have.
Had Jurassic Park not been made, what other movie might have inspired future biotech people?
Context suggests film...
"Jurassic Park inspired more people to go into biotech than any academic paper. The Matrix inspired more people to go into computer science than any GitHub repo. The Martian inspired more people to go into aerospace engineering than any industry trend report.
Science fiction doesn’t predict the future, it does something much more interesting: tell stories about technology so compelling that people dedicate their lives to advancing the frontier"
The old SGI IRIX workstations had sound effects. (the OS is featured in the original Jurassic Park film with the very silly 3D file manager)
It was literally like the hacker movies and predated most of them. Keystrokes, button presses, everything made a little noise. My first boss talked about the horror of the university computer lab full of them before they turned all the sounds off (as well as the absurd cost of outfitting that lab).
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
I rewatch many movies quite often. But the ones that really stand out, in no particular order...
Wargames Jurassic Park Evolution Unstoppable Lord of the Rings Die Hard 1, 2 and 3 Alien 1, 2 and 3 Back to the Future Ghost in the Shell (basically all of it, mostly seasons 1 and 2) The Martian Tron 1 and 2 Anything by Miyazaki, but Howl's Moving Castle even more so
Alien, Jurassic Park, The Harry Potter films
Great read about two worlds coliding. Also interesting to consider the level of artistry and care, ncessitated by exteme limitations, that went into the very short sequences in Jurassic Park and how alive those dinosaurs feel... versus the more technologically unbound filmmaking for Jurassic World movies, which to me offer nothing exciting to look at.
> Well, maybe you mis-communicated and spoiled the dinosaur thing, since there's an inconsistency, because that doesn't make sense with the paraphrase you provided, seems like there is something missing
My point is that Jurassic Park movies always involve dinosaurs running around freely and causing havoc rather than a fun trip to a fancy zoo, and I assumed that was everyone's expectation going in, whereas this friend genuinely thought there was a chance that no dinosaurs would escape their cages during the duration of the film. Re-reading my comment, it's not obvious to me why it doesn't make sense to you, so I think it's safer to assume that there's a miscommunication happening here rather than in the conversation I had almost a decade ago.
Exactly. This is a pet peeve of mine, with the most common incarnation being: no, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park do not escape because the writers proved that chaos theory makes a dinosaur zoo mathematically impossible, they escape because otherwise you and I would not pay to see the movie.
Nowadays, every new series or movie is set in a pre-existing universe that dates from the late 80s or 90s. Everything must be part of become a franchise to be funded, even if the team behind have little or nothing to do with the original creators. I do understand that producers want predictability and anything with a established fanbase is much less risky than betting on the next Jurassic Park, but they are simply killing the golden goose at this point.
Seconding other poster that all those were already famous. Like if you bought a small set of plastic dinosaurs before that movie, those would pretty much be guaranteed to be in the set, plus some sort of hadrosaur/duckbill and maybe an ankylosaurus.
Land Before Time included most of those in the “main cast” but I think it was following the trend, not setting it.
Velociraptor (well, the fake Deinonychus-like “velociraptor antirrhopus” or whatever from the book/movie) and definitely Dilophosaurus got a huge popularity boost from Jurassic Park.
> Why were these ones so “famous”? Were they the earliest ones discovered? most common? Just fine examples of their type?
I think it can be mostly explained by the first Jurassic Park movie.
There are a number of films: The Matrix, the original Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Avatar, I’m sure many others that were just so different and jaw-dropping in many ways when they first came out—in those cases because of effects of various types mostly—that it can be hard to appreciate their novelty at the time.
Some stand up better than others.
Disagree, Jurassic Park was an amazing movie on multiple levels, the book was just differently good, and adapting it to film in the exact format would have been less interesting (though the ending was better in the book.)
I know two movies where the book is way better, Jurassic Park and Fight Club. I thought about putting spoilers in a comment to this one but i won't.
This was interesting and new to me, but as other commenters indicate, part of the problem is that we're trying to find the bad thing rather than trying to verify it is the good thing
There's a related concept of "failing open vs failing closed" (fail open: fire exit, fail closed: ranch gate)
In Jurassic park (amazing book/film to understand system failures), when the power goes out, the fence is functionally an open gate
In this case, we shouldn't assume that we can enumerate all possible bad strings (even with a regex)
There’s a fun movie about this particular antenna, starring Sam Neill (from another famous historic movie, Jurassic Park).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dish
Worth a watch.
It reminds me of CGI in the 90's. Everyone was so astounded over the quality of jurassic park and toy story, the rate of improvements was mindboggling. Predictions were made that in a few years, actors and movie studios would be obsolete. But in the meantime, audiences started to notice artifacts that were not apparent to the untrained eye - CGI was actually ugly! And here we are 30 years later - actors are still on sets.
I was about 10 years old when films like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park came out. Although I had games consoles I never had a proper computer. I had friends who owned an Amiga or Amstrad but they always wanted to come to mine and play Sega or Nintendo.
Being into art at the time, was facinated with Silicon Graphics computers. If I could "wish" a xmas present, it would have been (something like) an SGI Indigo2 system.
It wasn't long before a 486-PC entered our home. It was certainly a learning experience trying to get Windows 3.1 to work but it was DooM that completely changed my views on video games. I never expected graphics to make such a huge leap when I considered Mortal Kombat 2 to be peak graphics! How game graphics changed for the rest of the 90s is insane!!!
When the Nintendo 64 came about (originally Ultra 64 and Project Reality) I honestly had a childish attitude that NOTHING would touch it for a long time because it was SGI under the hood! In defence of my childish attitude, I was still a child.
The harsh reality is... by the time the Nintendo 64 was on the shelves I knew it was already "old tech" after watching (and playing) a demo of Tomb Raider 2 in a computer shop. It was likely a Pentium 90 mhz computer with Windows 95, maybe 500GB Hard drive space and running on VooDoo graphics. Once you get over the awesome graphics you realise that these machines can be anywhere from £600-£1500.
My defensive side kicks in... but.. but.. SGI is still better, right? They cost so much more they are not about games, they are for Hollywood movies! A year or two after, seeing what 3D animation software can do... wouldn't be surprised if rendering speed was competitive on Windows 98 machines to SGI ones.
Move on to today. Our phones are more powerful than those really expensive SGI systems from 1992. It is crazy when you think about it.
> to work on some Jewish director’s movie about a dinosaur themepark
I assume you mean Steven Spielberg and one of the Jurassic Park films?
If so, why can't you just say so? Why are you referring to Steven Spielberg, one of the most famous directors of all time, as "some Jewish director?" Do you think people won't recognize the name? I promise people know who Steven Spielberg is.
Watch out, though. Plex metadata matching is not always reliable. One day my wife send me an angry text asking why I was adding porn to the Plex library. Turned out it decided to match a random movie (something innocuous like Jurassic Park) to some obscure Chinese adult film, complete with the expected cover art.
IIRC it’s even explained in the book.
And I think they haven’t used the largest known dromaeosaurid, the Utahraptor, in any Jurassic Park/World movie, have they? A 7 meter long “velociraptor” sounds terryfing, but I guess at that point they rather go with the larger theropods.
The main lesson of Jurassic Park is that the park designers are morons, incompetent to an actionable degree, over and over. Despite what Hollywood thinks, containing large animals is actually very easy. You "just" did a sheer trench around them. The larger the animal, the more afraid of heights it has to be.
Take a look carefully next time you are in a zoo. No active electric fences, lots of very dangerous animals, all contained. Dinosaurs would be almost no different.
It's a clear case of "but then the movie wouldn't happen".
As a bonus round, note the strange absence of guns as a final fallback and the blitheringly idiotic reasons deployed that they don't exist, can't be used, or don't work somehow. Granted, you need more than a .22 in case of emergency but this has been a solved problem for over a century.
The first movie I still enjoy even so. I don't let this interfere with my enjoyment of a cinematic classic, and rich eccentrics hiring the totally wrong people who overconfidently do everything wrong I can track with. The sequels, especially the ones with more parks, I have a much harder time with. Jurassic World really should have worked just fine, at least up until the volcano hit. And I don't mean worked fine as-is, as it is also disastrously misdesigned. I mean, a real, correctly designed park is certainly not "easy", but well within reach for a modern corporation even remotely concerned about liability.
A good overview is in [1].
Curiously, before the classic paper on modeling shutter efficiency [2] came out in 2005, all renderers used in VFX production used box shutters. I.e. the shutter opens instantly, stays open for the specified duration and then closes instantly.
When you watch movies like "Jurassic Park" or "The Mask" and see scenes with extreme motion blur, that's PhotoRealistic RenderMan with a box shutter.
The first in-the-wild 1:1 implementation of the parameterization in [2] was done in [3] in the same year the paper came out (hasn't changed until today). It was first used on "Charlotte's Web" (only the spider character done by Rising Sun Pictures has it as they used [3] for it).
Pixar added it a few years later too and went a tad overboard with theirs in [4]. Most offline renderers nowadays have this feature and call it a "shutter curve".
[1] O. Navarro et al.: Motion Blur Rendering: State of the Art (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/doc_view/pid/fc23fb525cafa8fe68ec84c1eadf85e30090a774)
[2] Stephenson, Ian: Improving Motion Blur: Shutter Efficiency and Temporal Sampling (https://staffprofiles.bournemouth.ac.uk/display/journal-article/5221)
[3] https://www.3delight.com/, see specifically https://nsi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/nodes.html
[4] https://renderman.pixar.com/resources/RenderMan_20/cameramodel.html#the-shutter-model
The first line of your comment doesn't seem necessary to make your point.
There is a guideline that says "don't be snarky"[0] and I think it applies here.
Having produced a documentary (and being in the process of creating another one), I can't say that I agree with your view on purpose at all.
The purpose of either documentary or fiction movie is whatever the movie maker aims at. There is no reason for anyone to abide by your standard of "trying to get at the truth" when writing the scenario for Once Upon A Time in America, Jurassic Park, The Simpsons (the movie), or Bowling for Columbine.
I'd say most movies have an intent behind them. Further than that, we're art amateurs trying to interpret the meaning of abstract paintings in a gallery. Maybe the painter wanted to denunce the patriarchy. Or maybe they had food poisoning that day. Who knows.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That's the other thing to keep in mind, seeing things in perspective for the time; these movies were literally groundbreaking, like Wizard of Oz' transition to color film (compare with e.g. Avatar which popularised 3D film), Jurassic Park's use of CGI blended with models and live actors, the unfortunately one-off Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Toy Story's full CGI film that revolutionised animated filmmaking (arguably for the worst since it eventually came at the cost of "traditional" western cartoons).
It feels like it's getting harder to do something new.
A more compelling thesis would be that the MCU films presided over a vacuum of good blockbusters during a period of decline in American cinema, brought about by risk-averse studios during the mortgage crisis.
The legacy of the films—technical achievements, continuity and coherence of narrative, ambition, etc.—are laudatory in some respects. Obviously, they made an enormous amount of money. But it's worth examining their "critical" success. Putting my personal opinions aside, do any of these films hold up to the standard bearers of early 90s and 00s blockbusters? I'm not convinced.
The MCU films are inherently derivative works with little dramatic tension; we already know the characters and that they will win. The narrative and dialogue is paint-by-numbers, and the action sequences are exhausting, low-stakes, and sterile.
That's fine for a theme park ride—get some thrills if that's your cup of tea—but it's not enough for a critically good blockbuster film. That's fine for teen boys and young adults, but it's not enough for a more diverse, discerning audience. Does anyone think any of these films, let alone their entirety, hold a candle to Jurassic Park, The Matrix, or The Pirates of the Caribbean? They're equally blockbusters, but they will be remembered long after the MCU films are forgotten.
Are any of these things true at scale? The two I can remember -- CGI and 3D rendered movies, were all lauded by audiences and critics as well as the industry when they emerged. The two films which brought CGI to mainstream audiences were Jurassic Park and Terminator 2, both critical hits. Toy Story was also huge with critics and no one claimed it wasn't 'real' animation.
I think you are just making things up because they make a good argument.
A while ago, I tried to watch the "Jurassic Park" series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park#Films
Jurassic Park is a cinema classic with ~6 films.
It is simply not possible to do this in any legal way. besides expensive, it is hard to understand if the film is available in each platform. I ended up paying for an extra streaming service and after login & pay, it said "this film is not available in your region".
please grow Netflix. Stop complaining about the "competition" and start working to provide a good service.
"Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied With Whether Or Not They Could, They Didn’t Stop To Think If They Should."
--Ian Malcolm in the original Jurassic Park film
> take hacker for example... I think that it started as something good.
You just reminded me of one of the earlier uses of “hacker” in popular culture that I’m aware of - They Live (1988) - one of the vagrant guys in the homeless encampment referred to the interference upon the analog TV broadcast as being the work of a hacker:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V-4JHT2q3w
This fictional hack may be inspired by actual events from a year earlier:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_signal_hijacking
I remember one of the kids in the film Jurassic Park referring to themselves as a hacker, but this time in a positive light. Not sure if that line was in the original book, or if that was an addition for the movie.
Forget the books for a moment. The film is a brainless action film.
Most of the criticisms I made are film criticisms that could be levied against any bad or middling movie.
- The film is a vacuum for intricacy and coherence.
- The characters are one-dimensional, unchanging, and don't matter.
- The stakes might be huge, but they carry no emotional weight. Like most superhero films these days.
These are deficiencies in storytelling.
If we contrast Lynch's Dune with Villeneuve's, we might find similar analogies in contrasting "Jurassic Park" versus "Jurassic World", Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" versus Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit", or "Independence Day" versus whatever the hell "Independence Day 2" was.
Each of these latter films promised more, but they turned out to be empty and soulless. More box checking than composition, more visual spectacle than substance. The same is true of Villeneuve's Dune as a film.
I don't need a film adaptation to be faithful. I just need it to be a good movie. I'd be totally fine if the film made a wild departure from its source material, so long as it used that liberty to deliver something impressive. That would honestly mean more to me than a fully "by the books" rendition.
Villeneuve's Dune was just lazy.
The 90s with its apolitical cinema like Saving private Ryan or Forrest gump that certainly are not pro american propaganda or other great movies like the Matrix that do not denounce late stage capitalism as soul crushing and has no themes that could be interpreted about taking red pills and feeling more like yourself.
The 90s had a different context sure, capitalism was peaking, we didn't have the crushing reality of the post 2008 world, or the crazy chest bumping Murica militarism of the post 9/11 era. But the 2000s scare, the internet fear, the office jobs being boring/grey and soulless. The slight fear of science and progress (see Jurassic park, gattaca, fifth element), the work culture being inhumane and dehumanising (matrix, office space, clerks, american beauty), the same happened in music with grunge being one of the main genres of the decades.
All of this art was made in the backdrop of probably the most optimistic period of time, Disney had a renaissance, america absolute cleared the floor in the first gulf war, the stock market had an impossible never ending rise, pop music was happier than ever and fashion was in the most sexy, thin, in your face hotness ever.
If you only want to enjoy the 90s happiness without seeing the fact tons of counter art was being made and that our current cyniscim isn't only a product of the post 2008 economic stagnation but also comes from the seeds that were planted at the height of the cultural hedonism of the 90s then you are just straight ignoring some of the biggest hits of that decade.
very different in my opinion. The movie is very Jurassic Park, classic Crichton. The TV adaption, especially the first two seasons have a different tone. Very religious surprisingly enough and including a lot of Meso- and Native-American elements in the first two seasons. Personally I found those seasons much more interesting than the movie. The last two seasons lose most of that unique stuff.
Hm. We may have a difference of outlook. I don't mind a fantasy blockbuster once in awhile, but to me the most interesting films involve interhuman drama that speaks to my own emotional experience, and often just consist of a lot of people talking with occasional plot twists and unexpected bursts of action. I went to film school for a couple years and dropped out, because as much as I enjoyed lighting and directing, I saw that everyone around me was obsessed with good effects and had no interest in good writing. [edit: That and it was insanely expensive and unjustifiable unless I wanted to be a commercial DP when I got out... and I wanted to be a writer.]
Yeah, I guess it would be awesome to just have an AI build your dream movie, but if you have a good script and a couple thousand bucks you can go out and find some actors and make something real right now. If it's good enough, you can get a shot at directing something massive where you actually have control over how your vision is executed, rather than sending your ideas into a "black box".
There's also the problem that visual fx are already pretty cheap, and no longer a reason to go see a movie. No one can even count the number of Viking shows or Lost Starship movies on streaming services, or tell them apart. It's not like when the original Jurassic Park came out and everyone was like I HAVE TO SEE THESE DINOSAURS. (My best friend recently described Avatar 2 as "that movie with the flying blue turds").
So my point is that the market is already oversaturated... just like mobile gaming. Chasing cool graphics, even if you get a monentary viral hit, you just end up lost in the flood of noise when everyone else has access to the same technology.
The pyramid is a good thing, actually, because it forces you to be imaginitive. The people at the top are less imaginative because they think their vast resources can compensate for bad writing. See: George Lucas.
Without a compelling story, a movie is worse than watching someone else play a video game. And with a compelling story, it doesn't matter if it's set on Mars or in your basement. I think it's also why the best games aren't the ones with the best rendering engines, but the ones with the best story and mechanics.
Fun. Because it's fun. Because we, as humans, generally like to tell stories, especially about shared culture. Making a tribute of an artifact is another way to appreciate it. It's another take, an amateur singer sharing a moment with their friends, singing a song from fiddler on the roof. I myself love recreating props from movies and games. It connects me to the author and other fans. I appreciate small details of its construction more. I perceive the steps the original craftsperson took. I understand, through a small window, the monumental effort it took to create the original greater creative work. I'm not saying not to create something new. Simply that it's fulfilling to some of us to experience our shared culture by contributing our own point of view.
A new thing is great, not saying it isn't. Certainly, tributes of recent works are not a good commercial strategy. I personally haven't truly appreciated a great work like lotr or Chrono Trigger or Jurassic Park or what have you until I've recreated a small part of it out of love. Of course, this rant is limited to fan derivatives made out of passion. Attempts to deceive are another thing.
I'm sorry if I'm rambling and come off as angry, I'm not and appreciate your point. But I find this suggestion to leave out the tribute part in fan works to kinda be missing the point. For my stuff I'd rather have made it and have it taken down, over not having made it at all.
The 90's were such an amazing decade, maybe one of the most perfect in the past 100 years(at least for the US).
You had a outstanding job market for all professions with tech jobs still around if you chose. No wars(besides smaller conflicts in desert storm(91) and Bosnia(98)). Politicians/politics during that time were very moderate, George HW Bush and Clinton both governed from the right and left center respectively. Housing was extremely affordable and if you worked a half decent job you could expect to buy a house in most markets, My Wife's family bought a house in Redwood city and her Dad was in the trades, and Mom worked in printing. A house in the mid-90's in Palo Alto CA would run about $350-400k.
Music was outstanding in grunge(Nirvana, STP, Peal Jam) and hiphop was in its golden age(Wutang, Biggie, Tupac). For TV such classics like Seinfeld, Friends, and Star trek TNG were around. Movies like great sci fi and action movies - Matrix, T2, Jurassic Park and many many others were coming out all the time.
Having been a teenager during that decade I feel really lucky compared to the following decades and how bad they have turned out. The only downside to the 90's was crime was relatively high compared to today, but almost every aspect of life was superior unless you miss social media and glued to a phone(I don't).
I would really love to have wall art that resembled the LED patterns from the supercomputers in the Jurassic Park film, specifically the CM-5 [1, 2]
[1] https://www.starringthecomputer.com/appearance.html?f=11&c=15
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine
[3] https://youtu.be/T4kBRC2co7Y?t=65
[4] https://youtu.be/W24ItFdsL7k?t=370
Sure, a few brief points.
1: Remember that 3BP had to break the speed of light (among other things) to make the story work. A first strike is a huge gamble, you have to make sure your shot in the dark kills the monster rather than makes it angry. If you put information lag back into the equation (not to mention other intelligence gathering and military imperfections), the confidence that you need to make the game theory work starts to look incredibly steep.
2: Nearby grabby aliens are highly unlikely in any event because otherwise they would have grabbed already. The time to colonize the galaxy (millions of years) is tiny compared to likely variation in the timescale on which interstellar-capable life emerged and evolved (billions of years). If you turn the colonization of the galaxy into a 2 hour movie and separate it into periods of "no aliens," "sparse aliens," and "dense aliens," the "sparse aliens" section is one small scene lasting seconds. It would take an enormous feat of synchronization for us to be "born" into those few seconds rather than before or after (and "after" probably doesn't work because colonization stops development). "Sparse aliens" makes for great sci-fi, so we are predisposed to imagine that it is more likely than it actually is. It's like Jurassic Park: the dinosaurs don't always escape because the mathematics of chaos theory dictate that it would be impossible to put resurrected dinosaurs in a zoo, they escape because otherwise I wouldn't buy a movie ticket (and neither would you).
3: Suppose that the situation has defied the odds and there are spooky aliens out there just waiting to kill us. What's our move? Hide? Or grow aggressively? The "hide" option is already a bust, so we should grow aggressively. Everyone else will do the same. Just as the desirability of a first-strike hinges on unlikely confidence in the ability to effectively carry out complete retaliation-eliminating destruction on a rapidly advancing adversary far in the future, the desirability of hiding hinges on unlikely confidence in the ability to hide from adversaries with truly staggering surveillance options. Even if the forest is full of monsters, we do not expect them to hide.
I love the 3BP trilogy and the atmosphere of horror that it builds, I just don't think its thesis works very well IRL. Which is a good thing :)
I completely agree.
I remember a similar discussion about special effects in movies. The year was 1993 and I was telling my uncle that the newly released Jurassic Park had special effects that looked completely real. My uncle was an artist (a painter) and told me that he agreed they looked real to us now, but that they probably wouldn't in the future. That concept seemed crazy to me... He explained that when he saw the original Star Wars in theaters the special effects were mind blowing to the audience and looked completely believable and real. Of course, to me, at the time, Star Wars special effects looked crude and fake--I had a hard time believing him. But, if I watch Jurassic Park today, sure enough, he was right.
I stopped reading movie reviews after they completely ruined Jurassic Park for me. If I'm interested in an upcoming movie I try to avoid even trailers.
I had a few "oh that was really nice" moments through the years, but I think the best surprise was Clerks: went in expecting a slow, realistic indie movie, and left the cinema in tears of laughter.
Yeah, I spent years being frightened of stuff like Jurassic Park, Critters, X-Files, and even a MacGyver episode(!) That last one is where MacGyver gets lead poisoning and starts hallucinating; I must've seen that when I was, 4, 5, maybe? I remembered it when I saw it years later at the age of 12 or so (at which point it wasn't scary at all).
But around that age I did see Jurassic Park, and I spent months scared in bed – every time I heard some rumbling noise (usually just a car) I worried it might be some T-Rex or whatnot shrug. X-Files was also all the rage at the time and I always imagined aliens and whatnot peeking through my window.
It all seems profoundly silly even to me who lived through this to the point of mental illness, but kids can be really silly and have a kind of over-active imaginations that can make things scary that you or I have trouble imagining.
And all of that was before the internet. Even back in the 90s some more parental controls wouldn't be a bad idea, tailored to the personality of the child.
The ad, and thus I assumed you too. The ad was obviously referencing Jurassic Park, because the only reason this take would resonate with people is because they know it from a movie they grew up watching.
To their credit, the text said, per your quote, "The liberal arts tell you why that might be a bad idea". That "might" there is what makes it a thoughtful take, instead of a dumb one that many seem to be harboring.
> any person rich enough to be a Hammond, probably is going to also have the ego to think that their idea is more safe than it is, or the greed to think they can get away without the proper precautions -- thereby dooming the project in a similar way.
1. "Rich therefore ego" is a popular meme. It's also bullshit.
