The Big Picture: Dinosaur Exodus

[Russell75]

To be honest, as much as Jurassic World is a gateway for a new generation, they still want to maintain a sense it's in the same franchise. Also, they have had paleontologists like Jack Horner consulting on this, making changes and correcting designs so it seems a lot like it's a lot of fuss over nothing.

 

[Rahkshi500]

I have to agree with Bob on this one. In spite of how much scientific evidence there is, dinosaurs are always going be considered more appealing resembling giant reptiles than giant feather-covered mutant chickens. In anything regarding feathered animals, they're much more considered badass and frightening when they're more of the flying bird variety. Chocobos are nice, but they will not have that kind of great majesty and awe that dinosaurs have, so no, I don't think making them more scientifically accurate with the feathers will change that. Realty is sometimes stranger than fiction, and that's not always a good thing.

I think Bob's comparing the line of thought between Jurassic Park and race portrayal in other movies is a bit of false equivalency; there's a big difference between long extinct animals of the past and the living groups of complex, sapient humans of today.

As for accusations at nostalgia bias, I have to disagree as well. While nostalgia can have a blinding affect, I also think that the urging desire to change and re-invent can also have a blinding affect. What's important to remember is that we are talking about fiction and escapism here, and neither of them should have to indexically recreate reality, otherwise it loses the point. It's possible to take liberties with some things.

 

[Methodia Chicken]

I had hoped the new Jurassic park would basically be to dinosaur audiences not too dissimilar to this comic.
It could have shown the world how awesome feathered dinosaurs could be. but I'm not unhappy that it didn't, it still looks awesome.

 

[JarinArenos]

Seriously, why is it always parrots and chickens with you people? Are those the only birds that exist in your world?

Bob's outlook:

Bob lacks imagination.

Those look pretty awesomely badass to me.

Also, I expect that with those designs... whatever movie you were showing clips from really sucked.

 

[Rahkshi500]

Seriously, why is it always parrots and chickens with you people? Are those the only birds that exist in your world?

Bob's outlook:

Bob lacks imagination.

Those look pretty awesomely badass to me.

Also, I expect that with those designs... whatever movie you were showing clips from really sucked.

Nah, still ain't convince. The chicken comment is usually brought up due to the common idea that the chicken is the closest descendent to the T-rex and other large carnivorous dinosaurs. If anything, most flightless land birds are not impressive.

 

[rcs619]

Isn't the lack of feathers a logical conclusion in regards to CGI? You don't have to render all those thousands of feathers, and it won't have all that to make its appearance on screen look worse.

Also Claymore Lightsaber is just wrong. My very first look at it and it screamed "won't work". You can lose your hand if you rely on that to block, and if they're caught on the hilt, its quite possible that they end up taking off the main blade. Could always use a Cortosis Weave hilt, or there's two other ways to do it - point them in opposing directions to all parts of the blade are caught. Alternative is to have a normal hilt bit have the lightsaber energy extend out via width rather than length.

Or maybe lightsabres, even the regular ones, were never intended to be practical, desirable weapons and only really meant to look cool and spacey? A lightclaymore is no sillier than Darth Maul's suicidally dangerous death-stick (which ranks amongst the most impractical melee weapons ever made). It's just meant to look cool and go vroooosh kachta kachta. Just roll with it and have fun. Almost none of the weapons in Star Wars are actually practical. Blaster bolts are slow, guns are often designed without stocks, creating horrendous accuracy issues, and starships have to roll up within visual range just to hit anything. But they look cool.

http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/umsrnb/lightsaber-controversy
Besides, Stephen Colbert already explained it. Makes total sense.

As for the feathered dinosaurs. On the one hand, yeah, it would be nice to reflect current science... but on the other, yeah, it's Jurassic Park and the dinosaurs just look a certain way. Honestly, if the movie wanted to explain it, it's pretty simple. Just have one of the people on the park comment that "Feathered dinosaurs didn't focus test well," so the park altered their dinosaurs to be more appealing. It's the exact sort of thing a cynical corporation with the ability to literally engineer its products would do.

