Post by The Social Introvert on Jul 11, 2018 15:50:22 GMT
To see a video version of this post, see here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsqeBsj4EWw&t=11s
I was flabbergasted when Jurassic World introduced the idea that children were becoming bored of seeing Dinosaurs and thus the scientists were pushed into making a hybrid dinosaur. Granted, it’s an interesting idea, having Dinosaurs becoming the norm to such an extent that no one finds them interesting anymore. It’s akin to people in the west hearing all sorts of fantastic stories about elephants and lions in Africa and Asia in the old days, and now we’re at a stage where we have both in zoos just a couple of miles away from our homes and can access videos featuring them on TV and on our phones, right in our very hands.
Still though, these are prehistoric, titanic, 12 meter high man eaters, not lions and tigers and bears. And there’s so many different dinosaurs that have yet to feature in the Jurassic Park movies. It’s a difficult premise to swallow that kids don’t care about dinosaurs anymore, but even if they did, splicing multiple dinosaurs into one creation seems to out there. Despite Jurassic Park being rooted in scientific fantasy, the whole “creating a hybrid out of multiple dinosaurs” is too schlocky and if anything, suggests the film makers themselves think movie audiences will find your standard T Rexs boring and needs to create a Frankenstein-saurus to get those beloved ticket sales. And anyway, isn’t the dna of Dinosuars in the JP movies mentioned as being incomplete, and the scientists essentially having to fill in the gaps? Wouldn’t that make every dinosaur in the franchise a hybrid?
Even if you can buy the plot, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. Aside from head scratching decisions like having your hybrid, the star attraction at your park, have abilities like camouflage and thus be invisible to the people who paid money to see it, am I not right in saying the Indominous Rex didn’t look too different from any other dinosaur? I mean, what’s so special about this one? It doesn’t look particularly unique, it doesn’t have 50 wings or M16s attached to its face, and if you put it in a room with a T Rex and showed both to someone with little knowledge of Dinosaurs, how would he know which one the hybrid was? The point being, there’s so much hype about this creature being a combination of different creatures, and yet it just looks the same as the rest of them. So why would a kid who apparently is bored of the hundreds of dinosaurs that the Park has engineered be excited about this one. Of course, this could be a meta reference to product distributers often hyping their latest phones, TVs, cars or whatever as a new revolutionary thing when it’s just the same old, same old, or a reference to film goers always complaining that they want something new and unique, when they’ll easily swallow a rehash of things they’ve seen before, like The Force Awakens or Jurassic World itself, providing it’s sold as something new and unique. I wonder if I am probably just giving the movie too much credit here since the Indominous Rex plot was probably just the result of a committee meeting between the producers looking to rake in the dollars as opposed to the film makers making a film where Jurassic Park’s bored attendees are supposed to reflect movie audiences today. The creators of the film have said this is the case but even if it is they made the mistake of basing an entire film around the concept and not have the showy hybrid as a small sub plot as a little reference for self-aware film goers. Yes it seems the movie was taking the piss out of the trope, but it also got sucked into it to the point that it became the very thing it was satirizing. Ironic.
This hybrid business seems to be one of the ‘it’ trends now in Hollywood for those stale studios who ran out of ideas long ago, along will all-female remakes of classic movies and sequels using the same plots as their predecessors. Jurassic World’s sequel, Fallen Kingdom, had yet another hybrid as its centrepiece only this time it was…smaller. Still, it’s a little more forgiving since the reason for the creation of this creature wasn’t to attract people to a park but bizarrely to be a military weapon. In an age of nuclear bombs and drones I’m not sure what good use an IndoRaptor would be but there you go. But I still think, because of the film’s marketing, the creature was supposed to be one of the main attractions of the film which I thought was a really lame idea since they only did it in the last film and that one was a lot bigger. So where does it end? Will the next movie have one with slightly more colourful skin and market it as the next big thing, or a bigger head, or a couple of more arms? The hybrid plot already felt redundant in Jurassic World and yet here we are three years later with the hybrid stuff not going away.
Is it that the film makers are so devoid of creativity that they can’t make an exciting movie with real dinosaurs, or scared to try something completely new and thus give us something familiar to us only with an added gimmick?