2. Real world doesn't work that way. Society exists, regulations exist, licensed professions get involved here. Jurassic Park is the tail-end worst possible scenario, and even there, few people get eaten, big fucking deal. The danger didn't come from cloning, the danger came from greed and negligence. In the movie, dinosaurs were involved. In real life equivalent, roller coasters were involved. Some people died because of greed of others, of course it's bad, but no one is going on about "hubris" and "life finds a way" because some dumb idiot managed to blind-walk themselves into operating dangerous hardware without usual safeguards noticing.
> Because you disagree with the message doesn't change what the message is.
There's a difference between author-intended message, and message or messages received by the audience. La mort de l'auteur, and all.
> The point is that "life finds a way" is not something that can be overcome.
Hopefully not, because that take is bullshit. Of course you can overcome life finding a way. Were you ever vaccinated or took antibiotics? That's humans one-upping nature.
The point, if anything, is that you can't overcome nature once and for all[0]. You have to put in effort to stay ahead. It's kind of implied in what life is in the first place. Evolution through natural selection is an optimization system. A greedy, short-sighted, incredibly dumb optimization system, but it has scale on its side. Which is why we are, for example, dealing with "superbugs" now. Life found a way around some of our antibiotics[1]. But this doesn't mean antibiotics were a mistake. It means we need to do better, one-up life again. Say, with phages.
It's not hubris to realize we are smarter than dumb natural selection. It's not hubris to recognize we can win, and keep on winning.
> To think otherwise is pretty much the definition of hubris. And men with too much hubris clone a bunch of fucking dinosaurs and set them loose on the world.
Don't confuse hubris with hope or ambition. Or engineering.
Meanwhile, I'll take my antibiotics and phages and RNA vaccines and cars and computers and airplanes[2], and if someone actually gets around to cloning dinosaurs, I trust they'll have people on the team who know what interlocks are, or redundant power supply. Unlike in movies like Jurassic Park, there exist non-idiots in the real world, and we also have case studies and regulations governing handling dangerous animals and technologies.
--
[0] - Ignoring for a moment that humans are nature too, and everything we do is part of "life finds a way", too.
[1] - In big part because human societies are dumb too. Clear parallels to Jurassic Park here.
[2] - Oh my god what an exercise of hubris powered flight is! Didn't we learn anything from the story of Icarus?!
>Jurassic Park wasn't a "don't clone dinosaurs" movie
I am absolutely certain Jurassic park was suggesting it wasn't the best idea.
> Jurassic Park wasn't a "don't clone dinosaurs" movie, it was a "don't be an idiot" movie with a dinosaur theme.
This is why we have people building torment nexuses and genuinely thinking they're doing nothing wrong.
Jurassic Park was a "don't clone dinosaurs" movie. They were very clear and explicit about it. The characters had multiple conversations about it. It was the central plot. The moral of the movie was "nature is indifferent to the hubris of man". Not that hubris is the downfall of man, but that the universe does not care about you, your intentions, or your actions. If you clone dinosaurs, they will escape at some point and they will kill and torment people.
Did you watch the movie? Did you miss the entire "life finds a way" scene?
You're taking "this is a torment nexus, please don't build it" and reading it as "torment nexus is fine, it's dumb men who are the problem"
You are the problem.
Which field will tell you that it's actually a perfectly fine idea, as long as you take correct precautions, and that taking them is literally what makes engineering a profession?
Jurassic Park wasn't a "don't clone dinosaurs" movie, it was a "don't be an idiot" movie with a dinosaur theme.
The Cretaceous is a lot farther back than 6 million years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous–Paleogene_boundary
If you can remember the Jurassic Park tagline (original movie), "an adventure 65 million years in the making", then you've got a good ballpark figure for this.
I wish more theatres in and around Sydney Australia would do this sort of thing. The Hayden Orpheum does, but it is kind of out of the way. For a brief period when I was growing up though my local cinema had a period where they'd put on some bit of fan favourite movie for a session or two (Jurassic Park, Alien, etc) and it was so fantastic to go see them on the big screen with cinema sound.
EDIT: Just wanted to add I'd absolutely go to the movies more if the ones near me played older movies more, rather than just new stuff
I was only 12 when Shoemaker-Levy banged into Jupiter in 1994, so wiser minds or those with better memories may correct me.
At the time, the leading theory for what killed the dinosaurs was still quite terrestrial - volcanos and climate change.
There was increasing evidence for the meteorite impact theory, but a big block was “Space is big, outside the early formation of the Solar System comets and asteroids don’t just slam into planets”.
Then comet Shoemaker-Levy showed us that they actually do, perhaps still quite frequently, with Jupiter playing an imperfect shield for Earth. It was one of the last roadblocks to the now-widely accepted impact theory (still not ‘solved’ of course, and perhaps only part of the extinction puzzle).
Dinosaurs were back in the zeitgeist thanks to Jurassic Park (1993), but Shoemaker-Levy and the impact theory gave us the 1998 twin movies Armageddon and (the better of the two, imho) Deep Impact.
I wrote up some recollections.
Neo-Visuals:
https://kaveh808.medium.com/10-17-000-polygons-should-be-enough-for-anyone-2d64ebb48471
Softimage:
https://kaveh808.medium.com/17-the-softimage-siggraph-sprint-97185ddeb227
These were both 3D systems running on SGI boxes, which allowed interactive editing of animation curves. Softimage was used for "Jurassic Park" among other films.
This is called 'blackstart', particularly in the energy sector.
My earliest exposure to this concept as a child was watching the film Jurassic Park. As someone fascinated by systems I found the idea of having to bring the whole system back up from scratch pretty interesting.
Today I still find these kinds of bootstrapping processes fascinating - both these megascale processes, but also the boot process that occurs whenever you turn on your computer. The latter is probably one of the most Rube Goldbergian feats of engineering with us today that actually still achieves a useful purpose. In fact it's absurd how Rube Goldbergian it is. And the complexity of the boot processes for modern systems (see [1] for a small glimpse) is extraordinary.
When you turn on your computer, it's like you're re-executing the entire process of a civilization bringing itself into being, gradually developing progressively more sophisticated technologies: at first RAM isn't working, but then you get RAM working and that lets you get progressively more sophisticated parts of the hardware working, etc.
By comparison, humans have no "automatic boot process". We're constructed in the 'on' state via fork(). So this repetition of entire process of, ah, 'abiogenesis' whenever you turn on your computer is kind of insane by comparison. Entire kingdoms of hardware state rise and fall with the press of a power button.
As an aside, I'm fond of the Red Dwarf novels, which are set on a massive mothership-type spaceship. The ship was constructed in space and never designed to enter a planet's atmosphere. In particular, the ship, and its engines, was constructed in the 'on' state by the crew that built it originally. It was never conceived that the ship would ever need to be rebooted, because it was assumed once the engines were initially fired during the commissioning of the ship, they would never be turned off until decommissioning. Thus, the ship has no automatic boot process for the engines, only a manual engine firing procedure which is extraordinarily arduous and long-winded and takes weeks to execute, said procedure having been included in the manual only as a curiosity more than anything else. This idea of a ship built "on" under the assumption it would never once be shut down or "restarted" until decommissioning is interesting, but of course also directly mirrors biological life.
[1] https://www.devever.net/~hl/backstage-cast
Speaking of FSV2, I remember randomly discovering fsn on the SGI Irix as an intern and realizing it was the cool 3D file browser from Jurassic park. I thought it was a special effect prop for the movie and then to my surprise it was an actual working application.
I'm with you. I think most of the star wars movies are pretty bad, but some of them are pretty good. And the bad ones don't make me feel worse about the good ones.
I think there has been a serious cultural shift in this regard sometime during the 00s. Most people used to understand that sequels are generally shitty and didn't make a big deal of this. S-tier classics from the likes of Disney used to get shitty straight-to-DVD sequels (e.g. Lion King 2) and nobody even thought to whine about it. Even movies that had very well received sequels would sometimes receive further sequels that were stinkers, and nobody started ranting about how the original was ruined because of it.
Alien and Aliens were great, then you got Alien 3, AvP, etc.. a bunch of mediocre slop to put it nicely (actually I like 3, but I admit it's deeply flawed). But when did you ever hear somebody say that AvP or Alien Resurrection ruined how they felt about Alien or Aliens? Terminator and T2; great movies that got a bunch of shitty spinoffs and sequels, but nobody said at the time that their enjoyment of the first two was ruined by what followed. James Bond has been a rollercoaster of quality for decades but it keeps going and fans enjoy calm respectful debates about which are their favorites. The Godzilla franchise has lots of quality interspersed with lots of crap, I don't hear many people saying that the horrible Minilla retroactively ruined King Kong vs. Godzilla, or for that matter, that King Kong vs. Godzilla ruined Godzilla (1954). The first Jurassic Park wasn't said to be ruined by the cashgrab sequels. The Land Before Time is still warmly remembered, despite 13(!) direct-to-dvd sequels.
Even in the early 2000s, I heard a lot of people saying they didn't like the Star Wars prequels, but I didn't hear many people saying the first three movies were ruined. Not until a few years later did this attitude start to find traction.
> Is there an overproduction of artist hopefuls compared to the movies being made?
Yes.
Hollywood in the general sense is also an industry packed to the brim with ego and wishful thinking. Nobody wants to rock the boat because, heaven forbid, an artist may never be allowed to live their dream working on the next Avatar or the next Toy Story for crossing the wrong person.
For better or worse, most young artists I've known are wishful thinkers. They each had a dream of working on the next Jurassic Park or the next equivalent to 2001 A Space Odyssey, or the next Frozen or whatever. Although the software industry is filled with aspirations of working at The Google or Meta, unlike programmers, artists in entertainment are willing to work for peanuts because they can't have their grand vision shattered.
The fantasy of being important is what fuels the entertainment industry. It's numerically infeasible for every artist to work on The Next Big Hit, but everyone is required to believe they can in order for there to be enough fresh artists to be chewed up and spat out.
I'm so glad I left animation and became a programmer. The worst coworkers in software pale in comparison to the giant throbbing dicks that exist everywhere in the entertainment industry. I can refuse to work weekends or, even more drastic, quit my job when the deal gets bad, and it's unlikely to permanently damage my career if it even does at all. My career isn't founded on a combination of free work and brown-nosing.
> this is one of the places I feel generative AI can do a lot of good.
I seriously think that studios aren't far from having their lunch totally eaten by small groups of individuals using various forms of AI. No doubt that GPT has been used in Hollywood already, but VFX and animation are stuck in the past in many ways. These studios are afraid to experiment, which is why they resort to using old school methods that are outclassed by individuals with deepfake tech.
It also helps that Harry Potter is really a single story divided into 7 books/8 movies. Jurassic Park was a story told in a single book that was later expanded because it was profitable.
Harry Potter had phenomenally good source material such that they would have had to try really hard to mess it up.
I'll hold my breath for the TV series...
Jurassic Park had two books, from which they've now made five (or is it six? Jeez who cares by this point) movies.
>Actually, the current AI situation may be even more perilous than Jurassic Park. In that film, the misguided science that brought dinosaurs back to life was at least confined to a single island and controlled by a single corporation. In our current reality, the dinosaurs are loose, and anyone who wants to can play with one.
I'm really tired of reading stuff like this above. Seriously, AI is a disruptive tech and some people will oppose any change, but this is too much. All of the "security issues" mentioned in the article are true for browser extensions,and perhaps even software in general.
Then the author talks about "copyright mess" just before describing how it is pretty much resolved in their company (copilot banned).
The only real "problem with AI" is really a "problem with cloud" or more precisely "problem with people's lack of understanding of it". Average people should be interested in finding software alternatives that don't undermine their privacy.
For example look at AI image up scaling. Every single android app other than mine sends user's images to a server somewhere. Are those images retained? Are they scanned for whatever "legal purposes" the maker deems adequate? No one knows. No one cares. Well specifically in the entire world about 90 people seem to care.
Why 90 people? Because that's how many users my android app has 6 months after release. (the app does all processing locally, free version is ad supported, paid version can be used 100% offline).
> Like cliche hacker movie levels of noises but worse
It kind of makes sense tho.
Some people were making CGI for movies on SGI boxes.
And naturally, some of the movies where SGI machines were involved ended up putting those machines in the movie itself:
> Jurassic Park featured a lot of computer generated images and it was one of the first movies to show SGI computers on screen.
http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/hollywood/jpark.html
http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/hollywood/index.html
So if the SGI computers made a lot of computer noises. Perhaps this helped inspire the portrayal of noisy computers in hacker movies.
Older developer here (I started my career by writing 3D graphics software in the mid-80's).
I recently spent a number of years in semi-retirement, concentrating on my photography [0] and filmmaking [1] and thinking I was done with (and too old for) software development.
Professional software development had lost its lure for me as the CG and VFX industry had grown into a massive factory-like industry. Though I had worked on some satisfying projects -- writing the animation code used in "Jurassic Park", leading the R&D team for "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within", working on "The Hobbit" movies -- I had lost the desire to write software.
Then about a year ago a friend asked me to teach him some Common Lisp online. So I wrote some tutorials and as we did our sessions [2] I got increasingly enthusiastic about developing for fun, especially if I could use the tool of my choice (Common Lisp) for the domain of my choice (computer graphics). So I started a new 3D graphics project and made it open source [3]. Even started a blog about the journey [4].
Although I don't consider myself to be up on the latest buzzwords and web architectures and the only scrum I'm familiar with is from my rugby-playing days, I have found -- rediscovered -- the pleasure of designing and implementing software. Surprisingly (to me at least), I don't feel over the hill. Yes, I probably can't do the marathon programming sessions I used to do, and all-nighters are a thing of the past, but I don't find my mind being any less sharp than it used to be.
[0] https://www.kardanphotography.com
[1] https://vimeo.com/kavehkardan
[2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTA6M4yZF0MzsMlNL0N67tIU12OLQ-R5K
[3] https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9
[4] https://medium.com/@kaveh808/once-more-into-the-breach-a-new-common-lisp-3d-graphics-project-d401bfa083d
I remember trying to buy some video games when I was a kid, and they wouldn't sell it to me because it was rated as 15+ and I wasn't 15. People would also check ages at movie theatres; I had some trouble getting in to Jurassic Park with my friend but we did manage, and also regretted it as I was scared witless for months, demonstrating that these age limits are perhaps not entirely nonsense.
A lot of people seem to have forgotten what the world was like 25 years ago.
MIT mathematics degree.
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS - Developed 3D animation software used to animate the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park”. - Software R&D lead for CGI feature “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within”. - Senior Software Developer on “The Hobbit” films.
INFO Location: Honolulu, HI Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Possibly Technologies: 3D Graphics & Production, VFX, Software Development, Common Lisp Résumé/CV: Upon request LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaveh-kardan/
Significantly depends on what kind of MS we are talking. Single quad can be had for well under $100k. Top of the line Orbitrap is ~$1.2 million. Depending on the analytical constraints, I think you could get by with a mid-range triple quad for $200-300k. Although, if you need to do exploratory work, I think everyone should just buy a QE as it is a solid workhorse that can fit most any role.
When a lot of that equipment gets aged out from industrial uses it will be given to universities in still-working order. Biotechs going bust can also be a boon to the second-hand market where state of the art equipment can be had for a song. I know one lab which acquired a piece of equipment that had been used in a background shot of a Jurassic Park movie.
I didn’t keep it but GPT-4 pitched me a very convincing cross-over between Die Hard and Jurassic Park culminating in a tense face off between a machine gun armed John McLane and a T-Rex.
The heartbreaking World War 1 movie involving Pokémon 1 was less good however.
> [...] but for animals, humans, and many manmade things a mesh-based modeler – or at least the use of third-party meshes – is essentially a requirement.
That was/is not true. It could be even a CAD modeler. In fact, in the 90's, before the advent of subdivison surfaces (sds) in VFX production, everything you saw in blockbuster movies that was organic was NURBS patches. E.g. the dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park". Usually modeled in Alias PowerAnimator and then animated in Softimage.
Nowadays you can choose between polygon meshes, sds, T-splines also signed-distance-based modeling for organic stuff. In fact, even then you could do organic modeling from SDF primitives using the Oranica[1] modeler.
There were also many cheap or even free modeleres that supported bezier patch modeling at the time. Bezier/B-spline patches modelers were accessible to everyone on Windows and Mac OS at the time. And there were many renderers that could render those without artifact. I.e. REYES[2]-based.
You may have to mesh the SDF for further work (and then maybe render a Loop sds if you want a high order surface at render time). So mesh-based being the only choice was neither true when "The wet bird" was produced nor is it now.
I ran a small CGI shop (five people) a few years before this image was produced. We used Real3D/Alias PowerAnimator with a custom pipeline to do organic modeling with B-spline patches and rendering with PhotoRealistic RenderMan for Windows. No polygons were ever created (or harmed) producing any of the images we were paid for.
So yeah, the humans in that image were polgon meshes from Poser and exported to POV but that was just what the artist knew/choose.
[1] https://archive.org/details/organica-12 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reyes_rendering
You can't disregard the bias towards an interesting story. For example, if Jurassic Park was real the worst case scenario would be ecosystem damage, not dinosaurs taking over the zoo (or whatever happens in the later films, I forget). That would be a bad story though, so in the book/films things need to go horribly wrong.
I think it’s going to be like movie special effects.
When Jurassic park first came out, or even something like Star Trek next gen. It looked AMAZING. So so realistic. But then…. As time goes on new things showed us what realistic could be.
I think we actually got better at seeing.
Same thing here. The more time you spend with it the more you notice things that don’t quite work. And then the new thing solves those problems, but we’ll find more wrongness
I’m sorry but this post comes of aa arrogant to me.
1. The practical effects on Jurassic Park weren’t simply augmented by CGI. The hero sequences had the main set pieces as CGI. Please tell me how you’d do the T-Rex chasing the jeep with practicals? Or something like gollum?
2. It’s ridiculous to say animation isn’t a form of film making. It’s possibly the most pure form of film making. You craft every single detail, and make every single choice along the way.
this kind of puritanical thinking isn’t constructive.
The raptors that are CG in most of the shots that aren’t just their heads? Like the entire sequence where they chase the kids…
you’re also comparing things without considering how the process created them.
Avatar wouldn’t look any more real with practical work. It’s just not possible to make robotics today that can have that level of articulation and micro expression. the reason it doesn’t look “real” is because the film makers didn’t want it to look real. It’s meant to be fantastical.
You claim most CG is bad in films but I’d argue that you, like many others, glomp onto the bad CG and ignore all the fantastic CG that you don’t notice.
How many people do you think noticed that the entire environment they’re in isn’t real in these shots? https://youtu.be/V5mS7BHmZJI
Often what people consider “bad CG” is overly apparent CG. This can be down to three things:
1. Budget. Both money and time.
2. Deliberate Aesthetic choices
3. Directors often put CG more in your face than practicals
Practicals wouldn’t make a difference there because they’d fall prey to the exact same issues which is why they’re often replaced in post anyway.
Aesthetics are a big one. The visual style between the original Jurassic Park trilogy and the Jurassic World trilogy is different. The new trilogy is significantly more fantastical in style and lighting. This is why you can’t just randomly compare shots between different films. They’re created by different teams with different goals. You need to compare against the raptors etc in the same film or where similar choices were made.
When people say “I wish this was done with practicals”, what I think they mean is “I wish this was better” but ignore the why.
I don't disagree with the conclusion in that video. But my criticism is precisely when filmmakers rely solely on CGI for every aspect in a scene. When used in moderation, and to _augment_ practical effects, as in the original Jurassic Park, or All Quiet on the Western Front, then it can increase, rather than break, immersion.
Eventually, we'll reach a point when CGI truly becomes indistinguishable from reality, but even then I'd argue that using it for all aspects in a scene would undermine what makes the art of cinema "magic". After all, would it really be filmmaking, or animation, at that point?
You mention Jurassic Park, but the fact is that movie wasn’t doable with animatronics alone. The most memorable shots in that film are CG.
I also contest your assertion that the results are more impressive than todays CGI. That’s some rose tinted nostalgia, but there’s no way to replicate some of the advanced motion and realism like the latest Planet of the Apes or Avatar with animatronics. The range of motion required is just not safe to do or cost effective.
Safety is a big one. Having an animatronic T-Rex chase a car at speed in the rain is not physically safe to execute in the same space as your main actors. The requirements are at odds. To work in rain requires materials that are hard to move, to move fast requires lighter materials and heavier motors. All of that is a giant weight hurtling at your talent. Use of lighter materials also makes them less durable or more expensive.
Furthermore, most animatronics and practical effects in film today are replaced. As much as people sell the allure of “this film is done practically”, the majority of it gets replaced with CG in post. The new star wars films tried that angle with BB-8 and Top Gun Maverick claimed the same, but they practical elements people laud were CG in the final film.
Fascinating, thanks for sharing. It's amazing how many novel techniques went into the film. I haven't seen it yet, but looking forward to it.
One of my favorite TV shows as a kid was Movie Magic. Back in the 90s, most effects were practical, rather than CG, and it was interesting to learn about the various techniques used to achieve the results. From matte paintings, foley sounds and miniature sets, to animatronics and pyrotechnics. There were entire industries dedicated to this, which were replaced—practically overnight—by computers.
While there was a rough patch of awful CGI in the 90s and 00s, and the tech has certainly come a long way since then, even today, a discerning viewer can still tell CGI apart from live action.
I feel like we lost some of that "magic" in the process.
Consider the animatronics used in Jurassic Park[1] and Free Willy 2[2]. They might be crude, stiff and surely very laborious and expensive to build, but the result on screen was much more impressive than today's state of the art CGI. Maybe we've been saturated and take VFX for granted today, but it's a shame that some of these practical effects didn't continue to improve, and are rarely used in modern films.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8Fv3tQm_Os
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sdzksxe4rio
Strongly disagree. Why two Orson Scott Card books of only nine? Surely Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness" gives a better sampling of what science fiction can encompass.
Similarly, why two H. G. Wells books? Yes, both are classics, but if the goal is to read the classics of SF then Heinlein's "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" would again give a better sampling of SF history.
IMO, "Jurassic Park" is more a thriller with science fiction elements. (Another would be "The Hunt for Red October".) While the movie won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, I don't think the book received much in the way of SF award recognition.
I would think Liu's "The Three-Body Problem" or something else more recent than 1999 would also be more appropriate for a beginner than the many old books listed.
These are all generally highly reviewed can lead to interesting discussions:
Gattaca - interesting take on genetics/DNA discrimination
Europa - hard science fiction, maybe a bit slow for a 12 year old
The Net - older movie but the concept of digital exile resonates today
City of Ember - post apocalyptic civilization that lives deep underground
First Man - dramatization of Neil Armstrong and the first moon landing (not realy "fiction")
Arrival - first contact situation, tastefully done
Contact - another first contact situation that explores how politics, skepticism, and fanaticism react
The Martian - easily as fun as the book
The Prestige - competing magicians in an industrial age setting
The Hunger Games - extreme class divide in a future setting
Jurassic Park - the original not the sequels
Stargate - wormhole travel to another planet (be careful with the TV shows though, SG1 on streaming has full frontal nudity and "not ok" scenes which were obviously not on the broadcast version and a total shock when we watched it as a family)
District 9 - has some graphic gore and language, so it might be 14+, but is an interesting look at aliens as refugees
Contagion - a look at how a pandemic could play out. Premiered before COVID.
The Maze Runner - interesting setting and look at group dynamics
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids - fun setting
The Village - scary movie with a sci fi twist
Galaxy Quest - comedy
Short Circuit - old movie that deals with AI sentience
Innerspace - another old one, but has some fun concepts
Ghost in the Shell, Sunshine, Children of Men, 12 Monkeys, Edge of Tomorrow, Moon
The Expanse show/books are great
I’m waiting til 13 for Akira
Mine is 11 and matrix, terminator, back to the future, arrival were all too slow. He liked the Jurassic Park books but the movie was “too hokey.”
Extensive experience in computer graphics development and production.
MIT mathematics degree.
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS - Developed 3D animation software used to animate the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park”. - Software R&D lead for CGI feature “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within”. - Senior Software Developer on “The Hobbit” films.
