Do you remember when Jurrassic Park first released?

Kassitus

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Jurassic Park was released in the early 90s, and all CGI that had come before it was pretty trash. Then all of a sudden you have photo realistic dinos eating dudes alive. It would probably be another five years before solid CGI became standard in movies, so I feel like this must have been a pretty big moment in film. I saw it as a kid but I was too young to really appreciate the leap in tech. Kinda curious what it was like to have what you thought possible redefined in those days.
 
It was breathtaking for sure. Everybody was blown away. That first scene that pans out to the dinos as Sam Neil/Laura Dern's face is astonished and the main thematic score kicks in is a moving moment.



Absolutely incredible special effects that pushed the envelope in cinema.
 
A recent thread touched on this:

Thoughts on this scene in Jurassic Park.


I shared my thoughts in a thread about the best Disney movie a while ago. No reason to write it all out again.
Nope. Used to be competitors. I thought Apple owned Pixar, originally, but it was actually Steve Jobs. I thought there was some relationship between Quicktime (Apple's old media software if you are old enough to remember) and the Luxo Jr. lamp character from Pixar's logo screen, but my Googles didn't turn anything up.

Another bit of trivia: so the worst-rated Disney animated movie of all time, there, Wild, was actually directed by and made under the studio founded by Steve "Spaz" Williams, the legendary computer animator who leapt animal motion capture animation years ahead with his work on Jurassic Park. He was acknowledged as the genius wunderkind who made the impossible possible even by the other nerd legends who were responsible for pulling off the special effects in that movie that dazzled the world. I still remember the first time I watched it in the theater and the scene came where you look out at the Brontosauruses in the valley. It's part of the magic of that movie. Because the way Sam Neill reacted as his character seeing live dinosaurs after a lifetime of digging them up perfectly encapsulated how we, the audience, felt looking at those computer models in the movie for the first time. We'd never seen anything like it. Their realism was breathtaking.
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But I guess there's a difference between being that nerd genius who helps Spielberg enchant an audience with your tech wizardry, and being the wizard Spielberg himself.
 
I remember being profoundly disappointed, because I had the read the book a couple of years earlier and they butchered it.

Butchered it how? Was a pretty faithful adaptation, all in all.
 
Saw it a few times in theaters if you include drive-ins. Part of double feature most of the summer and wanted to see the other movie I know I went to the other drive in screen once to watch what was there instead of JP lol.
 
Yea, I went to the cinema with my girlfriend and it was mental, place was heaving and she didn't fancy seeing a dinosaur film in a packed cinema.


So, instead we saw the other classic of King Ralph.
And you dumped her soon after?
 
Butchered it how? Was a pretty faithful adaptation, all in all.
He's not wrong.

JP was a great fun movie but it wasn't the same genre as the book.

I get it, a big Dino movie set in modern times, sell a fuck ton of merch, add just enough terror to make it PG13 so kids can enjoy it but its not a kid film....


The book had a dude disemboweled and eaten alive, the movie had a comedic toilet death, and yes I understand why and it doesn't take away from the magic of the film and experience I had...but even as a snot nosed kid, I read the book first. Two great experiences, but both are very different.

It's ok to prefer either rendition and it's ok to like both
 
It was amazing. I remember watching that as a child.

Crazy to think there are productions now that cost hundred of millions and the CGI looks worse than a +30 years old movie.
 
Butchered it how? Was a pretty faithful adaptation, all in all.

Been a long time since I read it or saw the first film but some things that stuck out:

1) Hammond was the villain of the book. This oligarch whose hubris and greed is directly responsible for all the mayhem and death. Movie Hammond got turned into an absent minded santa claus / Hemmingway impression and gets to live through the movie instead of dying as a consequence of his actions. Hammond dying was a major part of the final act in the book and letting him skip out on that felt like if Hans in Die Hard got to get into the helicopter and escape all consequences.

2) There was a huge section of the book that was cut out entirely. Felt like they just skipped 80 pages. I think it was the events leading up to or just after the pterosaur enclosure. I understand that if they went scene for scene it would have caused runtime issues but their solution was to cut multiple chapters out entirely.

As a whole a lot of the mathematics of chaos theory and the horror of man dying horribly for his arrogance were toned down. They paid lip service to chaos theory and the iterations in the film but it was a much more integral part of the text.

Allegedly James Cameron was being considered to helm the project earlier in development and he saw it as a horror film akin to Aliens and was in the early stages of working on an R rated script. Years later he said he was glad Spielberg got to do it and made it into a family film because dinosaurs should be accessible to kids and families.

The Spielberg film is a much better family movie overall and better for piquing that sense of wonder in kids, but if Cameron's vision of the adaptation as an R rated horror film were realized it probably would have been more authentic to the source.
 
Jurassic Park was released in the early 90s, and all CGI that had come before it was pretty trash. Then all of a sudden you have photo realistic dinos eating dudes alive. It would probably be another five years before solid CGI became standard in movies, so I feel like this must have been a pretty big moment in film. I saw it as a kid but I was too young to really appreciate the leap in tech. Kinda curious what it was like to have what you thought possible redefined in those days.

The reason Jurassic Park's CGI has held up so well is because Spielberg knew when not to use it. Full view of the dinosaur moving—especially at a distance? CGI all the way, because it's easier, the movement is much smoother, and there's way more you can get the dinosaurs to do. But if it's a close-up shot or the dinosaur is interacting with physical objects in the real world? Animatronics. Much higher level of detail, and it can interact with everything else in a realistic way (and you get perfect lighting and shadows, which you could not with CGI at the time).

So they used both practical effects and CGI, and used them both intelligently every step of the way.
 
The effects of the first movie still is far superior than anything today. I still cant believe how good it looks. The guys worked very hard to make this movie for its time, and its still better than the saturated over animated stuff of today.
 
I was 10-turning-11 in 1993 when the movie came out, I saw it in the theater and was so absolutely blown away on premiere night I saw it twice more that summer with friends.
 
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