James Cameron Nearly Directed Jurassic Park

[Arctodus_Simus]

".....and Jurassic Park 3 director, Joe Johnson is set to direct."

Now that can't be good.

But I would love to see Camerons take on JP.

dude, Joe Johnston isn't a bad director. I just want to kill whoever wrote the script for 3. Johnston has made some kickass movies, like The Rocketeer and Captain America.

And am I the only one here who liked the second movie? It was dumb, but it was still fun.

Nah, I enjoyed the second film a lot too - it's just the third that left me a bit cold.

The rumours I've heard for JP4 don't help any....Half human/velociraptor hybrid soldiers anyone?

*shudders*

 

[Vault101]

Dinosaurs, blah blah... Mass Effect?! Ears prick up.

If it's done right, it could be the *only* decent game to movie conversion... there's certainly enough material and there's an established look.. It could be awesome!

Just guard the production from Uwe Boll with snipers and to keep in on topic, a T-Rex.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1482455/

true....but no matter how good it is its not going to be "my" Shepard (or to be more acurate femshep) and to be honest it would make it almsot unwatchable for me...I mean its scary that I can imagine then casting Sam Worthington or some equivalent

 

[Harker067]

I'd also like to blame Michael Crichton for making every dinosaur game have projectile spitting dilophosaurus with frills. That is actually 50% more annoying then the velociraptors.

 

[Mahorfeus]

Well, James Cameron was behind the two best sequels in movie history (I'm going to pretend that this much is unarguable). His movie magic in that regard could have done The Lost World wonders. Kidding aside, from the sounds of it, he would have made a dinosaur movie that would take itself seriously; depending on how close to the book things were, such an interpretation could have very well worked.

As for Jurassic Park IV, the last plot pitch I heard of was the one about a mercenary training a squad of deinonychus for use by the military. That idea needed to be lit on fire.

 

[Scrythe]

To this day, my friends and I agree that Jurassic Park had the most convincing CGI ever made.

Swapping Spielberg with Cameron wouldn't have changed a thing.

On the other hand, I would have loved to see how it would have turned out if they used Spielberg's non-union Mexican equivalent, Señor Spielbergo [http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Se%C3%B1or_Spielbergo]

 

[Bacaruda]

Good thing Cameron didn't direct Jurassic Park. He is awfully overrated. Terminator 2 and Aliens are by far worse than the first films and Camerons Titanic and Avatar are just... Awful.

 

[Froggy Slayer]

Dinosaurs, blah blah... Mass Effect?! Ears prick up.

If it's done right, it could be the *only* decent game to movie conversion... there's certainly enough material and there's an established look.. It could be awesome!

Just guard the production from Uwe Boll with snipers and to keep in on topic, a T-Rex.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1482455/

true....but no matter how good it is its not going to be "my" Shepard (or to be more acurate femshep) and to be honest it would make it almsot unwatchable for me...I mean its scary that I can imagine then casting Sam Worthington or some equivalent

As far as I'm aware a Mass Effect film wouldn't be focused around Shepard at all; instead they're going to focus on something that was in the background. Seeing how much stuff there is in the Codex, I think it could go well.

Or it could end up shit, but here's hoping, eh?

 

[Nuke_em_05]

Wow, shanghaied by Mass Effect.

I just wanted to say this; velociraptors might look like dorky chickens, but in the words of Dr. Alan Grant:

Try to imagine yourself in the Cretaceous Period. You get your first look at this "six foot turkey" as you enter a clearing. He moves like a bird, lightly, bobbing his head. And you keep still because you think that maybe his visual acuity is based on movement like T-Rex ? he'll lose you if you don't move. But no, not Velociraptor. You stare at him, and he just stares right back. And that's when the attack comes. Not from the front, but from the side, from the other two raptors you didn't even know were there. Because Velociraptor's a pack hunter, you see, he uses coordinated attack patterns and he is out in force today. And he slashes at you with this ? a six-inch retractable claw, like a razor, on the middle toe. He doesn't bother to bite your jugular like a lion, oh no ? he slashes at you here or here ? or maybe across the belly, spilling your intestines. The point is ? you are alive when they start to eat you. So you know ? try to show a little respect.

I don't care what it looks like, it is still a badass.

Cameron would have been good for a "true to book" interpretation. I like Spielberg's, though.

 

[Froggy Slayer]

Wow, shanghaied by Mass Effect.