INFO Location: Honolulu, HI Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Possibly Technologies: 3D Graphics & Production, VFX, Software Development, Common Lisp Résumé/CV: Upon request LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaveh-kardan/
It's gold for non-native speakers of any supported language.
I'm trying to learn some Spanish, and a fun and easy way to study is to watch films in Spanish with Spanish-language subs.
Finding Jurassic Park on piratebay was easy, finding the right subs was impossible. Enter Whisper.
My favourite little hack this year.
Jurassic Park, full of dinosaurs(!) had less CGI than most mundane action movies of today.
Inception and Tenet both do not follow this (you can try and stretch Cobb's narrative _a bit_ there but "in familiar situation and now not" is definitely not the thing).
Harry Potter is not this.
Despite what you might think, I think most Marvel movies don't really follow this! Sometimes a single character follows this and they end up being the tragic character.
Not a movie but I think we get to Romeo & Julliet and this doesn't work.
Jurassic Park is not this. Terminator is not this. The Terminal is not this.
Avatar _is_ this I think! Kind of.
I just watched the "Making of Jurassic Park" documentary. They originally wanted to do most of the effects without computers. But one of the computer guys convinced them to try it, and it worked really well. They actually had to scrap a bunch of practical models they had built because the computer stuff was so good.
One of the guys in the documentary says "we were afraid they wouldn't need special effects people anymore. The director would just go on the computer and hit D for dinosaur and R for rain, and we'd be out of a job".
But it turned out that even with computers, they had to do a whole bunch of practical effects to get the rest of the footage. So when a computer generated dinosaur breaks through a fence, they had to make the fence break in just the right way so they could film it, and that took practical effects.
A lot of things have changed in the film industry and a lot of the old effects have gone away due to computers, but I don't think these big doom and gloom predictions people make are likely to come to pass.
I was listening to my favorite Martin Luther King Jr speech, The Three Evils of Society, and he's talking about concerns people have about job loss due to automation back in the 1960's. And computers did come and automate away all kinds of stuff, but people still found work in other areas.
My point is people have been worried about automation for a very long time. And it is interesting to think about, but I think a lot of the hyperbolic claims that it's going to destroy all these jobs overnight are a bit overblown.
Just because a movie looks better doesn’t mean it is a better movie. There has been trash made during all eras, but today is about volume, not quality, so finding the gems is much harder and frustrating.
Do we really need to have another movie about super heroes or another movie about rescuing some retiring tough guy’s kid from a bad guy? Or another movie that spends the first half rotating between character building scenes filled with silly, rote dialogue and no story line? Or another movie that takes an old, tired story and simply replaces the characters with a new set of characters intended to signal the importance of a particular demographic group? Or another Jurassic Park, Hangover, Rocky, Transformer, Terminator, Star Wars clone? Yawn.
For me a big part of it is due the slow pace. Today's slow movies are filmed in a way that make them feel more fast paced than action movies from the 80s/90s
Watch Jurassic park and Jurassic world back to back, or The mummy vs the remake with Tom Cruise, too many cameras, too many view points, too many cuts
Extensive experience in computer graphics development and production.
MIT mathematics degree.
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS
- Developed 3D animation software used to animate the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park”. - Software R&D lead for CGI feature “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within”. - Senior Software Developer on “The Hobbit” films.
INFO
Location: Honolulu, HI Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Possibly Technologies: 3D Graphics & Production, VFX, Software Development, Common Lisp Résumé/CV: Upon request LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaveh-kardan/
Extensive experience in computer graphics development and production.
MIT mathematics degree
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS
- Developed 3D animation software used to animate the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park”. - Software R&D lead for CGI feature “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within”. - Senior Software Developer on “The Hobbit” films.
INFO
Location: Honolulu, HI Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Possibly Technologies: 3D Graphics & Production, VFX, Software Development, Common Lisp Résumé/CV: Upon request Email: my user id at gmail
Hollywood has always been very bad at depicting tech! Till late 90s and also in the early 00s every computer in every movie had no GUI, no mouse, green phosphor displays and obviously beeped at every keypress.
There are exceptions: Jurassic Park, in 1993, featured a real UNIX system ("It's a UNIX system!"), a real SGI workstation with its GUI[0].
Modern online computers, aka the internet (with mouse and everything this time) made their debut in the mainstream "You've Got Mail" (1998).
As for Stranger Things, these are creative people, I guess instead of trying to be extremely accurate (and still get something wrong), they went for a credible yet not realistic way, featuring some easter-eggs in a post-modern fashion, so eventually geeks like us could scream: "Look! Iframes!!".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)
Here is a collection of some of the movies that I have liked the most
- The Matrix (1999) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/
- Gremlins (1984) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087363/
- Hackers (1995) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
- Sneakers (1992) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/
- Tron (1982) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/
- Jurassic Park (1993) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/
- The Terminator (1984) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088247/
- Back to the Future (1985) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088763/
- Dark City (1998) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/
- WarGames (1983) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/
- Starship Troopers (1997) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120201/
And there are many more as well :D
Some classify Truman Show as sci fi.
And depends on what you mean by "supernatural". There are many many movies without magic, but with possible future inventions. The category of hard scifi.
Europa report, primer, deep impact, robocop, starship troopers, blade runner, matrix, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, total recall, arrival, Jurassic Park, the man from earth, ...
But yeah, Gattaca is still my favourite movie.
TIL there was a Jurassic Park trailer where not a single scene there ended up in the movie
I think you're absolutely correct. The show was campy, and in time, would have become grating and fallen apart.
Star Wars, once lauded, has been milked dry. There are a few good works, but by and large they're beating a dead horse.
The same thing is happening to Marvel. People checked out after Endgame.
Game of Thrones was so near to perfection. It had an unusually large cast of a hundred characters and an expansive world to draw down. But even if the new show is good, the magic is gone.
The mystery of Stranger Things after season one ended. We're getting a rehash with common character tropes you can find anywhere.
The allure of Westworld softened after season one attempted to open up to bigger themes, but actually cut down on the possibility space.
The third Godfather. Dexter. Every single Jurassic Park but the first. Jaws. On and on.
Chiefly, it's simply a function of multiplied probabilities to continue with a success streak. Eventually the odds do not pay off in your favor.
But I think another contributing factor is that our brains begin to fit the shape of the setting, the motifs, the character arcs, the narrative world - and we just aren't surprised or pleased any longer. Few people would ask for twenty seasons of a show. Or ten movies in a given franchise. Our brains learn the shape of the landscape and grow bored.
Sounds similar to the IRIX "fsn" view of the filesystem that was featured in the "This is a Unix system" scene in the movie Jurassic Park.
https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/9745/is-the-unix-operating-system-featured-in-jurassic-park-real
A good documentary which describes the process is know as “Jurassic Park”.
I asked ChatGPT. It gave me bunch. I got some I've never heard of. I think I'll look into them.
<ChatGPT>
list 50 interesting movies that explore AI.
The Matrix
Ex Machina
Blade Runner
The Terminator
I, Robot
The War of the Worlds
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Transcendence
The Fifth Element
2001: A Space Odyssey
WarGames
Westworld
The Machine
Her
The Iron Giant
Automata
The Truman Show
The Prestige
The Martian
The Fly
The Bicentennial Man
Surrogates
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Limitless
Robocop
Electric Dreams
The Island
The Time Machine
The Circle
The Arrival
The Host
The Stepford Wives
The Brain that Wouldn't Die
Frankenstein
The Invisible Man
Metropolis
The Thing
Jurassic Park
Independence Day
Gravity
Artificial Intelligence: AI
Avatar
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix Revolutions
Inception
Interstellar
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Butterfly Effect
The Future.
</ChatGPT>
I could quibble with some of those, but it's a good exercise. Something not listed that I've been thinking of since this debuted is the impact of CGI on moviemaking VFX. People still build and paint miniatures, still create physical costumes, still film on location and build sets, but it is less than before as a proportion of all VFX (given 100% used to be physical). I'm not sure the work itself actually happens less, though, so much as more movies totally filled with VFX are being made now. The old work continues, but a whole lot of new work was created that is being done via CGI.
And, of course, the CGI is not fully autonomous. People are still employed to run the software that paints those scenes.
Labor impact seems like even more overall jobs, but they got shittier.
Quality about the same. Far more VFX, but they rarely hold up to good practical effects. Jurassic Park, Alien, even Space Odyssey still look better than a Marvel movie, and a huge part of the positive response to Top Gun: Maverick was seeing how awesome practical effects can still be.
> The article laments that things aren't right in the world when Steven Spielberg can't draw a theater crowd. Well, Steven Spielberg is an old, wealthy man now, and he is making movies for himself, not for the kind of audience that made Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park massive successes.
I sort of agree. I've enjoyed many of Spielberg's movies, but I have no interest in watching a fictionalized Spielberg biopic. West Side Story was meh, I tried watching it on Disney+, and gave up after 30 minutes or so. The music was dull and old-fashioned.
But the most obvious counter-argument to this is Schindler's List, a black-and-white Spielberg movie about the Holocaust (granted it has some 'feel-good' elements, but still). That movie made nearly $100M in the domestic box office in 1993. It's hard to imagine box office success for that kind of movie today.
This article feels so very out of touch, like a car enthusiast telling parents with 4 kids that their minivan should have a manual transmission since it's a better driving experience.
It gets the whole situation backwards: it blames the modern audience for not wanting to take the time and money to go out to the theater unless they get a theme park-style spectacle.
In other words, the article is blaming the customer. How dare they look to their Internet-connected 4K television in their living room to get Oscar-quality storytelling? How dare they turn to long-form television story arcs to deliver deep character development rather than Oscar-winning directors who pack it all in to a two hour movie made to be watched in a sticky theater?
The article laments that things aren't right in the world when Steven Spielberg can't draw a theater crowd. Well, Steven Spielberg is an old, wealthy man now, and he is making movies for himself, not for the kind of audience that made Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park massive successes.
The Fablemans might be a good movie, but it's still at its core a piece of Steven Spielberg fan service. It's the deepest of the deep cuts. If you didn't know who Steven Spielberg was, The Fablemans is supremely skippable.
The article continues on to describe a theater environment where the vast majority of Oscar contending movies are financial failures, but to me this is the natural evolution of film as technology advances. When you look at things like 4DX, IMAX 3D, and the kind of advanced sound systems you can find in theaters, it's quite obvious that the most beneficial movie for that experience involves action-packed escapism. Yes, it is a mini-theme park, that's what people want, and that's okay.
The tool was asked to provide code "for the sake of a story" and it explicitly disclaimed the ability to produce running code.
What came out was code like you would see in a movie scene -- in a story -- and not any like code. That programs looks like Dennis Nedry's "code" for taking over Jurassic Park.
Ironically Jurassic Park was an exception (made a great movie, but Spielberg must have been very happy to lose the book's preoccupation with details of chaos theory and computer systems in the screenplay)
> Take Jurassic Park: it's a very well constructed book with a theme of man's hubris in trying to control nature.
Hmm, that sounds more like the movie than the book. The book isn't really about "nature... finds a way". The book is more about the dangerous synthesis of startup capitalism and cutting edge scientific research. Almost everything that goes wrong on the island happens because Hammond cuts every corner he can, explicitly to save money. And this is allowed to happen because when a startup is developing cutting edge technology, government regulators are clueless about what's even going on. Scientists in the field can't self-regulate their own field because all of them have a stake in various commercial enterprises, making them behave more secretively and protective than scientists should be. The introduction at the beginning of the book lays this theme out clearly; it's basically an essay/rant against bioscience startups with the corrupting influence of capital as the central thesis.
Incidentally the book has some character development from the lawyer Gennaro, coming to recognize and take responsibility for his own role in the disaster. It's minor though, almost like Crichton was conscious of how little character development was in the story and felt he needed to add a little. The movie strips this out entirely, and has Gennaro get eaten by the T-Rex instead of Ed Regis (who was removed from the story.)
Jurassic Park (and The Andromeda Strain) are probably his two best. That one was made into a good movie and the other one a groundbreaking one probably colors our memories of them too.
Two of my favourite authors. I know that their books the equivalent to blockbuster movies in cinema but man, I loved their books during my teenage years.
I already loved dinosaurs as a kid (whick kid doesn’t love them, though) and Jurassic Park the novel and then the movie (I was 10 and 13 when they came out) blew me away. I just started reading Jurassic Park again, this time in English (I couldn’t as a kid) and damn, so many memories…
Never cared for The Lost World though, neither the book nor the film.
Malcolm was an author surrogate for the purpose of going on weird abstract rants which were mostly nonsensical even before they injected him full of morphine.
I vastly prefer reading books in general, but with Jurassic Park they really cleaned up a lot of rough edges in the movie. The kids are way less annoying too.
I had a similar experience, doing my first 3D graphics development on Symbolics Lisp Machines back in the 80's [1], and then spending my career developing 3D CG code in Fortran, C, and C++, missing the Lisp experience the whole time.
Some of the milestones along the way: - Developed 3D animation software used to animate the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park”. - Software R&D lead for CGI feature “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within”. - Senior Software Developer on “The Hobbit” films.
Now I have returned to Common Lisp with a new open source 3D system [2], and it feels really good. As I deliberate over innumerable design decisions, the one thing I have told myself I will not consider changing is the choice of language. New, popular, hot, trendy languages (Clojure, Julia) may monopolize the conversation, but I am content with what Common Lisp allows me to do.
[1]: https://kaveh808.medium.com/late-night-lisp-machine-hacking-d22a0e2d83fa [2]: https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9
I should re-read the Norvig paper...
The first Jurassic Park holds up unusually well. They used CGI for things they couldn't convincingly do any other way, and used practical effects for almost everything else. And for the most part they hid the CGI well, they took a lot of care to mix it up with close ups of practical effects, the way they framed the shots to direct audience attention, etc.
I think in a lot of modern stuff they go too far. They now use CGI for things that could easily be practical effects, but they go with CGI because it's simply cheaper or because they want to A/B test different colors of wall paneling behind a character in post production, or who knows what. The end result is apparently good enough to make a billion dollars, but I can't stand it. Movies don't feel authentic anymore. It's hard to describe rationally, but the word 'soulless' sums up how movies made the new way make me feel. Even the scenes which are wholly practical/real get degraded; the excessive CGI and compositing used in the rest of the movie cast a miasma of unrealness across the entire movie.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/248d25e2185a58bf827d329490480fb9/55a1eb08812b2f02-d3/s500x750/c1b6e7b7b6e21956bd7f60f7195794ea1e4998e9.jpg
Absolutely, particularly if you see this as simply another tool in the belt, like how Jurassic Park's thirty year old special effects absolutely stand the test of time because of them being a convincing mix of early CGI and puppetry.
It's not hard to imagine that this kind of thing could end up doing a lot of the heavy lifting for things like background scenes in the future, opening up the kind of stuff we saw in The Mandalorian, Game of Thrones, and the LOTR film trilogy to increasingly lower and lower budget productions.
Having grown up with the crappy "Jurassic Park somehow pulled off what no other movie of the time did" CGI of the 90s, the effects in the Marvel movies look pretty seamless up to the point where people's fingers start shooting green lightning or whatever. The nature of their plot holes and overall dumbness feels different, also. Much more polish, to the extent that I can almost ignore how stupid the whole thing is when I'm watching one. Almost.
I feel the same way, it's strangely mixed. You look at movies that are 30 years old and the music is very quiet or in different bands than speech, very carefully done. You can still hear speech in Jurassic Park or The Matrix. A Marvel Movie? Good luck...
Maybe it's a lost art. I have found that turning off subtitles and forcing myself to get used to their accents does improve my listening comprehension, but it's a much easier choice when you can't otherwise understand it just due to mixing.
I don't know that it helps me focus, if anything I have to focus harder when they're talking so I can hope that their lips will be enough to figure it out. But it does mean that if I'm watching something in a place with roomates I can use a much lower volume and figure out what is going on by combining the text with the low SNR audio I hear.
Listening at a low volume should mean better overall hearing over time too right? My default volume went from like -20dB to -45dB on the same system over the last decade, I think either I'm being polite to roomates or just more careful with my hearing.
Jurassic Park was right at the tipping between stop motion and CGI. Corridor Crew with John Berton Jr. ( https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0078237/ ) https://youtu.be/j8JgN_srwCc?t=921 discuss the change and how Phil Tippett ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Tippett ) who was the "master of dinosaur animation" changed the industry... And the first thing that they did was hire him as the animation director and other stop motion artists.
This wasn't a "they were out a job" - it was a they changed how they did what they did.
I thought this was funny
> • wrote 3D animation software used in “Jurassic Park” • software R&D lead on “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” movie • senior software developer on “The Hobbit” films
> But I don't consider myself an expert
Looks like a cool project though!
I think that we are finding more and more "transitional" fossils.
Fossils are actually incredibly rare, especially at more than a couple of million years old. For every fossil, there were probably a million dead critters that never became fossils (figure pulled right out of my nethers).
Nowadays, it's a given that birds are dinosaurs (theropods, to be precise). There have been enough transitionals, to establish that. I think the latest Jurassic Park finally has a feathered dinosaur in it. When the first movie came out, the look of the "lizards" was pretty much what everyone thought, so a lot has happened, in less than thirty years.
Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton
The movie cut out a lot. The book is awesome. Read it 5 times already and I might repeat it again soon.
Even without leaving Scott, Alien seems to have been at least as visually influential as Blade Runner. Plus of course Star Wars and Star Trek...
Blade Runner is fairly distinctive even today (outside of Cyberpunk, most other post-82 sci fi that I can think of is definitely more influenced by other things) which IMO is a sign that it isn't as universally influential as other 70s/80s sci-fi films.
Off the top of my head, do any of BSG, Babylon 5, Mass Effect, Jurassic Park, Inception, Terminator, The Expanse, Interstellar, Independence Day, or The Matrix have particularly strong ties to Blade Runner's aesthetic compared to their ties to other early film sci-fi?
I disagree.
Blade Runner seems to age like wine, and becomes more poignant with each re-watch.
It has a good pace, amazing visuals, asks tough questions, has some really good action sequences, etc.
Of course, everyone is looking for different things in movies and the experience is highly subjective.
Blade Runner will always be one of my favorites - right there with Contact, They Live, Jurassic Park, and other top-notch SciFi films.
> Classic movie music seems to be doing well
Yeah, probably because it's more bound to follow popular tastes than classical music meant to be played only in concert halls. I also like mostly anything by John Williams (Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park etc.), but I'm sure that would be too "pedestrian" for many classic music aficionados (quote from the article "Some of them, such as Korngold and Franz Waxman, were writing film music in Hollywood—a sure way to be dismissed by the anointed"). If you like the Game of Thrones soundtrack, you should also check out the Westworld soundtrack, which is also by Ramin Djawadi - because it's set on Earth, he got to play with reinterpreting pop/rock songs with classical instruments, e.g. "Black Hole Sun" on a (slightly out of tune) player piano or "Seven Nation Army" played with Indian instruments.
> Chris Pratt using a team of sauropods to farm in the next Jurassic Park movie.
If that's not in Randall Monroe's What If, I assume it must be in the upcoming sequel?
I've been listening to Nick Offerman read The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry. Wendell talks about using horses instead of tractors - the impact on the land and the economics. (using horses is just a small part of the economics - a community / local approach being a large aspect of Berry's writings)
Coming soon: Chris Pratt using a team of sauropods to farm in the next Jurassic Park movie.
Maybe I was too young to know any better, but I loved the 90s movies - from T2 all the way to matrix including 5th element.
> but I believe that after Terminator 2 and Jurassic park there was garbage for a few years
But lion king, toy story, pulp fiction, shawshank redemption, fargo, forrest gump, etc were released soon after jurassic park. Garbage isn't the word I'd use to describe these movies.
> How does content consumption work then?
simplified, there are two main branches:
- those who consume everything, kinda like maximizing the investment or "it makes me company"
- those who consume things that need to pass some kind filter
generated content would (maybe) reward the first group, but without some very good hit they will probably go back to downloading stuff, but not the second.
At least not yet and not in the foreseeable future.
There's a difference between computer aided content and computer generated.
Jurassic park wouldn't exist as it is without technology advancements, but the novel was already good.
Another example by Crichton is WestWorld. The original was written and directed by Crichton himself in 1973, the original movie is great, the second chapter is good, the tv-show is visually astonishing, but after 2 seasons, I stopped watching it. The material taken from the first two movies had ended and nothing really interesting have come out after from the writers (IMO).
Voyage au centre de la Terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth) is a great book from 1864 and I honestly prefer the movie from 1959 than the its latest 3D incarnation from 2008.
Not because older is better, but because the 1959 version is more centered around the story and it aged better.
Probably because Indiana Jones hadn't come out yet and the director didn't try to imitate it.
You are of course completely wrong. I have friends at Company 3 (one of the best colourist companies in the world) and they use Resolve for DIT and dailies all the time, including for such small films as Not Time to Die, Wonder Woman 1984 and the next Jurassic Park.
But of course this is the typical HN attitude of “I know better”.
I literally said I work in the industry, and your first claim is “there is no way that’s true”.
edit it’s also revealing that you think there are post pipelines set up around Final Cut. In my experience, there is no Final Cut at the high end (with extremely rare exceptions).
I frequently enjoy "weird" movies that audiences tend not to like. But there have been plenty of movies that audiences and critics both enjoy despite a lack of high-brow or polarizing content. I'm thinking of (e.g.) The Godfather, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Sound of Music, Contact, Disney's animated Beauty and the Beast, Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, Alien, the original Ghostbusters, most Pixar movies...
I feel like there is something pretty blah about most big-budget movies today, but I don't think that it can be explained by saying that filmmakers are progressively removing polarizing elements. Now that I consider it, most big-budget action movies in the past were blah too. The action movies that first come to mind are the ones that I have enjoyed enough to re-watch, but the 1990s had plenty of blah action movies. Maybe the problem is just too many big-budget action movies.
These are also great in my opinion (book as well as film): The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and Jurassic Park.
Sure... in the same way that the 3d interface in the original Jurassic park movie is the future of Unix.
This whole research domain is confusing to me. I do get that it's a hard and cool problem to solve and I do see why researcher could work on it on those grounds.
But I'm concerned about what solving this is useful for, especially with the focus on generating human faces. Obligatory Jurassic Park quote: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.".
I can imagine this technology to be used in the entertainment industry (movies, video games) as a way to save money on art. But it's quite obvious that this technology can be weaponized and used in the propaganda industry (if it isn't already).
So, this could save money in fun applications on one end, and provide means for mass opinion manipulation weapon on the other end. I am certainly biased but I'm not sure the recreative use case is worth the risk of the weaponized one (a bit like using tactical nukes for a firework show).
What am I missing then? Are there any other use cases that would make this technology actually desirable for the greater good or humanity, or is it just a weapon with some potential recreational use cases?
> $5 million have been allocated to de-extincting the Thylacine ("Tasmanian tiger")!
"They were so busy thinking about if they could, that they never stopped to think if they should"
- From the movie Jurassic Park, talking about exactly this. And yes, I know, they thought about it.
OT, the movie Jurassic Park made genetics and paleontology exciting, and afterwards the fields both saw a huge uptick in majors. What we now need is a movie that is really exciting, whose heroes are entomologists (bug scientists)
Right, so the consistent thing to measure is if the first movie was a hit. So yes, Jurassic Park (1993) is a counter-example to my point. But the sequels are not covered by the rule of thumb
I could be wrong (and potentially this 'big budgets are risky' is the case with big movies movies in general, not only big sci-fi movies.) Just an impression I've been developing
Care to look up the top grossing movie of that year? There is plenty of successful sci-fi including Star Wars, Jurassic Park, The Matrix, Transformers, The Hunger Games, and Avatar. Every genre can produce flops, but many of the most profitable movie franchises have been sci-fi movies.
I think two things are going on, everyone remembers movies they watched as a kid/teen and thinks they where unusually good. It’s not that there was a golden age of movies, it’s that you personally had seen fewer movies.