The JP franchise isn’t the only unable to provide new and memorable villains and instead resort to rehashing previously used concepts only with slight twists. Terminator Salvation had a strange concept in the character played by Sam Worthington being a machine that didn’t know it was a machine, which was mildly interesting even though they didn’t go anywhere with it, then the next movie Genysis completely jumps the shark with the T-3000 John Connor hybrid, which describes itself as neither machine nor human, rather a hybrid nanotechnologica cyborg. Is that supposed to be exciting? If anything, the concept is so far out and unrelatable, as opposed to the original T-800 simple killing machine, that you can’t find the concept remotely stimulating. The T-1000 in Terminator 2 felt fresh, it’s purpose was the same as the last terminator but it’s methods were different and it kept on surprising us – James Cameron really gets this doesn’t he, he also gave us the Queen in Aliens building on the standard Xenomorph - but it’s come to a stage now where you feel they’re just mixing and matching different concepts and complicated terminator names, and if Genisys had a sequel the next terminator would be a transformer. In fact, Salvation already did that!
That brings us to the new Predator movie. The predator universe is an untapped goldmine. There are so many expansive comics that delve deep into the lore of the universe, but in terms of the movie we’ve had two films where the Predator pops in for a visit, one in a jungle and one in the city, and one where The Predators drop a group of hunters onto a game planet so they can chew their food before they eat it. And that’s it, there’s still so much more to explore. And yet, as showcased by the latest trailer which pits the classic predator against a new sexual tyrannosaurus predator, the movie has gone down the familiar path of scientists faffing about to create a new, bigger, better version of something that is already familiar with us. Where is the creativity – no doubt the soldiers and normal Predators will team up to destroy the abomination, much like how the dinosaurs teamed up in Jurassic World to take out the unnatural Indominous Rex. The Predator isn’t even the film to try out the concept of a new, better predator – Predators introduced a new predator type, and though I’m not really a fan of the film the movie did this very well, telling us that these ones were a different species or clan that was at war with the classic predator. That’s actually impressive world-building, and give us questions to ponder on as to the status of the predators in the universe as the galaxy’s best hunters. But then the film ruins it by having the new predator kill the classic one, pissing off fans and initiating flashbacks to Jurassic Park 3 with the Spinosaurus and the T Rex.
There is so much that can be done with a new Predator movie, and it boggles the mind why they’ve chosen to go down the hybrid path. You could even just make a standard, Predator lands, takes on skilled killers, dies, roll credits like with the first two movies only set it in a different location and time period. Many predator fans have been excited at the idea of a period Predator movie set in a completely different time period, or the middle east during a time of turmoil and war, or even a Predator movie in Antarctica with a Predator ship crashing in the snow and ice and him having to fight in an environment completely alien to him. The original, classic predtaor can still be interesting, can still be scary, you just need a skilful director to get it right. And that’s not even getting started on having a movie set in space, or a serious go at a decent Alien vs Predator movie. But what have they gone with? The same old hybrid storyline, which was tired even before the trend first gained traction.
I think a part of the problem is the guys who make the films try to give us more of the same because audiences always complain that they liked the original movies and don’t want to see characters and mythos bastardized. At the same time you have to provide something new, so they’re in a dilemma. Do they make another Jurassic Park movie with a T Rex as the main threat, or raptors again? Do you just switch up to a different dinosaur like an Allosaurus or Carnotaurus? That would be a downgrade though, like going from a Great White Shark in Jaws to, say, a Bull Shark. So Hollywood tries to put a twist on it, something that appears to be fresh and new – it’s a NEW type of dinosaur, one you’ve never seen before, a hybrid! It’s not even a problems with hybrids themselves – if you take a step back you see this in other franchises also like Star Wars, with Kylo Renn essentially being a hybrid of Darth Vader, Snoke as Palpatine, that Chrome Trooper as Boba Fett, the Starkiller Base a bigger, better Death Star etc etc. This is less of a problem with the hybrid plots themselves and more of an expose of an industry whose tentpole franchises are exhausted of creativity.
You don’t need a super duper Predator, or flying, chainsaw-wielding dinosaurs, you can make a good movie with a standard villain providing the director has the creative juices and the elements (i.e. money) are all there for a good film to be made. I really hope the new Halloween movie will be good because even though the film is creatively unsound in the sense that it is not reinventing the wheel, but its success will drive the point home that you don’t need the villain to be a relative of the protagonist in a surprise twist, have him part of some supernatural cult or any weirdness like that. If your cast is on point and you have a decent premise, letting a competent director do his thing might be the key as opposed to hybrids and mutant versions of classic baddies. But in an age where it seems anyone and everyone with a bit of cash can make a film, finding a quality directors with good ideas that he can implement might be harder than engineering a Dinosaur hybrid in a laboratory.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsqeBsj4EWw&t=11s
I was flabbergasted when Jurassic World introduced the idea that children were becoming bored of seeing Dinosaurs and thus the scientists were pushed into making a hybrid dinosaur. Granted, it’s an interesting idea, having Dinosaurs becoming the norm to such an extent that no one finds them interesting anymore. It’s akin to people in the west hearing all sorts of fantastic stories about elephants and lions in Africa and Asia in the old days, and now we’re at a stage where we have both in zoos just a couple of miles away from our homes and can access videos featuring them on TV and on our phones, right in our very hands.