With the Egyptians, yeah... that's tough. I think people tend to forget that "ancient Egypt" isn't like, one single thing. Egyptian civilization was one of the oldest, and longest-lasting continuous civilizations in human history. The Great Pyramid of Giza is as ancient to the Roman Empire as the Romans are from us today. And, when it comes to really ancient Egypt, the period where Exodus usually takes place, there's just not a whole lot of concrete information on what those people looked like. Given their location, yeah, they were most likely a multiracial sort of society though. A bit of north africa, a bit of the arabian peninsula, and a bit of Mediterranean peoples. Either way, the current casting *is* a bit too white, but this is a bit studio production. They're going to play it insanely, super-safe. I still think "Prince of Egypt" is one of the better adaptations of that particular story.

 

[Gerishnakov]

At the end of the day, the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are part of the established JP IP, in which dinosaurs are represented as not having feathers. How would they explain in-movie the sudden appearance of feathers on the dinosaurs?

 

[sonofliber]

Seriously, why is it always parrots and chickens with you people? Are those the only birds that exist in your world?

Bob's outlook:

Bob lacks imagination.

Those look pretty awesomely badass to me.

Also, I expect that with those designs... whatever movie you were showing clips from really sucked.

no, they dont, second one looks like he went super sayain, and the third one looks like a frigging giant chicken

 

[Navvan]

It always annoys me how people get bent out of shape about sci-fi science/world history not matching the real world. It is fiction and thus inherently doesn't have to match it. So long as it is plausible and consistent I fail to see how fictionalized it is matters.

Reptile like dinosaurs are plausible enough that it was a theory that at one point had significant traction in the real world. Why should it matter if the fictionalized Jurassic Park dinosaurs actually were more reptilian than their real world counterparts?

 

[Canadamus Prime]

T-Rex could still look awesome and bad ass with feathers... you see the problem with the portrayal is that they go out of their way to make the damned plummage as garrishg as possible.

Look we know some birds use feathers for colourful display but here's the thing... Most Don't. Most birds have plumage that will not make them stand out like a white guy at a black panther rally.

Imagine a T-rex with a colloration more akin to a raven, or an eagle....

But I can respect that BoB. I too prefer my dinos feather free.. at least until they come up with a way to make them look bad ass with feathers.

It's also the fact that the T-Rex was a predator and it wouldn't be a very effective predator if it looked like the paint chip rack at your local hardware store.

 

[maffgibson]

-snip-.

If we are being slaves to accuracy while trying to retain the part that they play in the films, we are stuck either with people being chased by chickens, or larger feathered dinos called "Deinonychus", which is just hard to pronounce and unappealing.

Or you could call them 'Utahraptors' and make them even larger?

I'll give you that one, seeing that they are making a dino-hybrid, not that big a jump to make:

"Oh, and we upgraded our running-clawy things: now they're BIGGER!"

The only issue I have remaining is I would expect them to make banter with a T-rex:

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1099

 

[Jman1236]

Yeah the feathered Dino's thing I'm mixed on but I know on thing in 2015 that will have them and won't suck...at least going by the theme:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNKePAAfsRs

 

[English Stew]

Like a lot of the respondents in this thread I think that predatory dinosaurs, particularly raptors and some small allosaurs, look better with conservatively coloured feathers than with scaly dragon skin. I also think that skirts can work (visually) well as part of a combat uniform, that static firing lines are more interesting than gun kata, and that the claymore lightsaber controversy is irrelevant because force users were the least interesting part about star-wars anyway. I don't imagine many would agree with me, and I feel no need to convince them otherwise.

The point is, science aside (which it must be, because this is a remake of an old sci-fi movie)this is so utterly a matter of taste that I'm rather surprised at the intensity of emotion either side can summon for it. I know nerds do tend to heavily internalize their chosen IP's of interest, but could the polemics be saved for matters of craftsmanship and art, as opposed utterly subjective stylistic choices.

 

[able_to_think]

How did you go from dinosaurs to racism? That seems like a rather extreme tone shift to me.