That said, the ratio of original movies to sequels/franchises changed. Fast forward 20 years from Star Wars to 1997 and sure yet another Titanic, Jurassic Park 2, and a James Bond film but also, Men in Black, The Fifth Element, Liar Liar, As Good as It Gets etc so still mostly original movies.
But fast forward to 2017 and the top 10 movies included: Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Harry Potter 5, Spider-Man 3, Shrek 3, National Treasure 2, The Simpsons Movie, and Transformers. I Am Legend based on a book and 300 based on a comic. So only Ratatouille was actually new.
Hmm, I will check it out, but I don't think my take is an uncommon one, for example:
"Spielberg and his effects teams succeeded in creating convincing visual effects because they didn't rely on CGI as their go-to tool. In fact, only four to five minutes of the 14-15 total minutes of dinosaur scenes were entirely computer generated. All the other visual effects were created using Stan Wintson's various physical dinosaur models. The legendary technician, responsible for creating practical models for Predator and Terminator, built everything from animatronic puppets, to to a full-size animatronic T-Rex, and even Velociraptor suits that could be worn by stuntmen. CGI was then used to build on top of what the production team had already created on-set. In other words, Jurassic Park's CGI still looks so good today because there isn't much of it in the film, which makes sense considering the limitations of the technology at the time.
...
But perhaps even more important than the breakthrough graphics was Spielberg's decision to still keep the CGI to a minimum. According to Dennis Murren, visual effects supervisor at ILM, once the director saw how convincing the digital dinosaurs looked, he actually rewrote the ending of the film to include the now-famous full-body shot of the T-Rex letting out a final roar in the Jurassic Park visitor center rotunda. But despite clearly being impressed by the capabilities of ILM, Spielberg still limited the CGI elements and retained the use of Stan Winston's puppets for much of the memorable dinosaur scenes viewers still love today. In fact, there's said to be a total of just 63 visual effects shots in the whole film, a tiny number compared to Jurassic World's more than 2,000 VFX shots."
https://screenrant.com/jurassic-park-cgi-still-good-how-explained/
Lawrence of Arabia is also one of the most expensive and most insanely massively epic films ever shot - I am not sure it is a fair comparison. Dune is a massive massive movie today but I am not sure I agree the comparison.
Realistically yes we should just be doing more practical SFX but you have to realize it is not just some big hollywood exec deciding they want to ONLY do VFX - the available skill market for these things has drastically changed. In the 1980s there were lots of very skilled SFX people and studios that could do some incredible things. The amount of people with those skills has dwindled.
I think the best example of this sort of thing is the OG Jurassic Park. Everyone has an armchair evaluation of why it holds up so well and many are correct but there is a subtle difference most people never bring up. Years ago I worked with a guy much more experienced than me who had originally been a talented stop motion artist and then as the industry progressed moved on to doing animation for VFX. He did a lot of animation for the CGI dinosaurs - imagine the scene where the T-Rex is chasing the jeep for example. The big difference is that because his back story was in stop motion he had a much more direct and real world experience of how things and people move and how their weight is thrown around. One of the underappreciated things in Jurassic Park and why it seems to hold up so well today is simply that the dinosaurs move like they should as huge, lumbering creatures - it ends up a subtle difference that ends up making a huge impact on what we unconsciously accept as "real".
Agree very much, and that's really the triumph of a movie like Jurassic Park— judicious, minimal use of CGI supplemented by lots of practical puppet work, miniatures, etc.
I disagree on the author's definition of "real". I see two ways they can be defined in the context of movies: Real could mean that the objects portraid look like they were actually filmed through a camera; but it could also mean that the objects portraid look like the objects they're intended to portay. The former is easily achievable with practical effects. But the latter is in many cases ONLY achiavable with CGI, which in many cases already starkly outperforms any practical effects (admittably, to the detrement of realness according to the former definion in some cases).
Which of the two you prefer depends on what it is you're looking for in movies. One motivation might be to see humans acting realistically, reacting to their environment and struggles. If that's all you're looking for, practical effects almost always win, because they allow budget to be allocated on actors and scripts, and actors have an easier time imagining to be in the situation they're acting to be in. Many blockbuster movies, however, are made with a different goal in mind. Marvel, Jurassic Park, Star Wars all don't have realistic human interactions and struggles as a primary value proposition, but interesting fantasy worlds and fights, with "sufficiently" realistic characters. I for one enjoy both types of movies, deeply, and I don't think that CGI ruins movies today. In particular, I don't think that CGI ruins movies like Jurassic Park or Star Wars, which in my view are great movies for the year they came out in, but by todays standard's are clearly objectively worse in almost any respect. Imagine something like the first star wars movie coming out today! Nobody would know about it, even fewer would care. Nostalgia is a powerful force.
I don't think we need a shift back to practical FX or 2d animation in general. Only for those situations CGI can't handle yet.
What we need is good stories and unambitious effects that support those stories.
The author touched on several key problems:
* Color Grading:
> Notice the color differences. Every movie now takes place as if it were in The Matrix, appearing in deep greens or blues or in gray shades, like the complex colors of the world have been bleached out.
* Shadows:
> In the 2021 Dune, it is a monochrome chunk, despite the billowing fabric around the character. In the 1962 Lawrence of Arabia, the shadow of the fabric is actually see-through. It has dimensionality, thinness and thickness. Because it’s a real shadow.
* Over-ambition:
> how could the same filmmaker go from making a movie as good as The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001 to a movie as bad as The Hobbit in 2012? It’s not budgetary. The Fellowship cost 93 million to make, while The Hobbit cost 180 million.
Jurassic Park (1993) was so good and stands the test of time because the primitive CGI was hidden by night-time darkness. The filmmakers knew what was achievable and believable relative to the technology of the time.
If in 2022 you make a movie with flat colors, fake shadows, and 3D characters (like Maz Kanata in Star Wars) who need to interact in scenes with human characters, then yeah: it's going to be bad.
Modern movies fail because they're too ambitious. The battle of the five armies in The Hobbit was too ambitious: our technology can't make it look as good as live action yet.
The answer is to make movies we can make with a mix of practical + CGI, and wait for the technology to catch up. And to fix the damn color grading. Songs used to sound good. Movies used to look good.
Agreed, but to be fair, the comparison is also with high profile "modern" movies.
"The Thing" to most people today is not "one of the greatest movies" but a horror classic and -- visual quality wise -- on par with "Phantom Menace" or "Jurassic Park", if not worse.
I think the criticism is valid: that the physicality of classic SFX is still mostly unmatched by CGI, and the eye and mind notice this.
My favorite test of a workplace is to see how closely coworkers map to characters in the film Jurassic Park.
The more obvious each casting choice is, the more dysfunctional the workplace.
That theory doesn't convince me too much.
Jurassic Park (mentioned as well by the author), maybe as well Terminator 2, maybe something else had some reaaally well done rendered scenes, in my opinion done a lot better than the one of Neo vs Smiths, therefore a movie done a few years later should be able to at least reach the same level of quality... .
In my opinion it's more related about the company doing the CGI and their technical capabilities/know-how/experience of employees than the overall level of technology being available. Mmmhh... .
Most debt in the US can be discharged through bankruptcy. Student loans that are bankruptcy proof are a gift from the government in the last 30 years.
The entire tone of your post would be different if you realized that it’s like the game Jurassic Park, not the movie, because you can start over whenever you lose. The way to win in the US is lots of tries, not guaranteed wins.
Is it possible to actually get DNA material from such preserved embryos and create dinosaurs again like the jurassic park movies?
There's also Starring the Computer ( http://www.starringthecomputer.com/ ): A list dedicated to naming the computers used in movies and TV shows, including perennial favorites like Hackers and Jurassic Park.
Jurassic Park used a lot of animatronics. Some shots you might think are cgi (and probably would be in most modern movies) might not be.
Edit: here is a short video about the full size animatronic T. rex. https://youtu.be/fFTsYGgdR9k
Hmm, all birds are dinosaurs. It’s been a long time since I last saw Jurassic Park, but wasn’t something like this a plot line in the film?
Yep. Just think about all the latest Jurassic Park films. They're almost identical to video games in story-telling quality.
I have seen Iron Man 2, both Guardians of the Galaxy, the fist Captain America and the second Avengers movie. So it's actually five movies (one more than I thought).I might have seen part of the first Hulk on TV but I'm not entirely sure, could have been any of the other ones. I stand by my opinion.
When you consider that Hollywood produced movies like The Deer Hunter, Chinatown or even the first Jurassic Park if you want to talk about blockbusters (not the new ones they could be Marvel movies), it makes me a bit sad.
I mean, don't get me wrong. I enjoy going from McDonald's from time to time. Nothing like a bunch nuggets when you had too much to drink. I just don't go around pretending it's good food.
Harsh words. If they can persuade even a single person to gather enough domain knowledge to validate their efforts, I suppose they could do some good.
That said, whenever I see someone doing the Dunning Kruger Maneuver, I try to approach with compassion and communicate the constraints they are missing without mocking them, humiliating them, and forcing them into a corner where they publicly lose face. Misplaced confidence is a universal and human problem, not limited to technologists, and it's an excellent place to apply the golden rule. Caveman Science Fiction illustrates it happening in reverse:
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bw3le/caveman_science_fiction_you_are_play_gods/
For a real world reverse example, consider Jurassic Park. It convinced a generation of casual moviegoers that they understood the risks of genetic engineering to be severe and untamable, even though the movie was the furthest thing from a risk analysis: the dinosaurs were guaranteed to get out, otherwise nobody would pay to see the movie, including myself.
In any case, the moment anyone brings out accusations of arrogance, privilege, naiveté, etc is the moment that battle lines are drawn and all hope of civil discourse goes out the window. That's often a waste, because most of these situations can be course-corrected without verbal bloodshed.
Why do the dinosaurs always escape in Jurassic Park? Is it because the mathematics of chaos theory dictate that life always finds a way? Or is it because nobody pays to see a movie where a couple of brats go on an uneventful vacation to a dinosaur zoo?
It's definitely the latter, but through the power of repetition people started to believe it was the former.
It just says a lot about your “taste”. You may not like the lack of character building in Jurassic Park but you can’t deny the amount of work that went into practical effects in order to make that movie (same with Every single Harry Potter movie by the way).
Same thing with Starship Troopers which by itself is also quite a funny piece of political satire apart from creative use of gore and trashy characters.
What is arthouse for you? A man and a woman speaking french and driving into the sunset?
Wow, yes. It's been too long since I've read that book. It was very formative for me when I read it in school long ago, and at least twice more since, but it has to have been nearly 20 years.
Have you happened to read the recent sequel, and if so how was it? I was kind of put off of Crichton by his later works after the original Jurassic Park (as usual, better than the movie)
I know the sequel was not completely Crighton's own work, but I did mostly enjoy Robopocalypse, so I'm wondering if it's worth my time ( and money: I mostly do audiobooks these days, which are a lot more expensive)
My personal opinion... We've basically stopped watching Hollywood-fodder: it's largely formulaic, largely caters to the Politically Correct/Woke and seems intent on destroying the Good Stuff that came before. I'll give Mad Max, Alien and Jurassic Park as examples. Prequels? Sequels? How many sequels do you need? There's plenty of Good Stuff left though, and it needs a little research: look at what used to be called World Cinema and there are some real gems. You may need to get used to subtitles, but the works are inspiring and unlike the Hollywood Fast Food Burger movies will actually give you something to discuss afterwards.
Movies in the 90s and early 2000's were much better than the garbage we get today.
From T2, to Jurassic Park, to the Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Pulp Fiction, Eyes Wide Shut, Fight Club, Cruel Intentions, Mean Girls, 5th Element, Independence Day, etc.. etc..
Something happened after 2007-2008, perhaps it was the shift to digital, where filmmakers started relying more and more on special effects, and less on good acting and storytelling.
The first Iron Man and Avengers were great, but then the formula got very repetitive. None of the DC movies were good, Fast and the Furious are the same story on repeat, both comedies and romantic movies became dumber/more simplistic etc.. etc..
Movies became more like a circus show of forgettable digital effects and less about a good story that teaches something or leaves an impression.
I think streaming might be part of the problem (just lots of churn of a large quantity of low quality movies), but also the box industry started revolving too much around few large franchises, and everything else became a low budget niche.
I think there were still few good movies (Interstellar, Gone Girl, Midsommar, and Parasite), but still much fewer than the previous generation (91-2007), which I think it was a golden time for the movies.
I always wonder about this while watching movies like Jurassic Park. How could a T-Rex even survive in the current environment after skipping millions of years of evolution. Were they even breathing the same air?
A lot of writing advice focusses on writing the perfect first line/page/chapter, because that's all editors/agents will read.
And so I find many books have great openings, but get boring in 2nd chapter.
So if Im in a store, I always start browsing a book after the 1st chapter-- that gives me a better idea of what the book will be like.
And this advice-- open a book with a "killer" opening isnt always true. When I was doing a writing course with Dean Smith, he had us analyse the openings of our favourite book. For me, at that time, was Jurassic Park.
If you havent read the book, the first chapter is leisurely and slow, talking about a minor character who feels bored at her job as an island doctor. But that chapter is masterfully written, as the very last line hints that there is trouble in paradise, and sets up the main story.
Compared with the movie, which starts in the middle of action, but the scene is dark and confusing, and I always skip it on repeat viewings.
Yeah, Arrival fits well and I enjoyed it. There are a number of lower budget films you could add to that list like Primer, Moon (2009), or Gattaca. Ex Machina is sci-fi + drama. I'm sure there's plenty more. There's just a tendency for sci-fi films to lean heavily into action (or occasionally horror) like The Martian film did when compared with the book.
Jurassic Park feels more action/horror focused to me, but it has a sci-fi premise.
I don't know if Arrival has a book, and if it does I didn't read it. But the movie seems pretty solidly in what you're describing as "sci-fi" here. Takes a single premise and then builds the world around that "what-if". Same with Contact and Jurassic Park, with touches of drama and action / horror, respectively.
I can speak to this as a graphic designer.
In the Battle of Naboo in the Phantom Menace (2001, 115m budget,) you see a CGI battle between a million zillion CGI robots and CGI aliens with CGI force fields, etc. It's a proud display of state-of-the-art CGI capability, circa 2001.
To this day, when you watch Jurassic Park (1993, 65m budget,) you're looking at a fucking dinosaur.
Great typography is like great special effects in a movie (most of the time,)— the viewer shouldn't realize it's there. "Good typography is invisible" is the most commonly repeated maxim for typographers. Typography is good if it's readable, legible, all elements on the page serve their purpose without needing to be labelled or puzzled over, and the most noticeable thing on the page is the information being conveyed. (Postmodernism challenged this in some interesting ways but for most practical purposes, this still holds true.) A designer might notice the typeface choice, paper choice, tracking, leading, margins, kerning, paragraph 'rag,' line length/column width element hierarchy and placement. The user probably won't notice the greater reading speed, lessened eye fatigue, fewer incidents of losing their place, easier scanning for pertinent bits, and things like that. But it will certainly be there.
I remember the first time I listened to a perfect-condition vinyl of something that I had always only streamed— I was immediately struck by how much more spatially-open it was. I imagine that was pretty deliberately done by the producer and with the necessary high-end loss in lossily compressed music, it just doesn't make it through. Not sure if I would still be able to tell as much of a difference in my 40s as I did in my early 30s, but I think most people would be subtly more engrossed in the music, even if not consciously. That was also sitting at home directly in front of my modest but competent stereo. The real question is context. Will the listening devices convey those subtleties? I know a lot of people are using streaming services as sources for home audio these days, so maybe it would to them? Certainly wouldn't to me as I was listening to music while riding the subway. I might enjoy having it available for a nice sit-down critical listening session.
Didn't know this but yup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PxTAn4g20U - scene from The Matrix Reloaded where Trinity uses nmap and sshnuke. Looks like there's a re-creation of the on-screen display here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J2IdllfHh8 but the typing is faster than in the movie.
Also, the Jurassic Park scene to which you're referring was a real picture of SGI IRIX's 3D file manager. It was visual fluff, but functional visual fluff.
Trinity used an actual exploit (ssh IIRC). This sets it apart some movies like Jurassic Park with the girl looking at some UI made of 3D shapes and says "unix, I know it).
Or NCIS - of which I copied for an awareness training the part where the two geeks "go though the firewall" both on the same keyboard.
Just started a Jurassic Park marathon the other day, and can recognize this quote from that film! So relevant!
There was an artile on HN about the influence of movies on "cool".
After Jurassic park, there was a huge uptick in paleontology, and everything else related, even Veterianism (!).
Most of the currents that kids get from movies are destructive to society IMO, but if it could be tapped into - it is a source of influence. Humans naturally copy what they see.
If a series of movies with the hero being an entomologist came out, it would do us good. If there were a bunch of farm boys that played with nature in a way that made it cool, we would harvest the benefits for generations.
My favorite story is about the actor (who else, to be honest?) Samuel L. Jackson, born in 1948, who was in his mid 40s when Pulp Fiction (1994) and Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995) were released.
Some might argue that he had notable roles before that, but I think most people will argue that his career really kicked off after those two movies in particular.
EDIT: According to Wikipedia, "he rose to fame with films such as Coming to America (1988), Goodfellas (1990), Patriot Games (1992), Juice (1992), Menace II Society (1993), True Romance (1993), Jurassic Park (1993), and Fresh (1994)", which means that he was exactly-ish 40 years old when Coming to America (1988) was released.
For me, LotR hits a sweet-spot. Long enough to get your teeth into, fantastic world-building, amazing music that I still listen to, and it was made at the point in time before films over-used CGI. Don't get me wrong, I like computer graphics (I used to work in video games) but modern films are almost lazy in their use of CGI. Ridiculous camera angles that simply wouldn't be possible take me right out of the movie. Characters (CGI models) swinging and jumping all over the place that don't feel "grounded" (see the Marvel movies for example). LotR did have plenty of CGI but I get the feeling they were conservative with its use, and resorted to physical artefacts such as sand in-place of flowing/gushing water in scale-models (yes they still used scale-models!).
I can compare it to Jurassic Park - whereby the CGI looks great even today, but due to the high cost at the time was used conservatively.
The Mandalarian used physical models for a lot of the space sequences, so I think at least some people in the business are realising that CGI has to be used appropriately.
Anyway rant over :)
A little off topic but I'm a little jealous that dinosaurs are way cooler looking now that they are feathered and modeled after birds. The leathery lizard-like dinosaurs that were in my books as a kid were cool, but these ones are wild looking!
Now that gets me to think about just how persuasive images are to children's minds. When I think about velociraptors I almost exclusively imagine the Jurassic Park movie velociraptors, and not these ones.
Someone on HN mentioned the book 'Titanosaur: Discovering the World's Largest Dinosaur' written by the two paleontologists who led the discovery - José Luis Carballido and Diego Pol. It's illustrated and seems to have very good reviews.
https://kids.scholastic.com/kids/book/titanosaur-by-jose-luis-carballido/
Personally, when I was a teen, the first 3 Jurassic Park films whirled my brain and had nice vivid dreams about the island and dinos.
Like others have pointed out, do not try to force your interests on your child.
However, “liking” dinosaurs is pretty likely to happen, if only for a time period in their life. All of my kids “like” dinosaurs, but one likes them far more than others.
For a time, we lived close enough to the Field Museum in Chicago to be able to ride bikes there. We got a membership and visited 50-100 times per year (seriously). They have a world-famous dinosaur collection, but it’s located inside a much larger exhibit that takes you through earth’s history and places the dinosaurs in their proper time period (if I’m remembering correctly it’s between the 3rd and 4th mass extinction event). There is so much information and it’s so well presented that you can’t help but enjoy it and learn from it. My kids have never seen Jurassic Park or any other pop culture dinosaur movies, and they didn’t need to.
I sat down to watch Jurassic Park with my son just after he turned three. My wife thought that showed questionable judgement on my part but he absolutely loved it and instantly became thoroughly obsessed with dinosaurs. He’s almost 4 now and shows no sign of slowing down.
That doesn’t dispose of the question of my judgement - there’s some violence in that film so that’s not a universal recommendation.
Parenting is a total mystery.
EDIT: Just to say - kids go absolutely bananas for any of the scenes in either Jurassic World movie that feature a Mosasaurus.
OK, total aside — this post is pretty conspiratorial and has been flagged anyway — but there’s a link buried within a link that’s fascinating:
https://www.weforum.org/events/sustainable-development-impact-summit-2020/about/3d-world
The World Economic Forum created a 3D environment for their 2020 summit. I’m curious how effective it was, but I kind of love it.
Reminds me a lot of the kind of stuff people would make on SGI machines back in the 90s. Or the environment from the film “Disclosure”. Or the 3D IRIX interface from Jurassic Park.
Anyway, it’s interesting thing to consider as a way of presenting information. Both a “palace of the mind” / Second Life type presentation.
Imagine a race of ultra-advanced aliens were to give us technology that keeps us not only alive indefinitely, but robust and healthy, without disease. Just that one piece of technology. Not even weird weapons like antimatter bombs, etc.
Do you think humanity would suddenly come together in understanding and peace to explore the stars and advance ourselves... or do you think people who already have enormous wealth and power would keep themselves positioned such that their influence and control grows?
Yeah...
We're not fucking worthy of that kind of technology. Neither are any other species.
Its the struggle to acquire knowledge and power that gives you the wisdom to use it for beneficial purposes. This is the whole core of Ian Malcolm's speech to John Hammond in Jurassic Park (the book), but also to a lesser extent, the movie.
The original Jurassic Park movie showed a program called fsn which ran on Irix systems—which were also used to make digital effects for the movie itself. It has been cloned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)
As I recall it didn’t look particularly smooth in the movie itself.
This is cool. Reminds me of an attempt, I think in Windows 95? Era, of a desktop to mimic the computer at three original Jurassic Park movie. A 3D view of Windows, which you could turn and zoom to any layer, and layers were folders with files, which you could zoom into to activate. At the same time by rotating and zooming out, you could see the relationship of each folder to another, and the trees formed by these folders. Unfortunately, I think our computers were too slow for it work very well. I look forward to trying this out. (But can we adapt it to Windows/Linux/Mac to make it usable?)
So the AV Club did a thing where they retroactively watched + reviewed all the Futurama episodes, and I think about their review of, you know, that one, Jurassic Bark, an awful lot. Not just because that episode is so emotionally devastating or because the review does justice to that and is emotionally devastating too, but because of this bit:
> I said “Jurassic Park” is manipulative, and I stand by that; the way the episode exploits its flashback structure to build to the most devastating possible conclusion is about as subtle as that Sarah McLachlan SPCA ad. Acknowledging this isn’t the same as criticizing it, though. Manipulation fails when it becomes noticeable, and when the audience resents the efforts made to drive them towards certain feelings. [...] Clumsy manipulation reveals a certain unearned arrogance, even contempt; look how easy it was for me to trick you, how vulnerable you are to control. This episode is more about empathy, and that ending — that uncompromising, agonizing ending — has no contempt in it. Just the knowledge that these things happen, and that we have to live with them.
https://tv.avclub.com/futurama-jurassic-bark-crimes-of-the-hot-1798184247
I agree.. its very much a quality of experience for me.
I paid $250 for a six person table with dinner at the Mississippi Symphony Orchestra while they played all the best pieces of John Williams' music from his many film scores. Only a two hour concert, but the Jurassic Park theme made me tear up, and I was only 10 feet from the orchestra.
I paid $300 for two Conductor's Box seats at the MSO for myself and a girl I was dating to see the Harry Potter in Concert series, where you watch a Harry Potter movie while the orchestra plays all the music from the film live. For me, it was hit or miss, since I was too old to really get into Harry Potter, but the lady I was seeing was 15 years younger than me, so it really affected her, which of course really benefited me.
Both cases, money well spent.
Most people have missed the most obvious head-cannon in that Jurassic Park scene - when Nedry is talking on the 'video phone' to his guy he's really just watching a quicktime movie .... you can see the horizontal scroll bar running as it's being played.