I just wanted to say this; velociraptors might look like dorky chickens, but in the words of Dr. Alan Grant:

Try to imagine yourself in the Cretaceous Period. You get your first look at this "six foot turkey" as you enter a clearing. He moves like a bird, lightly, bobbing his head. And you keep still because you think that maybe his visual acuity is based on movement like T-Rex ? he'll lose you if you don't move. But no, not Velociraptor. You stare at him, and he just stares right back. And that's when the attack comes. Not from the front, but from the side, from the other two raptors you didn't even know were there. Because Velociraptor's a pack hunter, you see, he uses coordinated attack patterns and he is out in force today. And he slashes at you with this ? a six-inch retractable claw, like a razor, on the middle toe. He doesn't bother to bite your jugular like a lion, oh no ? he slashes at you here or here ? or maybe across the belly, spilling your intestines. The point is ? you are alive when they start to eat you. So you know ? try to show a little respect.

I don't care what it looks like, it is still a badass.

Cameron would have been good for a "true to book" interpretation. I like Spielberg's, though.

I always preferred Utahraptor's, because it feels like they're more like a mix of a lizard, a hawk, and an angry grizzly bear.

 

[Zeraki]

Wait... the guy who wrote the script for The Cell is doing the script for the Mass Effect movie?

 

[csoloist]

Good thing Cameron didn't direct Jurassic Park. He is awfully overrated. Terminator 2 and Aliens are by far worse than the first films and Camerons Titanic and Avatar are just... Awful.

Hey now, T2 and Aliens are both awesome. That neither is *quite* as good as the earlier installments says more about how amazing Alien and The Terminator are. Besides, Cameron made The Terminator too.

Titanic and Avatar though. Well... At least he had a good run in the eighties and early nineties.

 

[RJ Dalton]

I respond to your accusation of raptors being "dorky-looking chickens" with this XKCD strip: http://xkcd.com/1104/
They aren't chickens at all. If anything, they're more comparable to the cassowary. Look it up.

Also, will not bother with JP4. JP2&3 was enough of a lobotomy for the franchise already.

 

[RatRace123]

Hmm, I'dunno how I feel about this.

I love Jurassic Park, but Aliens with dinosaurs does sound kinda sweet.

 

[Evil Smurf]

there was three jurassic park films? The more you know

 

[RJ Dalton]

But I don't get why they bothered calling them Velociraptors in JP. They weren't well known back then and what they essentially made were Deinonychus or Dromaeosaurus.

Correction: Dromaeosaur is the family name for the entire subset of species, not an actual dinosaur name. It includes velociraptor, deinonychus and the others of that kind.
And the reason they were called velociraptor in the book was because, at the time of writing, there was a dispute over the animal's name and taxonomy. It happens a lot in the world of dinosaurs, but we rarely hear much about it because it boils down to a lot of technical stuff that the media assumes nobody is interested in.
Sadly, they're generally right on that point.

 

[RJ Dalton]

Dromaeosaurus is it's own genus, the family was Dromaeosauridae. I think after it's discovery the similarities between it and other therapods in the Dromaeosauridae family were noted and it's discoverer made the family Dromaeosauridae to put Dromaeosaurus and it's closer relatives in to.

Doh! Schooled at my own game.
I knew about the difference between the velociraptor and the deinonychus, too. In fact, deinonychus was my favorite dinosaur. I had an obsession with dinosaurs as a kid, though, and read everything I could find about them. I tended to know more about it than most of my peers.
It's been a while since I read the book, but if I remember correctly, Grant actually commented that he thought the species they were calling velociraptor was actually deinonychus and suspected that this was an error on part of the park due to the taxonomy argument at the time.
The movie skipped out on that detail because Hollywood tends to assume we're all idiots and wouldn't want to hear about that kind of stuff.

 

[bl4ckh4wk64]

Wait, Mass Effect film? dafuq?

Eh, as long as it's not about Shepard I think it'll be fine.
Actually, a film about the first contact war would be pretty awesome.

 

[RJ Dalton]

I was convinced that I was going to be a Palaeontologist as a child.

Then I realised how many degrees and research papers that would entail. LOL

I always said I was going to be one, too, but as I grew up, writing became more my passion. Dinosaurs is now more just one of those things I happen to have an encyclopedic knowledge of rather than a driving passion.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

So he would have made Jurassic Park 3?

Yeah, that was pretty much my thought. JP3 resembled nothing so much as a dinosaur-themed snuff film.

 

[Goofguy]

At least he was honest with us and himself. He could have fed up some BS line about how his version would have been different and that his fans would have enjoyed it.