Still though, these are prehistoric, titanic, 12 meter high man eaters, not lions and tigers and bears. And there’s so many different dinosaurs that have yet to feature in the Jurassic Park movies. It’s a difficult premise to swallow that kids don’t care about dinosaurs anymore, but even if they did, splicing multiple dinosaurs into one creation seems to out there. Despite Jurassic Park being rooted in scientific fantasy, the whole “creating a hybrid out of multiple dinosaurs” is too schlocky and if anything, suggests the film makers themselves think movie audiences will find your standard T Rexs boring and needs to create a Frankenstein-saurus to get those beloved ticket sales. And anyway, isn’t the dna of Dinosuars in the JP movies mentioned as being incomplete, and the scientists essentially having to fill in the gaps? Wouldn’t that make every dinosaur in the franchise a hybrid?
Even if you can buy the plot, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. Aside from head scratching decisions like having your hybrid, the star attraction at your park, have abilities like camouflage and thus be invisible to the people who paid money to see it, am I not right in saying the Indominous Rex didn’t look too different from any other dinosaur? I mean, what’s so special about this one? It doesn’t look particularly unique, it doesn’t have 50 wings or M16s attached to its face, and if you put it in a room with a T Rex and showed both to someone with little knowledge of Dinosaurs, how would he know which one the hybrid was? The point being, there’s so much hype about this creature being a combination of different creatures, and yet it just looks the same as the rest of them. So why would a kid who apparently is bored of the hundreds of dinosaurs that the Park has engineered be excited about this one. Of course, this could be a meta reference to product distributers often hyping their latest phones, TVs, cars or whatever as a new revolutionary thing when it’s just the same old, same old, or a reference to film goers always complaining that they want something new and unique, when they’ll easily swallow a rehash of things they’ve seen before, like The Force Awakens or Jurassic World itself, providing it’s sold as something new and unique. I wonder if I am probably just giving the movie too much credit here since the Indominous Rex plot was probably just the result of a committee meeting between the producers looking to rake in the dollars as opposed to the film makers making a film where Jurassic Park’s bored attendees are supposed to reflect movie audiences today. The creators of the film have said this is the case but even if it is they made the mistake of basing an entire film around the concept and not have the showy hybrid as a small sub plot as a little reference for self-aware film goers. Yes it seems the movie was taking the piss out of the trope, but it also got sucked into it to the point that it became the very thing it was satirizing. Ironic.
This hybrid business seems to be one of the ‘it’ trends now in Hollywood for those stale studios who ran out of ideas long ago, along will all-female remakes of classic movies and sequels using the same plots as their predecessors. Jurassic World’s sequel, Fallen Kingdom, had yet another hybrid as its centrepiece only this time it was…smaller. Still, it’s a little more forgiving since the reason for the creation of this creature wasn’t to attract people to a park but bizarrely to be a military weapon. In an age of nuclear bombs and drones I’m not sure what good use an IndoRaptor would be but there you go. But I still think, because of the film’s marketing, the creature was supposed to be one of the main attractions of the film which I thought was a really lame idea since they only did it in the last film and that one was a lot bigger. So where does it end? Will the next movie have one with slightly more colourful skin and market it as the next big thing, or a bigger head, or a couple of more arms? The hybrid plot already felt redundant in Jurassic World and yet here we are three years later with the hybrid stuff not going away.
Is it that the film makers are so devoid of creativity that they can’t make an exciting movie with real dinosaurs, or scared to try something completely new and thus give us something familiar to us only with an added gimmick?