Of course at the time almost no one had really seen video on a personal computer so to the vast bulk of the movie going audience it was just futuristic.
Also in order to film that scene the video card had to be slowed down to 24 frames/sec and synced to the camera, looked great on film but was probably headache inducing to the people present
> The movie Jurassic Park has impressive visuals but is almost completely lacking the social commentary the book has about [bio]tech startups evading regulators and 'moving fast and breaking things.'
I don't see it. That's literally the entire frame of the main plot of the movie.
> The movie also turns the park's operator, John Hammond, into a sympathetic character.
I don't recall Hammond being sympathetic in the film in any way that he isn't in the book, though the balance may be a little different. In both he is a mix of profiteering showman and naive optimist. The kind of warning that you seem concerned for in the book but miss in the movie (which I disagree about being absent in the latter) would work less well if Hammond was a mustache-twirling villain.
In almost every case, the original novel is better than the movie adaptation. In the case of Jurassic Park not only is the book better, it's almost a completely different story.
The movie Jurassic Park has impressive visuals but is almost completely lacking the social commentary the book has about [bio]tech startups evading regulators and 'moving fast and breaking things.' The movie also turns the park's operator, John Hammond, into a sympathetic character.
I thought it was a pretty compelling idea when I first saw it in the original Jurassic Park movie, even if that was a metaphor for "hacking."
> What if genetics goes awry (Jurassic Park)?
That was the movie, not the book. The book was "What if profit-motivated biotech startups go awry." In the book Hammond is an unsympathetic greedy asshole who causes a disaster by cutting corners and evading regulators/oversight, all to get filthy rich. His reward is being devoured alive by petty scavenger dinosaurs at the very end of the book when everybody is is being rescued. The book is more a critique of capitalism than it is science. A critique of the commercialization of science.
Predictably, these themes were diminished for the Hollywood adaptation. Hammond becomes a naive manchild who loves dinosaurs and is more a victim than a villain.
Sometimes this type of long form journalism is nice because it lets you marinate in a different world. Here I can't help but feel like I just want them to get to the point because I don't really want to marinate in the Flat Earth world.
If a super intelligent AI came to me and said, "I'm going to take over the world and destroy humanity, but first I wanted to see if there was anything you needed." One of the things that I would ask it to do in order to buy time would be to annotate all the background details of every movie. For example, in Jurassic Park when Hammond is trying to get Dr. Grant to come to the park, the trailer they are in has a bunch of newspapers on the walls. What do those say? Who are all the extras that are hanging out at the dig site? Like who are the actors and can we give their characters any backstories that are consistent with the world of Jurassic Park.
I can't help but want the same thing from a story about a Flat Earth conference. How many other people went there just to see what was up. Who is there as a joke. Occasionally people send fake articles to journals to see if they can get them published. Does the same thing happen to Flat Earth conferences? People try to see how much of an outlandish presentation they can get away with? And finally, how many people go there, have a good time, pretend to buy into the whole Flat Earth business, but then when they get back and are cornered indicate that they only went because their friend went / to see what it was like / because they make fun of them later / etc.
Finally, this whole business feels very similar to me as the whole Evolution in education stuff. Sure people believe in the wrong thing, but at the end of the day very few people actually understand how the right thing works and even if they get that far they don't see what any of the implications are. Yeah, I would prefer people believe things that are true, but they don't understand it either way and they refuse to think about the implications.
I greatly appreciate the world building in things like Lord of the Rings or Avatar the last airbender. Everything works together in great detail to create a holistic world where actions have consequences that echo through the centuries. It feels like most people are just as happy to watch Michael Bay's Transformers. Maybe they like Avatar as well, but they don't understand why the shyamalan movie "adaptation" is bad. So I have a hard time caring that they agree with me that the cartoon was good as well.
The event test at the end seemed to target people older than someone in their early thirties at least. So I don’t know that this article would have anything with being in their thirties to do?
Also, I’m about to hit 30 this year so there’s that.
And also also, when I got to the question about Jurassic Park, my immediate thought was 1993. But then I became unsure whether that was for the first or the second movie so I guessed that the first one actually came out in 1984 or something. Shouldn’t have second guessed myself on that one, d’oh!
But that kind of underlines the point about age, and what they were saying also. If I were older I probably would’ve seen it in the cinema when it first came out and I’d be like “oh yeah, I remember when I went and saw that movie that was the same year that I did such and such so it must have been then”.
SGI is Silicon Graphics - they were the pioneers in 3D animation especially for the movies, research etc. Jurassic Park was entirely rendered in SGI workstations.
These workstations were incredibly powerful and extremely expensive (think > $250,000 for the higher end gear in the 1990s) but pretty amazing.
Also, for the time it had very advanced user interfaces. SGI Irix was the name of the OS which ran on these machines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo3lUw9GUJA
Agree. Even with video we're spoiled with tech to the point where it takes hundreds of YouTube channels to explain what the heck the tech does and how to best use it. Reminds of a quote - "We are not limited by our tools, just by our imagination". On a related note, I recently re-watched the original Jurassic Park, and the movie quality still blows me away.
I remember having two Jurassic Park velociraptor toys as a kid. One had the arms positioned as in the film but, oddly enough, the other got it right, as in the article.
Wrong:
http://www.toydreams.co.uk/images/jurassicpark/loose/dinosaurs/velociraptor.jpg
Right:
http://dinotoyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/JPRaptor-4.jpg
I actually learned the bit about Raptors and Deinonychus from Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin would never mention velociraptors, but several times mentioned packs of hungry deinonychus. Being a 10 year old boy when Jurassic Park came out and being obsessed with dinosaurs, I looked up what Calvin was talking about and learned that raptors were modeled after this smaller dinosaur, and that they were about the size of a turkey, not the size they are in the movies.
I like to remind people the brilliant CGI work in Jurassic Park and Toy Story was contemporary to the cheeseball CGI in made for TV movies. People can guess what's made on a computer in Toy Story, but they never knew the well-done stuff trying to be realistic was done in part or in whole on computers.
The late '90s were especially big here because computers and tools were getting so cheap. The same tech that let big space battles happen in Deep Space 9 and Babylon 5 also made stuff that...did not age so well.
I am in the same boat, but unsoftened - for me, the movies ruined the books, because no matter how hard I try to dispel the bland images of the movies from my mind they overpower the once awesome images I envisioned when reading the LOTR books. I can still read the Silmarillion and enjoy the fantasy though.
I feel like Jurassic Park is on the other end of the spectrum, where seeing the original movie greatly enhanced re-reading the book(s).
And I never watched Ender’s Game... but I have a hunch, based on clips and reviews, that doing so would sully the book. Given the modern direction of big-budget cinema just being ridiculous action sequences I try to avoid movie adaptations of good books. Arrival is the only recent film I can think of that was better than the book (short story) it was based on.
Edit: spelling
A lot of the world is pretty bad about things like not keeping their word. You see this come up a lot in fiction, which likely reflects the embittering experiences of the author.
In one of the Jurassic Park movies, the father is blaming the mother for letting the kid sleep with a night light and then there really is a T rex in the backyard and it's just eaten the family dog.
In one of the Aliens vs. Predators movies, the father is dismissively telling the child "There's no monster. See!" and shines the light on the window which illuminates the Alien and it breaks through the window to kill him. Logically, the child was next, but the scene cuts away before the child is attacked. So you get sort of a fantasy depiction of some asshole father getting what they so richly deserve, to the satisfaction of the child who has been dismissed their entire life.
One video game has a meme "The cake is a lie." It's a hugely popular meme and probably because a lot of parents promise desert if the kid behaves and don't necessarily follow through.
Gifted kids aren't necessarily more moral, but they are more articulate, will have a better memory and a bigger vocabulary and are somewhat inclined to be argumentative. A lot of them will call the parents on "But you said..." and will remember it if the parent basically screws them over after being reminded of what they promised.
Kids tend to universally feel that if you said you would do X, that's a promise and you are supposed to keep your promises. Gifted kids just do a better job of remembering that you said X and arguing it with you and tend to have a raft load of other strong personality traits.
The higher the IQ, the more likely they are to qualify for other labels as well, such as OCD, ASD and ADHD. So some of these kids get really wrapped around the axle about things when adults make a promise and then break it and it becomes clear that the adult never really intended to keep it. They were just screwing with the kid for convenience' sake.
The same clear, bright line of logic that makes some kids good at math or science plays out socially as a strong moral position, whether it is intended that way or not. I have a strong interest in social stuff and I am routinely assumed to be talking about morality when I'm often saying something more like "gravity doesn't work that way."
People think social stuff is fuzzy and hand wavy and you can't research it. It's hard to research, but there are some things we know and there are some best practices for determining some things and I just find that stuff interesting. But people almost always feel I am being judgy, probably because most parents raise children with either a guilt model or a shame model.
I didn't use either as a parent. I raised my kids with a model of enlightened self interest and I taught them things like "You have to pick your battles. You don't have to back down just because someone is mad that you did X, but if you don't have a good reason to keep doing X, maybe them being mad is good enough reason to give it a rest already."
So they got schooled about social dynamics in a way that's pretty uncommon.
Anyway, it's not that they really frame it as morality per se. It's more that they do the same thing all kids do -- expect you to keep your word when you make a promise and things like that -- but they are more articulate and have a better memory and are more inclined to argue things for various reasons. For parents trying to take some easy way out and be lazy and say "There will be cake if you are good" when they don't actually mean it, this is endlessly problematic and comes back to bite them, doubly so if the kid is bright.
This is explored in the book Jurassic Park, but was left out of the movie.
All I can think about with these models in general is the book: Jurassic Park. A lot of talk about chaos theory in the book(kind of skimmed over in the movie). I don't know how accurate all of it is, but it seems trying to model how a dinosaur park would work in the modern day could be a lot like modeling what a virus will do(although probably easier to model a Dinosaur park)
Sun made SPARCstations, not SGI, who used MIPS, not SPARC, and just called them workstations. Then there was the SGI Indy, which was an SGI Indigo without the go. ;)
The 3d desktop file system navigator software running on the SGI workstation was actually a thing that SGI shipped, by Joel Sherrill <joel@sgi.com>, called SGI Fusion, or FSN!
Original URL of binary distribution:
ftp://ftp.sgi.com/sgi/fsn/fsn.tar.Z
Now archived at:
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/unix/sgi/bin/fsn.tar.Z
https://github.com/jdm7dv/3d-file-system-navigator/blob/master/README.txt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)
>File System Navigator (fsn; pronounced "fusion") is an experimental application to view a file system in 3D, made by SGI for IRIX systems.
>Even though it was never developed to a fully functional file manager, it gained some fame after appearing in the movie Jurassic Park in 1993. In a scene in the film, the character Lex Murphy, played by Ariana Richards, finds a computer displaying the interface. She exclaims "It's a UNIX system! I know this!" and proceeds to restart the building's access control system, locking the control room's doors. After the release of the film, some perceived the visualization as an example of media misrepresentation of computers, citing the computer game-like display as being an unrealistic Hollywood mockup.
FSN – the IRIX 3D file system tool from Jurassic Park
http://www.siliconbunny.com/fsn-the-irix-3d-file-system-tool-from-jurassic-park/
SGI Fusion - FSN 3d File System Navigator
SGI File System Navigator, otherwise known as Fusion. Running on IRIX 6.5 on an Octane. If you have an SGI, a binary of this program is available at ftp.sgi.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaRHU1XxMJQ
It's a unix system
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxIPcbmo1_U
"Indigo without the go." -Mark Hughes (?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEcw_oTKTa0?t=6m8s
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7341455
Software Usability II
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassing-memo.html
In the case of Jurassic Park, I think Crichton's book was a lot better than the movie. One major difference between the two was the John Hammond character. In the movie he's a lovable naive dinosaur-loving manchild who meant well, and survives the movie. In the book, he's a cynical profiteer who brings children to the island in an attempt to emotionally manipulate his critics, and gets devoured by the most petty scavenger dinosaurs at the end. Relating to this, the book puts a lot more emphasis on the disaster occurring due to corporate greed, not science-run-amok.
I think a lot of modern critics of the movie might conclude that Crichton's novel was meant to be anti-science (this viewpoint presumably being reinforced by Crichton's later statements concerning climate science...) however I don't think that's an accurate characterization of the book. In the book the disaster is caused by greedy businessmen who cut corners, while the heroes are scientists who use their knowledge of science to salvage the situation the best they can.
> And finally, from a movie aesthete’s view, the Jurassic Park movies are among Spielberg’s (and original novelist Crichton’s) worst work
Disagree, in the case of Crichton. He wrote a lot of fairly bad books. I doubt I’d find much to agree with in a ranking of them that didn’t place Jurassic Park somewhere in the top half, at least. True that it’s not among Spielberg’s best work but Spielberg’s “mediocre” is still pretty damn good.
It's a quote from the first "Jurassic Park" movie; one of the characters sees a graphical representation of a directory tree, and says the, "Hey, it's a Unix system! I know this!" line.
The OS in Jurassic Park (the original movie) was plain Irix running accelerated GL X11, with a well known demo program for 3D.
And yet the 3D upconversion of Terminator 2 was incredibly well done. Like anything else, the quality is based on the effort and money you put into it. (Compare with the 3D Jurassic Park, which varies from adequate to terrible.)
That said, the best native 3D movie I've ever seen is Dredd. The few upconverted scenes stick out like sore thumbs because they're so planar.
In my opinion the departures from the Jurassic Park novel were not just incidental. I enjoyed very much the Jurassic Park visual effects, but I despised the script as one of the most disappointing adaptations of novels, because it completely failed to convey the message of the book. The central idea of the book was that there are things so complex, i.e. chaotic systems, that regardless how good you are and how great are your efforts to control them, unpredictable failure is unavoidable. I did not see anything of that in the movie, where the failure of the park was just the consequence of stupid mistakes made by a bunch of morons, not the consequence of objective laws, as in the book.
The adaptation is always going to suffer in comparison to a book like that. It's not like you can just rotate the story through 360-degrees of the audio-video dimension and have it pop out at you.
Lots of more modern fiction, written by people who think of stories first in the cinematic sense even as they are writing them, you can almost derive the film from the book. Say, Jurassic Park, for example. The departures from the novel were incidental, and the film could've been made even more faithful to the text but for the desires of the producers.
+1 to Legal Eagle in general.
He's had great coverage of all kinds of stuff (like the entire impeachment...thing) in what I would consider a reasonably objective law-based point of view (although IANAL). He also has very entertaining videos about laws in movies and TV, like explaining all of the lawsuits and laws broken in Jurassic Park.
I'm not sure why you're getting voted down when that's a perfectly valid point.
I watch GalaxyQuest, Terminator, Jurassic Park, Robocop, Fight Club, and other films almost every year. They're predictable to me but I still find them to be fantastic films with a lot to say and they help remind me to look outside of myself.
He is basically the John Hammond character in Jurassic Park.
He will continue to cling to his creation well after the power goes out, the kids are missing and the Raptors and T-Rex are loose. Only problem is he hasn't been running this experiment on an island but on 2 billion lab rats. Whether they are Generals, Janitors, Journalists or Teenagers everyone is effected in ways no one fully understands yet.
So now we wait for more and more unintended consequences to mount. Because it's not like a Zuckerberg replacement is going to do any better. This is a problem that has only one solution.
Eventually the park will be shut down and be rebuilt after we understand the psychological and sociological dynamics such networks produces at scale. Right now his answer to Harari is incoherent because no one knows what the answer is. And it's impossible to figure it out while watching the current experiment gone of the rails.
Micheal Crichton however, did provide a possible answer to Harari's question 20 years ago - "I think cyberspace means the end of our species. It means the end of innovation. This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity"
I think this is a bigger problem than just economics, it's a cultural one too. You have a entire generation of boys/teens/men who either grew up with or are growing up with an endless amount of entertainment (games, movies, shows, music, porn, drugs), the consequences of outsourcing and automation, and the rise of feminism/PC-culture. All at one time, of course many are giving up or just opting out.
I've dated women I thought I wanted. One was a very attractive girl who was into astronomy and whose movie was Jurassic Park. She also had Borderline Personality Disorder. I recently dated an older woman who is a musician and a hardcore vegan, I parted ways with her because I realized I would never be able to live up their list for a 'perfect partner'.
I'm 29, maybe I'll settle down in my 30's. Maybe not. I honestly don't know. I don't think being married is for everyone. I have some friends and family who are married, they don't always seem happier. If anything, some of them seem trapped.
For now, creativity, learning, and travel are more fulfilling to me than dating, meaningless sex, chasing women.
I was discussing the comment I replied to - "Did no one watch Jurassic Park?" It's a good movie, but things that happen to imaginary scientists should not guide our decisions about real-world experiments.
I think the hypothesis of the experiment was something like "these genetic modifications will prevent mosquitos from reproducing". We know that the mosquitos did reproduce because the scientists deliberately included other modifications that would be easy to detect, and monitored the mosquito population to see if those genes showed up.
Contrary to your "we're so smart, we know what we're doing," caricature of the arrogant scientist, they made a hypothesis, carefully designed an experiment to disprove it, carefully gathered the data, and published a paper showing that their hypothesis was disproven. This is how science works. It doesn't mean that what they're trying to do is impossible, only that this approach didn't succeed.
Whoa loved this reference to Jurassic park, watched the movie for the 100th time yesterday, "life finds a way" I believe is the quote.
This has been routine in films since at least Jurassic Park (1993).
> Isn't the premise of every one of his books "scientists fuck it up, leading to exciting circumstances"?
Some of his books have the premise that some scientists are short sighted and myopic, while others aren't. We can briefly talk about Jurassic Park the book, which I assume you have read. The movie shares only the most broad story arcs with the book.
....and I started typing a synopsis... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park_(novel)#Plot_summary is pretty good.
To your point: yes, there's a group of scientists that fucked up, and there's another group of scientists that are trying to honestly work things out.
I'd say the biggest antagonists in Jurassic Park are big corporate interests.
Upon reflection, aside from his first couple of books, that seems to be a common theme.
> Isn't the premise of every one of his books "scientists fuck it up, leading to exciting circumstances"?
No, that's an inaccurate and uncharitable summarization of his literary career. Scientists fucking up covers some of his more popular works accurately, Jurassic Park more than the rest, but other stories have the scientists/doctors working hard to save lives, or otherwise behaving admirably. Sphere has the scientists accidentally acquire godlike powers, only to willingly relinquish those powers for the greater good.
In fact, in several of his novels, including Jurassic Park, I think there is stronger anti-corporate sentiment than there is anti-science sentiment. The book makes clear that the problems at Jurassic Park are caused by a corporation cutting corners to turn a profit on a complex system before pausing to understand what they were dealing with. In the novel, the park owner John Hammond is consumed by dinosaurs. For whatever reason the movie let him live, and otherwise tuned down the anti-corporate angle. In the book his idiocy and greed made him a villain, but the movie makes him seem like a cuddly victim. In the book the two heroes are paleontologists (scientists) who were not to blame for the disaster but nevertheless behaved heroically in their attempts to mitigate harm.
A similar theme is found in Airframe though, which covers the interactions between a crash site investigator trying to find a truth that's inconvienent to the airline (that the pilot was to blame.) It could have been about aircraft engineers or aerospace scientists fucking up... but it wasn't. Disclosure and Rising Sun are controversial for their own reasons, but both have prominent anti-corporate themes.
Then there are the novels that seem unrelated to the discussion at all, like Eaters of the Dead which was a retelling of Beowulf from the perspective of an Arab traveler from Baghdad.
Yeah it was definitely something geared towards graphics professionals...just found an old magazine ad for it, looks like it had a Trinitron tube and ran for $2700 at the time. It weighed an absolute ton. I certainly enjoyed the screen real estate for playing Sim City when my parents weren't working!
Also in googling for it I found it had been featured in Jurassic Park: https://productplacementblog.com/movies/supermatch-20-t-monitor-in-jurassic-park-1993/
> I wasn't even concerned about ecological impact.
I spat out a post in ten minutes that looked further out than you did. I wasn't even trying.
The people that actually do this stuff are trained, credentialed biologists and ecologists that have taken courses on this and spend literal decades reading studies about proposals and going down checklists of things that have caused problems in the past. It is literally their job to make sure nobody can say "You didn't consider X" during review, on the news, or in court.
Back in tenth grade I took an honors biology course. The year's final project was to write an environmental impact statement for, if I recall correctly, chopping down twenty or thirty trees in a nearby park. In retrospect, we worked off what I suspect was a massively stripped-down version of a tiny fraction of the real rules.
It took five of us a month and we wrote a hundred pages single-spaced.
> So do most programmers...
I certainly won't argue that the field of software engineering doesn't need more rigor - there are reasons that I prefer writing cleaner code than my coworkers often do. But this proposal isn't operating in the same regime I usually do.
I mangle data at scale for a fuzzy rules-engine type thing. I bet you do something with comparable correctness requirements. There are times I've looked at a bug, looked at the logs, figured out the underlying conditions, estimated the future occurrence, concluded that I spent more money just looking at the logs than it would cost to remediate the data by hand for the next ten years, and estimated that it'd take me three times as long to actually fix it. I do know what happens when my solutions aren't good enough, and I bet you do too.
Aerospace and defense programmers operate in a regime far more like what we see with these environmental proposals. And guess what? They know what happens when their code isn't good enough... and they have huge checklists that they go down for every single change and have their code audited regularly and tested obscenely thoroughly and spend weeks tracking down tiny bugs, stamping them out, and adding them to the checklist.
(Before you bring up the recent boeing failures: Take a look at the politics and incentives. Where did the economic and political incentives lie there? Where do you think the economic and political incentives lie for a proposal like this? Especially given how much environmental fearmongering we see as a result of movies like Jurassic Park? Do you think that anyone would dare approve a project like this with anything less than every single i dotted and every single t crossed?)
> but because it's new we're not addressing the same issue.
Development of resistance is such a well-known failure mode for pest-control tools that wikipedia's page on DDT has a whole second-level paragraph titled "Mosquito resistance".
Why do you think that evolution and resistance are novel failure modes, and why do you think they'd have been missed in the analysis?
Everything in the new Jurassic Park movies is mercedes. Even the weird sphere-car thing is made by mercedes. There is also a prominently featured starbucks in the dinosaur park.
The movie is aware of how ridiculous is getting and a character says "Verizon Wireless presents The Indominus T-Rex!!!". I guess the writers took a jab at the producers and their deals.
------
But the worst was in the recent Jim Jarmusch film, where Adam Driver says "You can order it and it will arrive with free 2 day shipping". In a Jim Jarmusch film, one of the most respected "underground" movie directors of our generation!!! But his movie was funded by amazon studios so.. no surprises there.
Someone should really make a "product placement in movies" hall of shame and get internet famous.
Looks like the Jurassic Park movies were allegorical after all. Go figure.
So it's like the T. Rex from the original Jurassic Park movie? "He can't see you if you don't move."
The ability to ask our TV for a movie
... isn't that reliable. For example, there is a Comcast commercial that has a woman saying very clearly "show me Jurassic Park" to her remote. The film that is actually pulled up is the Jurassic Park sequel "The Lost World."
Wrong film. And that's right in their own commercial.
Even once 911 AI exceeds humans in routing speed and accuracy, the first time a life is lost because the AI drops, misroutes, or misprioritizes a call, there will be an uproar.
Not really. Jurassic Park is a good movie, the framing, editing, script, fx work, performances, music all come together really well.
Birdemic is a bad movie, in that none of the individual components are good and they don't complement each other well at all.
I'd argue that both are interesting
I enjoyed the likes of Jurassic Park, Timeline, The First Great Train Robbery hugely. Found State of Fear too much like hard work.
I think I might be similarly disappointed with Fleming if he had held a well publicised stance about equality and women's rights through his career, and then put out James Bond. Course the Bond movies were very different to the books.