 

[Hawki]

I'm kinda sympathetic to Bob on this one, at least regarding the dinosaurs. Not so much the nostalgia though, more what it can represent from a thematic/in-universe standpoint. Not only is Jurassic World (and Jurassic Park, as in, Hammond's original vision) creating dinosaurs and other ancient reptiles through gene splicing with contempory fauna (e.g. frogs), but both are/were commercial ventures. I'm pretty sure this is touched on in the novels, that the dinosaurs were created to appear as people imagined dinosaurs to be, rather than making them completely accurate. It makes cynical sense from a commercial point of view in-universe, that a 21st century theme park (Jurassic World) would go for the mass appeal of idealized appearance, even if it doesn't match the science.

So yeah. JW dinosaurs appearing the way they do? I'm all for it. I think there's a lot that can be done with the concept...and it gets in some Ian Malcolm-esque quotes too, so that's an added bonus. Of course, the same can be said for the commercial sense in the real-world, that they look the way they do so that film audiences will want to see the dinos, but eh, what ya gonna do?

Oh, and the lightsabre? Still awesome. XD

 

[Diddy_Mao]

I'm perfectly fine with the Claymore Lightsabre.

For one thing it's equally, and no more so ridiculous, than the Lightsabre Staff that Maul used. While invoking the spectre of Episode 1 to defend Episode VIII leaves a bade taste in my mouth, I think the general consensus is that for all the problems Phantom Menace had Darth Maul wasn't really one of them.
Secondly, once you start introducing Space Wizards to the story all credibility for argument of function over form flies right out the window.


As for the Dinosaurs. I think I have the same kind of cognitive dissonance on this issue as Mr. Bob. On one had, our stories and legends can't help but shape our perspective of things. Our notion of a traditional Christmas was invented almost entirely by Dickens. Everything you know about the "Legend" of the Werewolf was woven whole cloth for the movies.

While that's all fine and good for works of fiction, one only has to look at the campaign of heroification that's gone on in American History to see how badly an accepted myth can backfire.

Dinosaurs in the meantime continue to lumber about in a morally gray area for me. I enjoy the myth of giant leathery predators stomping around the landscape roaring triumphantly as they tear each other to pieces.
However, I've seen one too many "creationist museums" up close to be entirely okay with adding more bad science to the already muddied waters.

 

[Redd the Sock]

I'll give the claymore sabre a chance. I mean, I didn't see the potential for the dual blade either, and they made it work. Though personally I'd rather see those little blades strapped to the forearm like Wolverine's claws.

As for the other two, I'm sorry can we have these "controversies" come up early enough in production to actually do something with them but get people mad? Sorry, I'm tired of people with issues making big deals out of something well too late to do anything about it. What wold you expect: Jurassic World and / or Exodus getting scrapped because the internet got mad? No one cares about the movies, they just want to hold them up as the latest object lesson for whatever cause they have, or they might have made a bigger deal about Exodus at the first casting. I'm sure some did, but I didn't see it. Hell at this point do we even care about accuracy. 10 minutes on Cracked will give you plenty of examples of movies and TV getting things wrong, it's ridiculous for people to expect accuracy anymore.

 

[daxterx2005]

Its a FICTIONAL movie and people are upset that the dinosaurs aren't covered in feathers?
Jeez....

 

[CaitSeith]

Insert "commentary about having scales instead of feathers for continuity sake, and the lack of cool looking feathered dinosaurs" here.

There was something that always couldn't put my finger on every time Bob speaks about social justice, but now with the blackface example I just realized it. His point of view is too American for the global world (at least in that case). While in America the blackface had the implicit purpose of denigrating black people, the rest of the world didn't use it that way. And now, blackfaces don't exist in American main media; but in some other countries still do, not as a way to offend (it never was seen like that by anyone living there back then. Heck, some didn't even have Jim Crow laws!), but as an artistic style. That's why there are characters like Memín Pinguín in Mexico or Mr. Popo in Japan nowadays (and pointing out they are racists will usually be met in those countries with a look of confusion).