The JP franchise isn’t the only unable to provide new and memorable villains and instead resort to rehashing previously used concepts only with slight twists. Terminator Salvation had a strange concept in the character played by Sam Worthington being a machine that didn’t know it was a machine, which was mildly interesting even though they didn’t go anywhere with it, then the next movie Genysis completely jumps the shark with the T-3000 John Connor hybrid, which describes itself as neither machine nor human, rather a hybrid nanotechnologica cyborg. Is that supposed to be exciting? If anything, the concept is so far out and unrelatable, as opposed to the original T-800 simple killing machine, that you can’t find the concept remotely stimulating. The T-1000 in Terminator 2 felt fresh, it’s purpose was the same as the last terminator but it’s methods were different and it kept on surprising us – James Cameron really gets this doesn’t he, he also gave us the Queen in Aliens building on the standard Xenomorph - but it’s come to a stage now where you feel they’re just mixing and matching different concepts and complicated terminator names, and if Genisys had a sequel the next terminator would be a transformer. In fact, Salvation already did that!
That brings us to the new Predator movie. The predator universe is an untapped goldmine. There are so many expansive comics that delve deep into the lore of the universe, but in terms of the movie we’ve had two films where the Predator pops in for a visit, one in a jungle and one in the city, and one where The Predators drop a group of hunters onto a game planet so they can chew their food before they eat it. And that’s it, there’s still so much more to explore. And yet, as showcased by the latest trailer which pits the classic predator against a new sexual tyrannosaurus predator, the movie has gone down the familiar path of scientists faffing about to create a new, bigger, better version of something that is already familiar with us. Where is the creativity – no doubt the soldiers and normal Predators will team up to destroy the abomination, much like how the dinosaurs teamed up in Jurassic World to take out the unnatural Indominous Rex. The Predator isn’t even the film to try out the concept of a new, better predator – Predators introduced a new predator type, and though I’m not really a fan of the film the movie did this very well, telling us that these ones were a different species or clan that was at war with the classic predator. That’s actually impressive world-building, and give us questions to ponder on as to the status of the predators in the universe as the galaxy’s best hunters. But then the film ruins it by having the new predator kill the classic one, pissing off fans and initiating flashbacks to Jurassic Park 3 with the Spinosaurus and the T Rex.
There is so much that can be done with a new Predator movie, and it boggles the mind why they’ve chosen to go down the hybrid path. You could even just make a standard, Predator lands, takes on skilled killers, dies, roll credits like with the first two movies only set it in a different location and time period. Many predator fans have been excited at the idea of a period Predator movie set in a completely different time period, or the middle east during a time of turmoil and war, or even a Predator movie in Antarctica with a Predator ship crashing in the snow and ice and him having to fight in an environment completely alien to him. The original, classic predtaor can still be interesting, can still be scary, you just need a skilful director to get it right. And that’s not even getting started on having a movie set in space, or a serious go at a decent Alien vs Predator movie. But what have they gone with? The same old hybrid storyline, which was tired even before the trend first gained traction.
I think a part of the problem is the guys who make the films try to give us more of the same because audiences always complain that they liked the original movies and don’t want to see characters and mythos bastardized. At the same time you have to provide something new, so they’re in a dilemma. Do they make another Jurassic Park movie with a T Rex as the main threat, or raptors again? Do you just switch up to a different dinosaur like an Allosaurus or Carnotaurus? That would be a downgrade though, like going from a Great White Shark in Jaws to, say, a Bull Shark. So Hollywood tries to put a twist on it, something that appears to be fresh and new – it’s a NEW type of dinosaur, one you’ve never seen before, a hybrid! It’s not even a problems with hybrids themselves – if you take a step back you see this in other franchises also like Star Wars, with Kylo Renn essentially being a hybrid of Darth Vader, Snoke as Palpatine, that Chrome Trooper as Boba Fett, the Starkiller Base a bigger, better Death Star etc etc. This is less of a problem with the hybrid plots themselves and more of an expose of an industry whose tentpole franchises are exhausted of creativity.
You don’t need a super duper Predator, or flying, chainsaw-wielding dinosaurs, you can make a good movie with a standard villain providing the director has the creative juices and the elements (i.e. money) are all there for a good film to be made. I really hope the new Halloween movie will be good because even though the film is creatively unsound in the sense that it is not reinventing the wheel, but its success will drive the point home that you don’t need the villain to be a relative of the protagonist in a surprise twist, have him part of some supernatural cult or any weirdness like that. If your cast is on point and you have a decent premise, letting a competent director do his thing might be the key as opposed to hybrids and mutant versions of classic baddies. But in an age where it seems anyone and everyone with a bit of cash can make a film, finding a quality directors with good ideas that he can implement might be harder than engineering a Dinosaur hybrid in a laboratory.