> in the novel, “Jurassic Park”, the park’s supercomputer is a Cray, but Spielberg picked a Connection Machine for the movie
Not just a Connection Machine:
“You know anybody who can network eight Connection Machines and debug two million lines of code for what I bid for this job?”
— Dennis Nedry
This is one of those ones I’ll stop and read every time it gets posted.
Bit of trivia: in the novel, “Jurassic Park”, the park’s supercomputer is a Cray, but Spielberg picked a Connection Machine for the movie because he thought it looked cooler.
Also, the artist Karl Sims did some outstanding work using the Connection Machine that was mind blowing for the time, and still pretty darn cool today. The computer itself was part of the art installation:
https://www.karlsims.com/genetic-images.html
That's totally a real thing: https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/9745/is-the-unix-operating-system-featured-in-jurassic-park-real
> Michael Chriton - Jurassic Park. The movie was better.
That surprised me as I found the book far better than the movie, and in fact it's a book I keep recommending.
What did you find lacking there?
Ofer Gal - Baroque Science. A highly academic history of the scientific revolution, not the most readable book. It focused quite a bit on mathematization, especially in optics (and Kepler's optics revolution in particular), and also in observation via instrumentation like telescopes and microscopes.
Paul Nahin - The Logician and the Engineer. About Boole and Shannon's work; I had already learned the material so i skimmed part of it and returned it to the library.
Ian Mortimer - The time traveler's guide to medieval england. Talks about what daily life was like for different social classes in 14th century England eg towns & cities, food, clothes, housing, employment, travel etc. I got about halfway through and lost interest in the subject matter.
Lucio Russo - The forgotten Revolution. A very readable academic history of the development of science in ptolomaic egypt (eg euclid, archimedes, etc). This was certainly the most surprising book I read all year. This time period has been almost completely deleted from history, which jumps straight from aristotle to the renaissance (with a quick stop in the islamic world if you're being spoiled), and their achievements were incredibly impressive!
Jim al-Khalili - The House of Wisdom. A pop-history book about arabic science that i got from the library. I was wary because it's written by a particle physicist and not a historian, and sure enough it is filled with so much nonsense that I through it down in disgust after a few chapters.
Colin Pask - Magnificent Principia. A brief tour of some of the highlights of Newton's Principia, using both newton's geometric diagrams and modern notation. Following the modern notation of course assumes some basic calculus. Highly recommended - it made me want to learn old fashioned celestial mechanics! Perhaps in 2019...
Randall Munroe - What if. A fun light read about whimsical scenarios.
Sigmund - Exact thinking in demented times. About the vienna circle, the philosophical group associated with logical positivism.
Newman [ed] - The world of mathematics vol 1. A varied Collection of mathematical writings, both contemporary and historical.
Richard J Evans - The Coming of the Third Reich. Evans has recently written a three volume treatment of the third Reich. this is of course the first and starts with the origins of the modern form of antisemitism in the late 19th century. I hope to read the next two in 2019!
Robert Harper - Practical foundations for programming languages. I've mostly just skimmed it so my understanding is quite superficial, maybe in a year or two I'll go through and do all the exercises. I liked that he avoided 'paradigms' and developed the subject more systematically. The book's table of contents is absolutely irresistible!
Tolkien - the Hobbit. I finally got around to reading it... I didn't care for it. I started the lord of the rings but i don't think i'm going to finish it.
Michael Chriton - Jurassic Park. The movie was better.
Agatha Christie - Murder on the Orient Express. I think i just don't like fiction. The few years before this I tried reading more fancy literature and i didn't like that, so this year I tried more popular literature... Recently i heard someone say they thought that history spoiled fiction for them. I think I've suffered the same problem.
Findlay & O'Rourke - Power and Plenty. (in progress) An economic history of the 2nd millennium, absolutely fascinating so far. The discussion of the black death was particularly memorable. It's become something of a meme to point out how the peasant survivors were economically better off than their parents and grandparents. In fact that effect was limited to western europe. In eastern europe the economics were different and feudalism deepened, and in the arab world the reaction was different still: (if i remember my reading correctly) it was certain sects of military men who came out on top. I'm bringing it up because it is a perfect reminder that reality is more complicated than memes.
Robert Harper - Programming in Standard ML. (in progress) Online notes about functional programming.
Everyone here owes themselves to watch Disney's "Tomorrowland".
"'We saved a seat for you?' That's a commercial."
I was just looking at stills from Tomorrowland, for inspiration for things to build in Second Life. Second Life is a good test for futuristic architecture, because, after you build it, you get to live, work, and play in it. You find out if anyone else wants to. Not much passes that test.
Tomorrowland is a theme park. Swooping roads with no offramps. Big round unflyable craft that land in cradles. Giant tubes full of plants. It's not a working future.
"Minority Report" is considered one of the better examples of futuristic urban design in film. It suffers from the usual problems. Giant arcology structures mean nobody in the interior volume has a window. The road network's connectivity is far too low. Overall, though, it looks halfway workable.
"I, Robot" is a bit more workable. Worlds with a lot of "nature", like "Avatar" and "Jurassic Park" do OK. The giant tree thing tends to be overdone.
There's a whole world building department at USC's film school.[1] Their videos are not impressive. There's a startup in this space.[2] Mostly they do title sequences and ads.
[1] http://worldbuilding.institute
[2] https://www.imaginaryforces.com/
>I'm actually very interested in hearing concrete ideas of what the unintended consequences could be and their cost, from actual experts.
Not all unintended consequences can be predicted let alone have a cost attached to them. In fact by definition unintended consequences are those we cannot forsee or prepare for in any meaningful way. Of course virtually any action has some unintended consequences but I think what the naysayers are saying in this case is that with something as complicated and untested as this, there is potential for massively negative unpredictable outcomes (maybe a new invasive species, maybe aedes aegypti perform some as yet unknown ecological function and their loss would be massively detrimental in ways we can't as yet predict etc), and there's some justification for that from human experience. This was the entire premise for movies like Jurassic park
> I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble. I cringed during the part in Hackers (1995) when a screen saver with extruded "equations" is used to signify that the hacker has reached some sort of neural flow or ambiguous destination. I cringed for Swordfish and Jurassic Park as well.
Jurassic Park's infamous scene was actually UNIX though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)
There was a Linux port too - but not used that in something like 10 years so no idea if it still compiles.
I never finished my degree, but I'm an environmental studies major. A cartoon in one of my books showed oxygen producing microbes that created earth's oxygen atmosphere organizing to stop the creation of this poisonous oxygen atmosphere as it was killing them.
I was watching a TV show that said "If this spider were alive today, it would be hunting animals the size of house cats." and I blurted "No, it wouldn't. It would be on life support."
Those giant dragonflies with 4 foot wingspans or whatever? They couldn't exist today. The atmosphere isn't dense enough. For that reason, movies like Jurassic Park are probably completely unrealistic. Dinosaur physiology probably is wholly unsuited to the modern atmosphere.
Yes, absolutely, things are changing. But there is an unprecedented 7 billion people on the planet and life expectancy is going up, generally speaking.
Could we see a dramatic population crash? Absolutely. Population crashes of various species in various places are a known phenomenon. That could happen.
But we keep making these dire predictions about the end of the world and they keep failing to come true. We have been making them for at least a thousand years. The turn of the first millennium was predicted to be The End Times. More recently, the end of, I think, the Mayan calendar was supposed to be the end.
Post WW2, everyone expected to die in nuclear war. Today, there is all kinds of post apocalyptic dystopian fiction, often involving antibiotic resistant infections.
There are solutions for such things, though people who know of antibiotic alternatives are often dismissed as crackpots. Yet, we continue to quietly problem solve.
That gets largely ignored in favor of making new predictions of how The End Times are at hand -- this time for realzy realz, I'm serious man, this is not like all those other silly predictions in the last 1000 years.
And if you voice skepticism, you are advised you are a fool who just doesn't get it.
Well, that would be an argument if you have bothered made it. Taleb, for one, has.
The reference is all wrong though. People in Idiocracy are just idiots -- the simple kind. That's the very base of the money.
Whereas people doing "genetically modifications" while they might not know all the implications of are not idiots, just smart people who commit hubris.
Different thing, different movie. Try "Jurassic Park" or "Frankenstein" for your kind of message.
To be fair to Jurassic Park, I'm not sure its pterodactyls were explicitly claimed to be dinosaurs, and much of the film talked about non-dinosaur extinct species being resurrected as well (eg, ancient plant life).
Maybe it wasn't the filmmakers intent, but they have plausible deniability here. :)
Can you link to a source with some detail on what was wrong with those films? Particularly Jurassic Park?
I think the "common conception" comes from Land Before Time and Jurassic Park, it seems almost everything we learned about dinosaurs from those movies is wrong.
Edit:
I just looked it up and discovered both were made by Steven Speilberg...
Do you find good movies that justify a good grade home theater ?
when I was young I would have killed to experience Jurassic Park in such a way. But nowadays movies are so meh to my mind.. as said above, nowadays I'd kill to have a good plot and good editing.
ps: bonus dire straights.
Movies have always been bad. Always. Look at how many movies are made in Hollywood each year. Hundreds and hundreds. Maybe 10 each year are worth the time to watch. Maybe 1 will end up having enduring value. The rest just disappear.
Tropes get recycled, new genres come and go, are rediscovered, and then fade. Formula has always been important in cranking out the volume of productions. The odds are stacked against any one movie being a success, either critically or financially. Who would have thought that Spielberg would follow up Jurassic Park with such a stinker?
The studio system was no ideal world; actors were stuck in their contracts and had horrible bargaining power. Censorship was the norm, writers were not given much leeway. Today's movie industry is far healthier, with more outlets, more customers, and more opportunities.
The problem today isn't on the distribution side, but on the production side. Creating a movie is just so expensive. Same problem facing the video game industry. Think you can create a movie for $4M? That's the inflation adjusted budget for American Graffiti. Or Star Wars at $47M. Not a chance. The FX alone would probably cost that. Rogue One was over $200M...
I loved Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton when I first read it as a teenager.
Recognizing how far my taste has developed since then, I recently re-read it... and found it to be a shrill anti-science screed wrapped in an action movie script.
You mean like they tried in the Jurassic Park movies?
An AI could learn to operate without this component as this becomes necessary to escape the system.
Last weekend, the Oregon Symphony performed the score for Jurassic Park as the film played on a big screen above the orchestra. It was great fun. More than once, I caught myself thinking "this place has a really great sound system".
> So we shouldn't ask the question?
The problem with this Jurassic Park question [1] is it says nothing. If you think we shouldn’t, say so and give your reasons. If you think we should, but with limits, suggest those limits. If there is a group whose needs are not being thought of, state that and proffer a solution.
[1] http://quotegeek.com/quotes-from-movies/jurassic-park/397/
This reminds me a lot of how we've discovered that dinosaurs had feathers.
I wonder how long this imagery will take to come into public consciousness, both painted sculptures and feathered dinosaurs. Popular culture doesn't seem to be catching on, the new Jurassic Park movies still have scaly dinosaurs and I expect that any new Ancient Greek or Roman movies will have white statues. I think it makes people uncomfortable to discover that they've been visualising something wrong their whole life.
> where critical systems are now connected to systems that are remotely accessible
This reminds me of the first Jurassic Park movie, where IIRC everything was controlled by a single mainframe, from the PABX to the electric fences of the dinosaur pens, and a disgruntled programmer pretending to fix the former disabled the later. We seem to be steadily moving towards that kind of world.
I appreciate your point, but the same thing happens in DDG? Enter a movie (e.g. I used Jurassic Park) and I have links in more-or-less-the-same-place to iTunes or Amazon. You could have just as easily given your $3 to those services had you used DDG.
I dont see how that DDG's approach is "ridiculous" compared to how Google does it? Seems like the same sort of background interface to doing "stuff" on the internet, just a different URL. Sure Google have got a joined-up ecosystem (just like Amazon & Apple do), but I dont think in this scenario it presents any real benefits to the end user? You pays your money, you sees your dinosaurs.
Sure people need to switch search engines, and sure people probably wont switch, but I dont think people's laziness/unawareness to switch is justification enough to classify Google a monopoly when viable alternatives exist.
It might be better for browsers to provide a randomised-order "search engine choice screen" on installation about what engine to use, rather than just default to something (a bit like what MS had to do with Browsers IIRC). At least that might stop people getting auto opted-in to using to whichever company have the best relationship with the browser developer.
His stories are often lazy, too. The notion of a magic machine that lets everyone wifi and have dreams inside dreams inside dreams together is fun but absurd. The same with the end of Interstellar. Too conveniently we've got a magic wormhole which saves him and drops him a few feet away from a ship around the ring of Saturn. The first half of TDK is incredible, the second is very anti-climatic (maybe not his fault).
Check out anything by Roger Deakins for world class cinematography. Nolan is just good. If you are looking for a director who people might one day consider in the realm of Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson might fit it, but he's got a lot of "weird" movies (even his masterpieces) which don't give him the same wide appeal. [0]
Williams was great in just about anything he was ever in, I wouldn't attribute that to Nolan. The greatest directors elevate their actors (see the crazy stories about Kubrick and The Shining). Nolan works with great talent, but the performances often leave a lot to be desired, this is uncontested even by fans.
Nolan makes movies with interesting themes and he never really does anything bad. But for him to be even be discussed in the same thread as Kubrick shows how overrated he is. I say this owning Interstellar (the teaser gives me chills) and I thought Dunkirk was great simply because he toned it down and worked within something realistic. Given 20 years and a Jurassic Park, we might see Nolan the same way we do Spielberg today, but Kubrick? Forget about it!
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2017/12/22/16809404/there-will-be-blood-paul-thomas-anderson-10-years-daniel-day-lewis
MS Front page editor and Notepad were the only tools those days. But was really cool. I still remember my first website showing Dinosaurs family classification inspired by movie 'Jurassic Park'
Personally, I think one of the main problems with current use of CGI (specifically in non-animated movies) is color treatment. Comparisons between the original non-altered version of Jurassic Park (JP) against Jurassic World (JW) shows my point. There is an increased tendency to change hue and saturation of color in post-production, in order to transmit ideas or set moods on the film itself, but this makes CGI look faker than what it is and the brain is able to identify it.
EDIT: I prefer the look of JP over JW, not because I think it has better CGI, but because colors look more closer to reality.
The most recent Jurassic Park movie has a solution to this problem. In it they say that they had to use genes from amphibians together with the dinosaur genes in order to create their animals. This way the issue is reconciled.
Sounds like the opening line to the next Jurassic Park movie...
We are still not there. Press pause button on a CGI heavy movie like "2012". The effects work if they are in motion. But looking at them in "pause mode" on 1080p it looks like shit hits the fan. The same for Transformer movies. 90% is real world material with green screen background CGI effects. There are still way too many physical effects going on. And many directors went back to do more physical stunts, because the end CGI-only result was easily spotted and universally hated by the audience.
Jurassic Park 1993 had only 18 minutes of dinosaur screen footage of - 95% of them were miniatures, costumes and hydraulic mechanical robots. Only a very short T-Rex running sequence was rendered with CGI with the predecessor of OpenGL rendered on Silicon Graphics hardware. The good thing is, even today the movie (shot in analog) can be viewed in 2k or even 4k. They will have to re-render "2012" and the Transformer movies for 4k and 8k in near future.
Also the real time rendering is behind, video games still can't render 2005 era movie quality in real time, let alone 2017 era quality.
So a bit pre-mature to call it "goodbye". The progress is great, but there is a road ahead for sure.
Jurassic Park is one of THE seminal movies of the 90s and the female kid in the show saves the day because she "knows Unix". That was pretty cool. Though it was only a small role, not the lead like in War Games.
You'll get weird looks if you haven't seen the common ones like Star Wars (especially in geek circles), The Matrix, Jurassic Park, the Batman movies, etc.
When I first saw the "This is Unix ... I know this" scene in Jurassic Park, I had to restrain myself from leaping up in the theater shouting "YES!!"
All those lost hours typing at a green-screen terminal qualify me to be the hero in a Hollywood movie too!
In the original Jurassic Park, dinosaurs moving in the open are full CG.[1] Close-ups where the actors were directly interacting with the dinosaurs were model work. That was the first major film with photorealistic CG creatures.
It's still difficult to do close interaction between humans and CG-animated characters, although, with enough money and a huge team, it can be done. See "Guardians of the Galaxy" to see that done very well.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-cgi-works-in-jurassic-park-2014-7
Do you mean the new Jurassic Park film, because the old ones were mostly models, https://youtu.be/DzCID0HinMg?t=460
I visited Kerner Optical some years ago, which did that kind of work. They were originally a part of Lucasfilm, and were spun off to sink or swim on their own. They sank. Here's some of those guys at work, on the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" film.[1] They were 10-20 year veterans of physical effects. Someone who'd been there five years was the new guy.
Tippett Studios was one of the big model work studios. Phil Tippett saw the writing on the wall when Jurassic Park went digital. The original plan for Jurassic Park was to use models of various sizes. Now Tippett is a digital effects house.
Not that being a digital effects house means job security. That's become a grind of a business, outsourced and offshored.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urvcYSpiwQA
> Captive raised birds, released in the wild, have no ability to raise chicks -- because there have been no tutors.
Except this can be fixed trivially by puppetry/robotics. Just because it currently is under-addressed doesn't mean its some unsolvable problem. There are probably a lot of steps from cloning to wild survival we're ignoring here, but the idea that they're insurmountable because we haven't really tried to solve them is a bit much.
I think with global warming, we more or less have a moral responsibility to try to preserve and in some cases try to resurrect the animals that will go extinct in the future due to irresponsible use of fossil fuels. I suspect this stuff is going to move from the theoretical and experimental to concrete results in our grandkid's time.
I imagine biologists of the future will be running Jurassic Park-like technology as the norm and gleefully watch old movies to point out all the technical mistakes we made, the same way we can laugh at movies about shooting men to the moon with a cannon.
This happens to me all the time.
For example, I absolutely loved the Dunkirk's trailer the first time I watched it. Until someone pointed out an actor in the Dunkirk trailer (bottom right side, second guy to look up) who appears to be holding back laughing. Once you're taking out of the films emotional experience it's hard to get back into it. https://youtu.be/rJePvN_4T_E?t=38s
Same with the time I was a kid watching Jurassic Park and noticed the cow they fed the T-Rex looked had a stuffed-animal looking toy eye clearly visible during a close-up. It seemed less scary.
There's a lot of this type of stuff in movies that can really take you out of it. When I hear directors like Stanley Kubrick or Riddley Scott spending 10 hours getting a single shot perfect in Blade Runner I can understand why. The details really do matter.
Reusing this sound effect is just lazy IMO. Just like the jump scare sound effect in all hollywood horror films. It might be pointless to hope for more care to be taken in big productions but I'm still saddened that prioritizing safe easy bets like an obviously reused prominent sound effect is seemingly becoming common practice.
Regardless the best option might be to either stop paying such close attention as ignorance is bliss and/or stop reading reddit comment!
This may be true but I get the feeling those movies overwhelmingly lean towards luddism rather than the responsible use of technology. For example, in Jurassic Park, the message is essentially "don't mess with nature (because it's impossible to outsmart it no matter how hard you try)", not "be cautious when messing with nature". Maybe nuance just doesn't easily lend itself to exciting stories.
I'd draw a line between the good scifi and the good theatre movies. There is some great scifi out there that isn't for general consumption in theatres. I'd call Akira (1988) one of the greats, but not the sort of thing I would see in a theater with a mixed group of friends.
On the other hand, I didn;t like the Matrix movies much but would have to agree that were fun in theatres. Some people found them great, but they haven't aged well imho. I saw the original Jurassic Park probably 10 times in theatres. That was a great scifi theatre movie. If it came out today I would recommend it to my friends.
To those not in the know:
1. Plan 9 was led by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Dave Presotto and Phil Winterbottom, with support from Dennis Ritchie and released (closed source) by Bell Labs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs ) in 1992. In 1996, AT&T decided to deprioritize it. Lucent open sourced it in 2000 and free sourced it in 2002. It was a process-based OS where each process had its own filesystem (called a namespace) where each process could share virtual files (via 9P, later 9P2000, protocol) in the other processes' file systems. Like Unix (and Linux), files could represent devices. UTF-8 was used everywhere (since Ken Thompson invented it). rc was the default shell, rio was the windows system, plumber allowed system-wide hyperlinking, and sam and acme were the text editors.
2. 9front is a fork of Plan 9.
3. If you refresh the linked page (the main page for 9front), it has a new picture. There are a lot. Some are really bizarre, like the man in the wheelchair in front of the elevator. Others like the shot from Jurassic Park are funny and wrong- "it was a Silicon Graphics workstation (using IRIX, the SGI System V based Unix) running a three dimensional file system browser." (not Plan 9 which was not Unix) http://movies.stackexchange.com/a/9746
I understand it was a homage. It just didn't make sense to do it as the main twist.
I mean, if you're making a movie about an island zoo of dinosaurs, it's OK to pay homage to Jurassic Park using dialogue or the composition of a specific scene. But if the main plot of your movie turns out to be about dinosaurs escaping their zoo... well, that becomes a bit too much, in my opinion.
I've always been very meh towards 3D, but found that it works quite well in a VR cinema. The 3D effect is more pronounced, more natural, and there are none of the downsides (blurrier/dimmer). On the other hand, the 2 hours with a DK2 on watching the Jurassic Park remaster wasn't very comfortable ergonomically. A great deal of potential if they reduce the weight however.
> the Jurassic Park movie, which claimed to run the park using a network of Thinking Machines Corporation CM-5 machines instead of a Cray supercomputer that the book had used.
That was probably due to the CM's more impressive blinkenlights: https://youtu.be/BVtHh9JoS3s?t=2m20s
The rest of the video seems pretty interesting as well, it looks like a 10 minute intro to the CM architecture.
Every time I hear about these, I think about the Jurassic Park movie, which claimed to run the park using a network of Thinking Machines Corporation CM-5 machines instead of a Cray supercomputer that the book had used.
This is awesome, thank you! I have to admit I wasn't even thinking about GMO in relation to organic. But I can share that my wife and I totally feel like "Organic" is mostly a bullshit marketing label being used to justify increased prices, and we don't buy that organic certified foods are safer.
I wouldn't say I'm anti GMO in general, like you I just don't love all the ways this tool is being used.
What do you think the chances are that the Jurassic Park movies have had the largest impact on the public perception of GMO foods? :P
While that exact realization did make me stop being freaked out by giant spiders in movies, technically "they can't breathe" in earth's current atmosphere. Presumably, if it was worth the expense involved, you could grow giant insects in closed biomes with higher oxygen levels and (I assume) higher atmospheric pressure.
Also: Jurassic Park is BS for the same reason. The T Rex would not function in earth's current atmosphere -- at least not without tampering with their physiology and/or some kind of extra support system.
The touched-up "THX Enhanced" versions of the original three movies, where they digitally removed some of the matting artifacts and such, had more convincing and better-looking SFX than the prequels, for the most part.
Movies like Jurassic Park and Independence Day that came out before the prequels (well before, in the case of JP) that used a blend of models/animatronics and CGI looked way better. The visuals in Ep. 1 were an obvious step backward the day it was released, no hindsight required.
I thought the effects looked amazing. Since the turn of the millennium we've had movies switch over almost entirely to digital effects, but pure cgi still just doesn't look really real. It's missing some ineffable emotional weight that makes its fruit not quite believable. TFA, in trying to recreate some of the look of the original films using practical effects, also had the effect of saying, look what we can do when we combine real things that are actually in front of the camera with state of the art digital effects. I don't think I've seen a big special effects movie that looked so actually real since the golden age of practical effects in the 90s – movies like Jurassic Park come to mind.
Most of those are pretty evidently distinguishable from real life...
The issue here - and the point being made - is that we are already at the stage where many CG images can fool even close observers, and we've been here for some time.
We've been passing around these "CGI OR REAL?!!!!" images for a few years at least, and when they are first created people really can't tell the difference, but yet somehow when people get used to the tech and revisit these images a few years down the line they look obviously synthesized.
Ditto older movies like Jurassic Park, whose cutting edge CGI of the time were convincing even when viewing frame-by-frame, but to savvy eyes appears downright obvious today.
So clearly "photoreal" is something we haven't reached yet. IMO the indicator that we've reached "true photoreal" is when an image rendered 5 years ago still holds up to fresh eyes.
ahead? This 3d representation of computer operations has been a staple of “hacker” movie art direction since the 80's. Tron, WarGames, Jurassic Park.
Back when I was in the band (in high school), my conductor loved playing Hans Zimmer and John Williams and we played them pretty much every year, and in marching band we mostly did halftime shows based on popular movies or musicals. I don't see much difference between performing the soundtrack of Jurassic Park or Jaws and performing music from Zelda.
I personally know at least one person performing in orchestras professionally who grew up with video games and would be excited to play music from her favorite games.
Disclosure! Yeah, the one that became the movie with Demi Moore and Michael Douglas. A man is sexually harassed by his female boss.
The book is kind of about that, but also about technology. It was published in 1994 and I would say it was futuristic, if not a bit misguided.
Crichton envisioned a virtual reality tool where -- if you wanted to find a certain file on your computer -- you would run down the halls of a huge virtual library, opening virtual filing cabinets and picking through files by hand. I think this was supposed to make finding your digital files "easier"... but seems hilarious now.
Who knows, maybe some version of that will still come true. It's been a while since I read it, so I might be mis-remembering.
Almost all of his books had some futuristic technology involved, including Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Timeline, etc.
Jurassic Park, its not the movie in the literal sense, but the fact that it was my first move I ever saw with my family in a big theatre. So every frame of it "wow" experience for me at that time.
Also "Man from Earth", It was my first movie that made me realize sci-fi genre is lot more than fancy cgi.
Well at least he diverted him away from dinosaurs, otherwise Jurassic Park might have been a documentary!
Fiction: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton (loved the movie as a kid, but never got round to reading the book), will follow up with the Lost World.
Non-Fiction: Chaos by James Gleick.
Semester break reading, Real World Ocaml and Modern Compilers in ML (assuming they arrive in time)
Have you tried 3D glasses in big movie theaters like IMAX? Or watch a movie like Avatar or Jurassic Park (re-released 3D edition of the 1993 movie) on a good 3D TV. You should see the 3D effect there.
But some people only see 2D, e.g. with only one eye or eye-problems.
I thought the first Jurassic Park had little to none CGI, going with animatronics, puppets and on-stage vissual effects. Is there any article to read about where and how CGI was used in that movie?
Just recently I rewatched the first 3 Jurassic Park movies and found they aged really well. You never have the feeling that there's to much CGI because they striked an awesome balance between CGI, animatronics and sceneography (especially the first movie, but the other two are still above average imho). On the other hand, many of my friends agree that The Hobbit already looked bad when it came out.
The only weird thing about Jurassic Park 2 was the overuse of the T-Rex head. But the rest never feels "Hollywoodky".
Seeing the changes and the trailer, I have little hope for Jurassic World to be a movie where you can immerse deeply and forget that you're watching a movie.
fsn[1] seen in Jurassic Park brings that kind of metaphor to the file system. I don't think it's that practical, but it sure looked wonderful in the movie. I guess we better stick to 2D interfaces as long as we don't have 3D controls that equal mouse in their practicality. Maybe one day there'll be a nice Oculus Rift enabled desktop :)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn
I think what the parent comment was saying is that the smoothing algorithm used in subdivision modeling is very similar to bezier. Actually, subdivision surfaces are very similar to B-splines [1], but are much more convenient to use than NURBS -- which require the modeler to maintain consistent rows of control points throughout the model. ILM's use of patch modeling in films like Jurassic Park are incredible examples of working around these constraints. (I believe they side-stepped the continuity issue with their proprietary "enveloping" software which allowed them to blend discontinuous B-spline patch surfaces together.)
Love this post btw -- extremely impressive / educational.
1: http://graphics.pixar.com/library/Geri/paper.pdf
Right. As in the script of Jurassic Park at
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/quotes
early in the movie we have a discussion saying that the animals can't breed in the wild due to them all being female:
"John Hammond: [as they gather around a baby dinosaur hatching from its egg] I've been present for the birth of every little creature on this island.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: Surely not the ones that are bred in the wild?
Henry Wu: Actually they can't breed in the wild. Population control is one of our security precautions. There's no unauthorized breeding in Jurassic Park.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: How do you know they can't breed?
Henry Wu: Well, because all the animals in Jurassic Park are female. We've engineered them that way."
and later with three of the characters wandering in the park we have
"Dr. Alan Grant: [finding egg shells] Oh my God. Do you know what this is? This is a dinosaur egg. The dinosaurs are breeding.
Tim: But Grandpa said all the dinosaurs were girls.
Dr. Alan Grant: Amphibian DNA.
Lex: What's that?
Dr. Alan Grant: Well, on the tour, the film said they used frog DNA to fill in the gene sequence gaps. They mutated the dinosaur genetic code and blended it with that of a frog's. Now, some West African frogs have been known to spontaneously change sex from male to female in a single sex environment. Malcolm was right. Look..."
So, yes, the movie anticipated the OP from the BBC.
Ah, apparently the BBC forgot about the scene in the first movie Jurassic Park!
As someone who has legitimately tried to use Bing let me just say, Bing's issue isn't its lack of indexing. Every time you search on Google you're "teaching" Google's system what results you'll most likely want.
So for example if I search for "that movie with dinosaurs" on Bing and Google, Bing's no.1 result is an IMDB link to a movie called "Dinosaur (2000)." That's not a "stupid" suggestion, but it is still not how people use search engines. Google shows me "jurassic park" and "the land before time" neither of which contain the word "dinosaur" in the title.
That's because millions of people have likely searched "that movie with a dinosaur" and clicked on the "Jurassic Park"/"Land Before Time" links. This information cannot be gained by simply just indexing no matter how amazing your indexer is.
So let's say, theoretically, that someone stole Google's code. They then reproduced Google's infrastructure, search algorithms, and so on but WITHOUT Google's massive database of historic queries. I legitimately do not think that this company, even with all of Google's stuff could catch up with Google, because 1. Those historic queries now ARE the core of Google's results, and 2. Google will always out-pace the competition in generating new intelligent results (due to more usage).
It is a circular problem. Bing could be twice as good as Google under the covers, but it will never catch up for the reasons I said above... Ditto with DDG or anyone else.
PS - As an aside, Google's search query parsing is significantly better than Bing's when it comes to programming/technical queries. Every time a quote appears in a bing query it treats it as a literal query string, Google seems to understand the context of the double quote (i.e. that it was from the source material) and give you non-literal query string results.
Well, performance scaling in software has advanced (in average) with a stronger exponent than Moore's Law. Which is why we can get visuals as awesome as Jurassic Park on modern GPUs - while the hardware isn't quite as powerful as the rendering farms used for that movie, other advancements allow us to achieve what are in many ways more spectacular results.
So, he may be wrong about what makes this happen, in essence he's probably correct. In the time frame he outlined, I expect both Ray Tracing and Radiosity solutions on both hardware and software to match and possibly exceed what he has outlined in terms of capability.
Also The Net, Antitrust and David Fincher's Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo have very realistic computer sequences.
Antitrust and Social Network also show real source code that compiles (C, Java, Perl, Bash, HTML), Antitrust even explains "Open Source" to the audience. The camera work (especially showing relevant parts of the computer monitors and pan around to keep it engaging for a longer time) on all four movies is really fantastic.
* The Net (1995) - filmed one year before the World Wide Web got traction with the first fully graphical Mosaic web browser: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/
* Antitrust (2001) - famous for highlighting the open source movement, features a "CEO" that resembles a mixture of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in one person as evil character, shows Linux desktop and command shell, and shows real Linux developer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
* Social Network (2010) - very realistic, based on real detailed technical blog posts from 2004 on LiveJournal from Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin's memory: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/
* The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) - nmap tool, etc.: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568346/
---
* Jurassic Park (1993) - real 3D file manager application on Unix desktop, first use of OpenGL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/ , see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaRHU1XxMJQ and http://fsv.sourceforge.net/
* movies (like The Matrix reloaded) that use the nmap tool: http://nmap.org/movies/
The cool thing about Jurassic Park is that it showcases all this high-end tech (at the time) to set the mood. The setting of this movie made a huge impact on me as a kid.
In the computer room scene you can see a CM-5 [1] from Thinking Machines in the background (or at least, only the front panels with the futuristic blinking red leds). Those were very interesting computers when launched, with a fundamentally different architecture for parallel computing.
Also, fun story: the company hired Richard Feynman [2].
[1] http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/hollywood/images/hwd_jpark9l.jpg
[2] http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/
You are right.
I do miss SGI. They had really cool workstations. Expensive as hell. We had to lease them instead of buying them.
Besides doing actual work, remember playing and compiling a bunch of OpenGL demos on them. Even found the Jurassic Park file browser, by accident, and only years later connected the two when watching the movie the 2nd or 3rd time.
I remember the "onslaught" of Windows NT and Windows 2000 workstations with larger, beefier graphics cards, more memory and faster processor. I could tell it was the end for SGI. But I will always remember them fondly.
My favorite example is from Terminator, blogged about here (not by me):
http://www.pagetable.com/?p=64
When I first saw the movie I was with a friend who laughed out loud at that point and said "hey, that's 6502 assembler".
I guess "I know UNIX" from Jurassic Park doesn't count.
I have tubes of mint condition pogs back at home. Some of them were ads for movies like Jurassic Park. I wonder if they'll ever be worth anything... I wonder if I could trade them for bitcoin?
Yes, women spend a lot on cell phones. So, that means that they are interested in technology? Not really! Here's why:
Read D. Tannen, You Just Don't Understand: Men and Women in Conversation -- she's long been a prof at Georgetown. There learn that girls and young women want to get security from memberships in groups of other girls, and one of the main ways a girl/young woman can do that is to bring to the group some juicy gossip. So, they gossip. Yes, they do gossip. And drawing from the movie Jurassic Park, yes, "They do form herds.".
For technology, that's things. In simple terms, in year 1, month 1, nearly week 1, in their crib, the girls are trying to get emotional connections with adults via facial expressions, and the boys are trying to hack the latch on the crib and write C++ code to automate the toy fire truck on the floor.
The girls are interested in emotional connections with people, and the boys are interested in things. The boys are seeking mastery over the physical world, and the girls are seeking care taking via emotional connections with men who have mastery over the physical world.
The girls are interested in fashion and cosmetics both to attract men and also to fit into the groups of other girls they want to be part of.
Can women do technology? I don't have much insight into what the real limits are, but I've seen a wide range from (1) having a super tough time with 8-9th grade algebra to (2) work with programming languages, starting with no real background at all, totally blowing away some of the brightest people in computing. But, I've nearly never seen a girl or woman who actually likes something technical.
Again, basically the women's magazines are correct: What girls and women really like is belonging to groups of girls/women and making emotional connections with other people. And that's what girls/women use technology, radio, TV, magazines, cell phones, social media, for -- to belong to groups of girls/women and to make emotional connections with other people. For the technology itself, the girls/women don't care, don't care any more than they care that it was a Diesel powered 18 wheel truck that delivered their women's magazine, cosmetics, cell phone, laptop, skim milk, etc.
Just because the women's magazines dish out material based on stereotypes does not mean that the stereotypes are wrong.
> It was also one of the first movies to combine significant CGI with real-world interaction.
The was no CGI in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It was all traditional animation, hand-drawn on celluloid sheets.
It wouldn't be until Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park that CGI really broke through as a technique that could be used in conjunction with live-action.
There are a lot of people who don't know what this is like; as someone who used to regularly experience this, I'd like to share some of my experience.
I have been in real situations that legitimately threatened my life and safety, and sleep paralysis consistently gave me comparable levels of stress and fear in each episode.
Imagine having a bad nightmare, so bad that you wake up from it. But when you wake up, your eyes are open and you cannot move. You see things that your mind logically knows cannot actually be there, but they are real for you. The REM dream state continues, overlapping reality.
In one case I woke up one my side to a large, dimly lit figure on the side of the bed, staring at me with red eyes. It just stared at me, while I physically felt something at the bottom of the bed dragging my body off. I couldn't move or even shift my head.
I was aware that I was awake, that this wasn't a dream anymore, but that this sort of paranormal situation should't be happening. I couldn't move, couldn't struggle - then the thing staring at me unhinged its jaws wider than should be humanly possible and screamed at me at the top of its lungs. It sounded like a human mixed with the shrill cry of a velociraptor from Jurassic Park.
I just remember trying to yell but not making noise, and feeling like I was drowning. I knew I was awake but the supernatural sense of wrongness was almost more terrifying than the hallucination.
Then, after what felt like minutes of struggling to breath, and the figure almost eating me, it all vanished, and I shook my body so violently I threw myself off the bed (seriously). I think I actually ran to the lights, turned them on and sat shuddering on my bed in the blanket for a while.
It's no joke. I used to regularly have these, and I sympathize with anyone who has had them. They're primarily caused by stress and anxiety (and have a high incidence in people with PTSD). It's not like a nightmare where you can convince yourself it wasn't real, because the things I hallucinated were as real to me as the lamp and nightstand.
Obviously I should say I didn't consume anything the night before. It's almost debilitating, and caused me insomnia for quite a while.
It was hard to describe to people - they are not the same things as night terrors. I would talk to people about it and they would say it was a bad nightmare. But it felt so real, it was like that scene from the Matrix with Neo and the bug.
Afterwards, details were always fully lucid and clear, and never became fuzzy. I eventually realized that the level of obsession I would get into when trying to get people to understand that it wasn't just a nightmare mirrored the hysterical reactions you would see from characters in Nightmare on Elm Street or the Exorcist. I never really believed in things like alien abduction, but I can fully understand why repeated exposure to sleep paralysis would cause someone to seriously question reality.
For anyone still doubtful of how much structure and intent there is in a screenplay, this deconstruction of Jurassic Park is an amazing read: http://www.blakesnyder.com/2013/04/05/the-jurassic-park-beat-sheet/
While not exactly following the 'save the cat' formula, and probably being a much better movie for that, it clearly rests on the same principles.
Preamble: I am 28 years old and have returned to school as a full-time student. I am finishing my first year. I live on campus as an RA and am in freshman level classes. I feel like I can offer a unique perspective to you, here are my thoughts for whatever they are worth.
Don't discount your relationship with your roommate. I know you are looking to other people, and thats fine, but if you two get along that is important. My first time through college was the typical drink/party/girls experience. I made friends and lived with the same group of guys all 4 years. Now, 5+ years later, there is ONE person from college that I am still close with. He is the only one I consider a "life-long" friend. After school he moved in with me and got a job at my company. He met his wife at work, they moved to Cali then to Chicago. They're doing great. A single friendship can make a huge difference...also, this friend and I didn't even know each other freshman year.
Freshman year is tumultuous. Many of the people you see all buddy-buddy right now will hate each other before the end of next year. A lot changes during college and much of it in first two years. Don't stress about friends too much yet, nothing is settled, it just APPEARS to be settled.
Don't try too hard. This will sabotage your efforts. In my first freshman year I had a tough time when my group of friends started mixing with this other group and those new kids didn't like me very much. I tried so hard to earn their approval and be a part of the group but nothing worked. Eventually I got flat-out fed-up and angry. I said "F* them." I started doing my own thing and almost instantly they responded with acceptance. Kids can tell when you are trying hard to make something happen and, for whatever reason, they respond negatively to that. Do whatever it is you like to do, do it well, be proud, be confident, be pleasant and people will gravitate towards you. This will create opportunities for you to create a relationship.
PLEASE don't internalize this. What you are going through does NOT mean people won't/don't accept you or people don't like you. It just means that you haven't made the right connection yet. Making friends is serendipitous to a large degree, the right comment at the right time, a well placed quip, etc. Things come together and it just happens.
And now for some advice,
In high school I moved from the east coast to the west coast for my father's job. I had never had to "make friends" before. I experimented and ranked the best ways to "make friends" They were: talk about sports, talk about music, talk about movies. I'm a big movie fan so I used movies a lot. Quoting movies is an incredibly effective way to start conversations. I still use it to this day. (I don't know what you kids watch these days, the harry potter and whatnot but for me its lots of Jurassic Park, Star Wars, and American Psycho.) They can be obscure quotes and/or obscure movies, whatever. Quotes are good because when someone else recognizes the quote it says "you and I like and notice the same weird/funny things." without saying it. You don't need to be funny or over-the-top about it, just throw it out there and see who responds. If no one responds don't feel awkward, its just something you've seen that they haven't.
This year I have found the after-class-food tactic seems to work pretty well. Towards the end of class, when you are packing up ask someone if they want to get some food, I have found that most kids without another class head to the cafeteria. This is an easy, low-pressure approach.
Practice, practice, practice. Socializing is a technique like a golf swing. Practice makes perfect. Try different things out, now is the time to do that. You will crash and burn sometimes, THATS OK, everyone does. Those crashes will mean nothing to you looking back. Just keep practicing and you will get better. Remember what works and what doesn't. Incorporate and adapt.
I hope some of this helps, I tried to be honest and straight-forward. I'll leave you with this postamble,
I've lurked on HN for quite some time now. A couple years I think. I've never posted anything because I've never felt confident enough in any of my thoughts to broadcast them to such an intelligent and awe-inspiring community. This is my first post because I feel confident in saying to you that it will work out. I can see just from what you've written that you have good things to offer. It's in the honesty and thought of your words. I know this is important to you but don't stress too much. Don't get too caught up in it. It will happen for you.
Please feel free to message me if you want to talk more.
I recommend reading Jack Horner's "How to build a Dinosaur", he talks about this sort of thing, namely that you can take an existing flightless bird, give it teeth, a tail, and flip the arms around and you've basically got a dinosaur.
The creepy part is people are actually messing around with chicken genes and can turn on things like "grow teeth" and "grow a tail".
- http://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_building_a_dinosaur_from_a_chicken.html
You'd think the guy who was the dinosaur adviser for Jurassic Park would actually learn the lesson from the movie, so if we all get eaten to death by chickens, here's your guy.
Yeah, but he also criticized Jurassic Park despite the fact that most of Jurassic Park's OS views were genuinely Unix (SGI's IRIX, to be precise):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y12_WrlPaw
In that clip, you can see fsn, which is a genuinely real 3D file manager for IRIX:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaRHU1XxMJQ
Granted it's fair to say that the average theme park wouldn't be running IRIX, but Jurassic Park wasn't the average theme park (movie quote: "no expense spared"). So I think some of his criticisms are completely misplaced.
This isn't Apple's doing per se, but it sucks for consumers nonetheless. And people don't really care whose fault it really is. They just want it to work, and these silly restrictions put in place by old media companies are really making streaming video hard to love.
I was going to purchase the Jurassic Park trilogy on iTunes last week, but noticed that it is no longer available to purchase in HD. I have no idea why. Apple certainly would like to sell it to me in HD, but the movie studio must not really want to sell it that badly.
Maybe this is related to the blu-ray release. Who knows. Not my job to figure it out. So, I just won't buy it.
fsm (from SGI---you can see it in action in the movie "Jurassic Park") was an interesting filesystem viewer. It presented the filesystem in 3D on an infinite plane. Directories were squat boxes, while files were tall and skinny boxes sitting on directories. The size of the boxes reflected the size of the directory/file (huge files literally stood out). Color was used to indicate age---the older the file, the cooler and darker the color.
Yeah, but a movie called "Jurassic Park" with no dinosaurs would be pretty woeful. The same movie without 10-year-old experts in esoteric Unix UIs would have worked just fine.
The Jurassic Park stuff wasn't done by a "guy", it was done by a team of folks, of which my mom was a part. (Specifically she helped pull together some of the spinning 3D xray skull stuff, wrote some c-shell scripts and was part of the sales team that sold the Sun systems to the movie). Also, the UI that you're probably talking about is this thing, and it's (sadly) real: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn
Y'know the 3D filesystem in Jurassic Park was a real program too, and it was based on a UNIX system.
(I think it's a file explorer for an old SGI box; which makes sense as SGI was commonly used in the production of movies.)
I noticed this in Jurassic Park - it had a sort of movie OS, sort of actual code thing in it:
https://twitter.com/hoorayimhelping/status/198887963399176192/photo/1/large
Matrix 2 rather famously involved an actual ssh escalation using nmap. Takedown (aka Track Down) was another fairly accurate example of hacking (though highly inaccurate historically). One of the more famous examples of "Movie OSes", Jurassic Park (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB9Ng), actually was a real unix system running FSN
Minor quibbling point, not necessarily relevant to your question: The point of a college education is not just job skills per se. If you want skills for a specific job, you typically are sent for training rather than education. My sister, who has vastly superior job hunting skills to mine, always said that unless you want to be something like a doctor or lawyer, your major is largely irrelevant but having a degree (any degree) is important to get your foot in the door.
I will close with one of my favorite anecdotes: Michael Crichton wanted to be a writer. His family told him he was crazy, you cannot support yourself that way and encouraged him to be a doctor. So he went to medical school. And his first book was published before he graduated, so he never did work as a doctor. Still, his overwhelmingly successful books and movies are all the richer due to his educational background. Jurassic Park and other works would not be so compelling if, like so many authors, he had some throwaway explanation like "er...radiation! That's it!"
Not intended as advice, which is nearly "against my religion". Intended only as food for thought.
Best of luck.
> And here’s something no one has stopped to consider: Maybe making movies is too damn expensive. Or rather, far more expensive than it needs to be.
Hmm. I went to the theatre (first time since a long time as the experience feels antiquated and overpriced) with friends to see Sherlock Holmes, and the opening scene perfectly exemplifies the point: for about ten second you see a shot of the cathedral of Strasbourg. Half of it consists of a CGI explosion. I live there, and to produce this shot, they locked this part of the city for one week.
Ten seconds. One week. A whole team plus equipment. To the other side of the world. Seriously.
When seeing the scene I found that downright shocking, especially given the 10€ hole burning my pocket.
By comparison it takes Turn10 Studios three days[0] locally to gather enough information on a track to subsequently work on for one year. That's a full-length, five kilometer track.
I know this is not the same, and various other things come into play, but I just can't help but have an alarm bell ringing when I see movie production costs. See for yourself (budget in $):
- 2001 and Star Wars: 10 million each - Independence Day: 75 million - Transformers: 150 million - Kill Bill 1+2: 50 million - Jurassic Park: 65 million - King Kong: 200 million - Blues Brothers: 30 million - Fast & Furious: 90 million - The Fellowship of the Ring: 100 million - Harry Potter: ~150 million each - Full Metal Jacket: 15 million - Jarhead: 72 million - Apocalypse Now: 30 million - Black Hawk Down: 90 million - Terminator: 6 million - The Matrix: 60 million - Terminator 2: 100 million - Casino Royale: 100 million - Quantum of Solace: 230 million - Sherlock Holmes: 125 million - The Godfather: 6.5 million
I know those $ do not mean the same across time, but still, you can see going from simple to double produces crap (CS vs QoS), or produces twice the length at arguably the same 'quality' (whatever that means) for a significantly smaller cost (LotR vs HP). I don't see either why F&F costs thrice as much as BB, and almost twice as much as KB.
Bottom line: MAFIAA, please produce non-crap and control your costs instead of blaming piracy.
[0] http://forzamotorsport.net/en-us/underthehood4/
If they did not play accounting games they could pay actors based on movie revenue without increasing upfront costs. However, major studios are setup as cost plus contracts where they get upside on successes and still make money even if nobody sees the movie.
Also, if you look at the actual costs it's not hoard to find advertizing more than 50% of the budget for mildly expensive films. Because advertizing is effectively a huge fixed cost they are incentive to make expensive movies with big stars and or explosions that they can leverage to make their advertizing less expensive.
EX: Jurassic park and Avatar could show Dinosaurs and so did not need big name talent to get people into seats.
> The CG has not aged well at all.
Really? I look to Jurassic Park as what CG should look like in movies. The opening reveal of the brontosauruses is still amazing, especially when you think of when the movie was made. What hasn't aged well?
Other movies from the mid-to-late 90s, on the other hand, have not aged well. Many of these used CG for the sake of having CG and did not take any care of ensuring it integrated into the rest of the shot.
I'd add two more:
1. Kids get bored quicker, This year, I've left the cinema four times before the movie finished because the kids were bored. This makes me less likely to go back, they prefer to stay home on the xbox/lappy or go out for pizza/bowling instead.
2. Mass appeal movies are shit. There's just no quality or focus anymore, every movie is trying to be everything to everyone and ends up crap.
Don't get me started on the overuse of CG.
Instead of learning from filmmakers, the CG guys picked up tips from animators, that's why every CG creature walks and talks the same, with over emphasised, unrealistic, and ridiculous movement patterns that don't fool anyone and ruin the moment. You know why Jurassic Park is still awesome? and ghostbusters, and all those other heavy animation movies? Because they don't look obviously fake.
His example outside of software[1] is not the best either. Movies do have "versions", they are called cuts; an example of multiple published cuts for a movie is Blade Runner.
[1]> Every single release of a movie, whether it is The Jurassic Park and its sequels or The Matrix and its sequels or Steve Jobs’s own Toy Story and its sequels never had "versions".
Oh for crying out loud...
I understand the privacy concerns, but this isn't a secret agent movie. I'm reminded of that scene from Jurassic Park..
Nedry: Ooh! Dodgson! he sits down Dodgson: You shouldn't use my name. Nedry: (loudly) Dodgson! Dodgson! We have Dodgson here! Nedry: Nobody cares. Nice hat. Trying to look like a secret agent?
It's debatable whether Jurassic Park is "great scifi" but Ian Malcolm says:
"You know what’s wrong with scientific power? It’s a form of inherited wealth. There is no humility before nature. And because you can stand on the shoulders of giants, you can accomplish something quickly." - that's in the book, not the movie!
I think what Neal Stephenson laments is not that we can't innovate, but that we haven't achieved our potential. Achievement is a world apart from raw data.
(Ironically, I only had to copy-and-paste the quote... http://manas.tungare.name/blog/jurassic-park-what-the-movie-left-out/ )
My remarks about women are dead on the center of the target. If you don't understand that, then I'm sorry: Read slowly and carefully and learn likely some very important information. The information could save a life, yours, some woman you know and/or love, and/or some children. NO JOKE. I very much know just what the heck I'm talking about, very unfortunately.
Sure, not all women are like I described, but some surprisingly large fraction are. I mentioned the Roman Catholic church as a source; review what you know about that church and add details for yourself. Sorry you didn't know those things about women. If you won't take this common wisdom from me, then take it from the writers of the second 'Jurassic Park' as I noted. The fraction of such women is so large that my description is a good candidate to explain what the author is saying. That is, she wants to 'save the world' and wants SV to do so also.
Deliberately refusing to understand women is foolish down to dangerous down to fatal. Literally. Do I have to give you names, circumstances, dates, and where the tomb stones are?
Just because some women are as I described does not mean that no men are. Okay, some men can be similar.
For your "duty", you are imagining things. You have no such 'duty' at all. None. Zip, zilch, zero. If following what that 'duty' would say is something you want to do, then go for it, but no one, neither you nor anyone else, should agree that you have a 'duty'. You have no such 'duty'.
For 'innovation', I've been there, done that, am doing it now. I'm doing a startup. I'm in NY, not SV, but I have a list of a dozen or so VCs in SV who are eager to see my software run and be ready for users.
Your claims of 'corruption' are out of some vulnerability to 'morality' plays, of some old claims that humans are evil, sinful, do transgressions, get retribution, and need redemption with sacrifice -- and now we will have the choir sing while we pass the offering plate. But I'm not "corrupted" at all. SV has done nothing to 'corrupt' me.
My 'innovation' is some original research in applied math with some theorems and proofs based on some advanced prerequisites in pure and applied math. Only a small fraction of university math profs have all the prerequisites; the fraction among computer science profs is much lower; the fraction among information technology entrepreneurs is still much lower, essentially at zip, zilch, and zero. So, my work is, if only being so rare, 'innovative'. It is also 'innovative' because it provides a new and powerful way for software to work with 'meaning' of quite general 'media content' as humans understand it although uses techniques much different than humans do. Maybe, if from my applied math and corresponding software my Web site becomes worth $150 billion from being by far the world's best at search, discovery, recommendation, subscription, and curation for about 2/3rds of the content on the Internet. then you will be convinced that my work is 'innovative'.
So it's fair for me to say I'm 'innovating'. So, SV has not kept me from 'innovating'. SV has not 'corrupted' me.
But absolutely, positively SV and VCs make no attempt to look at my research as part of evaluating the financial potential of my project. As I outlined, in biomedical VC, NSF, NIH, DARPA, ONR, etc., the situation is wildly different. And THAT is where I would criticize SV and VCs and agree with the article. I said that.
"Duty", "corrupt" -- you sound a bit 'moralistic'! Calm down. Cool off. Relax. Have a beer. Watch a movie.
For more on what's wrong with SV, it's not just the VCs who are not qualified compared with 'project sponsors' at NSF, NIH, DARPA, ONR and at the biomedical VCs; in addition the information technology (IT) entrepreneurs nearly never have the 'right stuff'. Sorry 'bout that.
As I've explained often enough, bluntly, frankly, 'computer science' is out'a gas and not the main path to the future of computing or IT entrepreneurship. Sorry 'bout that. For 'computer science', it's trivial down to junk think.
The bedrock and crucial content of the future of computing is from: Let me have the envelope please: Here is it: "Advanced pure and applied math.". Period. Sorry 'bout that.
E.g., at Stanford, f'get about the Computer Science department, look up D. Luenberger, and study, say,
David G. Luenberger, 'Optimization by Vector Space Methods', John Wiley and Sons, Inc., New York.
which is fun and profit mostly from the Hahn-Banach theorem.
Again, there is a fundamental problem: Only a tiny fraction of people can start really successful businesses. So, only a tiny fraction of people will know in good terms what the good directions are for the future. So, anyone with such understanding will necessarily be rarely understood and nearly always rejected.
For what is wrong with SV, I outlined it, but the details of my view are likely not widely shared. In particular, I doubt that the author of the article or many people upvoting this thread would say that the future of computing is much more in
David G. Luenberger, 'Optimization by Vector Space Methods', John Wiley and Sons, Inc., New York.
etc. than in computer science.
Right away, don't expect to accept what I'm saying easily. Still, rejection is dangerous: You have to consider very carefully because I might be right!
Okay, I'll bite at this flame bait:
First, sorry to be 'sexist', but the pattern is far too strong to ignore: For some reason, maybe part of some of the old teachings and/or attitudes of the Roman Catholic church, heavily in Western culture women are supposed to want to dedicate their lives to 'saving the world'. A belief is that, if they dedicate their lives to saving the world, then the world will be obligated to save them and will. Indeed, it is common for such a woman to be 'married' more strongly to their church or saving the world than to their actual husband. That is, she is married to her husband but 'commits adultery' with her church or the whales.
Also, the women are supposed to regard money as something they are supposed not to be interested in. Indeed, a belief is that if they do have have money, then they will no longer deserve to be cared for by the world and, thus, will have a big net loss. In addition, there is a belief that any woman who does anything that results in making money is somehow doing something immoral and, thus, causing her, again, no longer deserving to be cared for by the world.
If the above points seem absurd to you, then I congratulate you on hearing these points finally now instead of later. I hate to say this, but basically on these points I'm standing on rock solid ground. Believe me, I came to understand these points only very slowly and reluctantly and at enormous cost. Let's not go into all it cost.
But, I can tell you, it's far too common for such a woman, with a loving husband, a house, three small children, busy at home, in a job, and at church, to attend a lecture on some need on the other side of the planet and, then, to give up everything to rush to the other side of the planet to address the need. One women I know even wrote a book about her effort along these lines, and I could, but won't, give you the author and title of the book.
I kid you not: A LOT of Western women are out to 'save the' world, whales, environment, polar bears, kitty cats, puppy dogs, poor people in countries X, Y, Z (mostly NOT their own countries), etc. E.g., even the movies understand as in the remark in the second 'Jurassic Park' movie: "80% women, Greenpeace".
So, she's out to save the world and is upset because SV is not.
Okay, now lets set aside her point about saving the world.
I'd make another point about 'finance': Yes, we would value a company based on 'discounted future cash flows'. But we nearly never have any way to know about cash flows very far into the future. So, net, a lot of financial evaluation is based on just the latest data, adjusted for 'variance'. Are the short term traders making a mistake? They are watching many times a second and will sell at the first evidence of a change in the status of the company and, thus, don't get caught when the price falls. If the cash flow indeed lasts, then the short term traders will again be doing the right things.
VCs and their entrepreneurs can't sell in a fraction of a second, but, still, a short term horizon for evaluation seems to be ground into pricing in finance.
So, that she is concerned about short term pricing is nearly inevitable.
Next, that there are clones for GroupOn is not an example of something silly about SV: Instead, GroupOn is quite obviously vulnerable to a different clone in each of Peoria, Paducah, and Pleasantville. Indeed, a clone in Peoria might have better connections with the businesses in Peoria and have an advantage. Net, the many clones of GroupOn are mostly due to what GroupOn is doing instead of SV.
So, why can GroupOn have such a high market capitalization? Because of the practice of pricing companies based only on very recent data.
I would have another objection about SV:
I can believe that the biomedical VCs know what they are doing. I believe that the 'problem sponsors' at NSF, NIH, DARPA, ONR, etc. know very well what they are doing. But for the information technology (IT) VCs, I ROFL and then crying. The incompetence is astounding, outrageous, off the wall, out of some Alice in Wonderland, beyond belief. Actually, YC is a grand exception: Most or all of the partners actually have some solid qualifications in IT. Otherwise, we're looking at history majors who got an MBA, worked in 'management consulting', 'development', 'marketing', analyzing stocks, and, thus, accumulated "deep domain knowledge". What a LAUGH: They don't know the first thing about IT, even the old stuff, and they have not a clue about evaluating things for the future.
What technical IT founder would want to hire one of these ignorant, arrogant blowhards? These blowhards are not qualified to do anything technical, teach a technical course in a university (or even high school), write a technical paper, review a technical paper, get a research grant, etc.
Again, at biomedical VC, NSF, NIH, DARPA, ONR, and YC, the situation is wildly different.
The non-technical situation in VC IT is so uniform that I have to look for a single cause, and my guess is that the situation is not due just to the VCs but to their LPs. It's very much as if some of the leading LPs wrote the criteria for each of seed, Series A, B, and C rounds on one side of a 3 x 5" card and insist that the VCs follow these criteria.
In particular, the criteria demand that the VCs just ignore the 'secret sauce'.
What to pay attention to?
Seed round: Look at the prototype software and estimate if many users will like it and give their 'eyeballs'.
Series A: Have the number of unique eyeballs per month at at least 100,000 and growing rapidly.
Series B: Have revenue growing rapidly.
Series C: Have earnings, and buy a chunk of the company based mostly just on the earnings and exit possibilities.
For any estimate of building a serious company, ignore that.
At an IT VC table, without YC, now tough to find an A. Viterbi or G. Moore on either side of the table.
That 3 x 5" card IT VC criteria explains the trivia she sees. On this point, I agree with her.
Some of the storm scenes in Jurassic Park are from a real hurricane that made landfall in the last day or so before they were scheduled to leave Hawaii. The site below is the best online resource I could find and it leaves out a lot of critical details (that I remember from a show on The Weather Channel). IIRC, one person (probably the person referred to below as Kennedy) got out of Hawaii via space available with the military and then airlifted supplies in to give relief to the Hawaiian people, in part so they could get the cast and crew out who otherwise would have been stranded there for god-knows-how-long. There were no commercial flights in or out and no permission to do anything of the sort. The plane was only allowed to land because it carried relief supplies. Once empty, it was okay to fill it back up and fly home. There were a number of ways in which the film crew provided relief locally (to the hotel they stayed in and surrounding areas) while still on the ground because of the expertise and equipment they had. It's really a very inspiring story which I think should get more press.
So just keep trying. You don't know what you can do until you try.
Best of luck.
http://www.lost-world.com/Lost_World02/Jurassic_Park.Site/Production.html
Kennedy jogged two miles to the airport to explore their options.
"The destruction in the airport was unbelievable," she recalls. "All the windows were blown out in the terminals, and the buildings were full of palms, trees, sand and water. Every single helicopter had been tipped on its side."
Thanks to her relentless efforts among airport and military personnel in Lihue, Kennedy was able to hitch a ride to Honolulu on a Salvation Army plane and began organizing from a pay phone. Over the next 24 hours, she not only coordinated the safe return of the company, but also arranged for more than 20,000 pounds of relief supplies to be transported from Honolulu and Los Angeles into Kauai.
Amazing that such a reputable source includes the Jurrasic Park classic ("This is a Unix system. I know this") without also pointing out that the application shown in that scene is indeed a real program, FSN from Silicon Graphics.
See http://www.siliconbunny.com/fsn-the-irix-3d-file-system-tool-from-jurassic-park/ for more information.
With that in mind, I don't think it's at all unreasonable that a 12-year old drops the distinction between "a Silicon Graphics system" and "Unix".
Of course, it might be a bit beside the point to nag about factual problems in a movie about reborn dinosaurs. :)
I agree - the article kind of lost purpose midway in the first paragraph, so I skimmed it too and found it with an atrocious closing paragraph.
My wife is generally averse to sci-fi, so what I always make sure to do is point out when an 'ordinary' movie is using sci-fi and it becomes disturbingly long.
I like to point out movies like Inception (being a big one people don't see as sci-fi even though it is pure sci-fi), Donnie Darko (a movie about time travel), V for Vendetta, Frankenstein, Jurassic Park and the funniest I've had to point out has been E.T. And that's without even having to step out into the 'grey area' where movies are using sci-fi 'concepts' or just using mild sci-fi elements.
It also works to point out that almost 3/4 of horror movies are still solidly sci-fi.
I think sci-fi's death will be when it becomes so mainstream it's rarely differentiated from regular fiction, which with a lot of movies it's still hard to convince people it's sci-fi. I mean 'Click' with Adam Sandler is a great example. It's sci-fi through and through, but because it's using only 1 element people won't believe it's sci-fi.
Aren't they suppose to compare this year with some of the other years
Of course not. That would be mindful. This is a mindless nostalgia piece, right out of central casting.
The fun thing to do when one of these articles arrives on the radar is to see which cherry-picked "classics" are being name-checked:
"The Godfather," "Jurassic Park," "Casablanca," "Gone with the Wind," "My Fair Lady" and "The Matrix,"
These lists are always carefully constructed. In this case we have two extremely popular classics from the 1930s, generally regarded as among the best films ever made. That's to establish your street cred as someone who has actually seen some great movies. Then one film each from the 60s, 70s, early 90s, and late 90s, to ensure that every one of your readers over the age of thirty has something to be nostalgic about, and that they believe that the author is sufficiently "hip". (No sense in listing too many films from the 2000s; twentysomethings don't read newspapers.)
Then I got as far as this line:
Where once there was "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves," there is now "Robin Hood," prince of duds.
This line is a dead giveaway, because "Prince of Thieves" was not a good movie, let alone among the best Robin Hood movies; it was redeemed only by the presence of Alan Rickman. Why, then, is the movie praised here? Because the writer really needed to write a cute sentence, reality be damned.
That's about all you need to read. The rest just wrote itself. It can read itself as well.
I don't feel this is true at all. I think people start to question reality when the plot is weak or when the object that in unrealistic is tied to the plot in a significant way.
I've never sat through Back to the Future and seen a nerd say "but what exactly does a flux capacitor do in order to enable time travel, this movie is so unrealistic!". I think that as long as a minimal effort is given to explain away these points it is satisfactory to most people as long as those points are not essential to the movie: the physics of time travel is not essential to the story of Back to the Future.
However, the more important to the movie, the more time must be spent. Cloning dinosaurs, and specifically how they clone dinosaurs, was pretty important to Jurassic Park. Hence, more effort was placed in explaining this to the audience (they're all girl dinosaurs, fossilized dna, need frog dna, etc etc). This is significantly more involved than "oh we have a flux capacitor for that" explanation. Both are perfectly fine though, since they match their necessity to the movie.
I personally felt that Avatar succeeded at this level of explanation. Aside from "unobtanium" somehow making it past the first edit of the script, the technological/biological stuff was fine: Unoriginal? Yes. Uncomfortably unrealistic? No.
However, I think absolutely everything else about that movie was pretty subpar. The plot was really uninspired. Its sad, so much gloss on top of such an empty story. On top of that, I really was not that impressed with the graphics. I'm sure plenty of people will tell me I don't know what I'm talking about, but when I'm 70 years old and someone asks me, visual effects-wise, what was the highlight of my movie going career, I'm going to say seeing the brachiosaur in Jurassic Park, and probably won't even remember Avatar.
I asked my father to teach me basic in 5th grade after seeing the movie WarGames. My efforts were soon doubled after Angelina Jolie stared in Hackers. Since then, everything I have done has been out of sheer curiosity, but I'd be lying if I said these two pop culture movies had nothing to do with my initial motivations.
(P.S. Jurassic Park I was on yesterday. "It's a Unix system." I couldn't help but smile. I was 9 or so when that movie came out, and I remember thinking I should get a Unix system.)
5. Saw it in 3D on a non-IMAX screen. I know enough to know that I'm supposed to be impressed by the CGI in the skin/eyes of the Na'vi and other creatures. And given that I'm supposed to know that, they (generally) succeeded. The 3D wasn't really any different than any other Real 3D movie, and I really didn't see any difference in the quality of the CGI landscapes versus LoTR or even Jurassic Park (which were just arial shots). The story, of course, is Dances with Wolves in Space.
I wish I went to Up in the Air instead.
As to the ZOMG: Glengarry Glen Ross could have been filmed in the 1930s, but it's one of the best films in my lifetime. To say that Avatar changes movies forever is insane.
For what it's worth, the GUI shown in jurassic park was a real system from SGI http://sgistuff.g-lenerz.de/movies/jpark.php .
Granted, it's pretty unrealistic that it would be used in a production system, much less the security controls for an island full of dinosaurs, but it was a real program.
My drive to/from work is about 30-45 minutes of almost zero traffic most of the way, so it's very low stress. I listen to various podcasts. Mostly stuff from IT Conversations or VentureVoice. Otherwise it's Public Radio or the local jazz station.
When I used to commute by train, I read a lot. Mostly fiction (discovered there was going to be a Jurassic Park movie when someone next to me noticed I was reading the book!). Still haven't finished Njal's Saga...
"The movie "Jurassic Park" was a lesson in how resurrecting extinct organisms can go awry." It truly was.
Oh, what a shame :-( I remember reading Jurassic Park 2, and then being appalled to see how the fairly reasonable science in the novel was just flat out massacred in the film. Worse yet, the film absolutely killed the best parts of the plot.
However I was yet another turned off by Timeline. It was the next book of Crichton's that I read after JP2, and I was seriously disappointed... I don't remember the details now, but there were several glaring flaws in the logic of the story, not to mention some of the stuff about language just seemed so far fetched to me.
Still, there can be no doubt that Crichton was a very talented man. His contributions to our culture will be missed.
Most of his books appear as if they were written to be made into movies. Most of them were thoroughly enjoyable too - Jurassic Park, Congo, Timeline, Prey etc., though his recent works weren't as good as his older ones.
RIP
That logic may be true about bikes.
But what if my Facebook profile says I like the movies Godzilla, Jurassic Park, and The Bourne Identity? It's very easy to extrapolate a common movie "typeness" that someone likes from a list. Then you can target new movies in that genre very specifically to users who would be most likely to watch them.
For movies, books, tv shows, etc, and repeatable purchases, the cache of information at Facebook is far, far more valuable than two words at Google.
It'll be interesting to see if readers like the system, because I imagine there's a number of problems with the metrics and then establishing a good personal weighting function. What about books that have mixed perspectives, 1st and 3rd person? Most of the writing style metrics would be far less significant than interesting plot and good characterization. Let's say someone liked Jurassic Park. Chances are they liked it despite the slow start, yet the structure analysis apparently recommends other books partly on a criterion ("slow start followed by fast pace") that should be negatively weighted.
Pandora's music DNA matching might be more successful because listening to music seems more visceral and less cognitive than reading books. The dimension space of book recommendation feature vectors could dwarf that of music and even movies. I wonder how the system would do in the Netflix challenge by turning the analysis on the production screenplays for the films.
This is an interesting post. There are a couple of points that I'm hesitant on, though. I wouldn't necessarily say I disagree with his position - just that I think there are some points that might need a bit more elaboration (ok, a bit more defending).
First is that the Hollywood model for talent may be an improvement over Silicon Valley in some ways. Kathy Sierra wrote a great post on this a while back:
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/02/dont_ask_employ.html
In short - the Hollywood model where everyone comes together to complete a project and goes off looking for a new gig after it is completed may be a better model for tech work than the employer/employee model. This model heavily rewards talent that gets things done, and has no place for seat warmers. I do agree with Marc that it's good for the creators to be stakeholders with a share in the output - so that would improve things. Maybe this explains so much of the job hopping that goes on in Silicon Valley. Perhaps developers should vest at the completion of a product? After all, top talent at Google may be sitting around with golden handcuffs when they could be working on the next great release...
Another factor is the extreme expense of producing a truly professional film. Yes, technology is getting cheaper and more available, but tens of millions is still a small budget for a feature film. I'm not a big fan of special effects for their own sake, but I thought "Jurassic Park" was pretty much awesome, took trememdous technical expertise and innovation, and was ultra-expensive. I suppose this capital could now be raised from VCs rather than studio heads.
Think VC's in the film industry would be willing to give the same kind of creative freedom we (only sometimes) see in tech startups? It's a tempting idea, no doubt about it...
This idea: find similar people, good music, good movies, and interesting things.
How are those not benefits?
The benefit of finding movies that are similar to Jurassic Park is that you find new movies that you might enjoy. This is very obvious. What is the benefit of finding new music on iTunes/Pandora? It's the same thing! Of course it's for comfort and delight. That's what you're supposed to be pursuing in life.
IMDB does not recommend movies at all. If it does, it does it horrifically badly because it has never helped me before. IMDB is not a recommendation engine, it's simply a database. And they don't seem to want to innovate beyond that.
Video stores are enormous and movies are ordered alphabetically by genre. There is no way to know which movie is good, or which one you will like, because all you have is a promotional paragraph on the back and a pretty picture on the front. This is also very obvious to me.
Benefits
Facebook: Better contact with more people
Google: Answers to questions. Solutions to problems.
Last.fm: Good music
Pandora: Good music
reddig/Digg: Inspiration, quick and easy learning about tech, internet, politics
This idea: ?
For example, what's the benefit of getting movies that are similar to Jurassic Park? If you say "comfort and delight" I'd like to know how it's more comfortable than checking the movie with imdb and checking the recommendations. It has to be a bit more comfortable than the way people find movies today. Why would they check your service instead of just walking down to the video store and look at the selection?
Here's an example of how I would use something like this: I want to watch a movie that's similar to Jurassic Park. I can go to the site and type that in. The web application picks apart the constituent pieces of "jurassic park," like "action movie" and "dinosaurs" and "made a lot of money," then looks for other movies that match the criteria based on information from IMDB, Google, and MPAA.
Then, it looks for people who have voted/commented on the movie, and extrapolates a probability of you liking other movies that they have rated highly or poorly. If your rating history is similar to theirs, it rates their other movies with similar pieces higher. If your history is very different, or if they voted Jurassic Park very poorly, then the other items they voted highly are placed low on your recommendations.
I think that's awesome.