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Post by theropod on Nov 19, 2019 3:13:04 GMT 5
I mean I’ve already talked about it (without spoilers I think) in one of my previous posts in this thread, but yes, highly recommended for you. Imo simply a prime example of how a work of fiction can use sound science to enhance rather than hamper its worldbuilding and provide material for its story.
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Post by creature386 on Nov 19, 2019 3:18:53 GMT 5
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Post by Life on Nov 19, 2019 7:30:56 GMT 5
I think scientific accuracy often benefits stories, greatly, but accuracy alone doesn’t make a good story, it’s about striking the right balance. A world feels more real, and hence more immersive, if one feels like one understands the rules. E.g. when I watch or read the expanse, I can feel confident that no fancy artificial gravity or faster than light travel technologies will just turn up and be taken for granted when it is convenient, because it is firmly established humans don’t have those kinds of technology (yet). On the other hand, issues arising from this realism can actually benefit the plot and worldbuilding greatly, e.g. the issues around the gravity or lack thereof on the various inhabited colonies in the solar system are largely taken as a very creative, yet fairly realistic (with certain exceptions, like spinning up ceres to provide .33 g of centrifugal gravity, which of course wouldn’t work without it flying apart), replacement for any actual alien planets or alien lifeforms in the traditional sense, at least for the first few books. Similarly, when watching the original Jurassic Park, or The Lost World, one could be confident that the movie would try to depict real animals, not just boring generic movie monsters. On the other hand the godzilla-mosasaur, The Meg, Kronosaurus imperator or the like all suffer from certain stereotypes that make them rather uninteresting imo. They are necessarily incredibly deadly. They are unrealistically large. They are hellbent on killing humans at all cost, making their motivations and actions unnecessarily one-dimensional and predictable (contrast this with the lost world’s T. rexes, which mostly wanted their baby back, or even JPIII’s raptors, which mostly just wanted their eggs back. Everyone was still afraid of them all the same, but they had more complex motivations than simply "human, must kill"). Such creatures are imo more of a tenet of fantasy than science fiction. If I want to be awed by incomprehensively large or powerful monsters, usually I will look to fantasy, and not science fiction, because it does it much better (and because something like a dragon the size of a mountain just isn’t convincing without magic). There are some exceptions, although they are usually not really my thing. For example Pacific Rim’s Kaiju were actually built as a bioweapon by an advanced alien civilization, so in that sense them being ridiculously large and hellbent on destruction makes more sense. |
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Post by dinosauria101 on Nov 19, 2019 21:28:20 GMT 5
So, something that really pesters me about scientifically inaccurate films is that they can give the public a wrong impression about the dinos. Anyone agree?
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Post by creature386 on Nov 19, 2019 23:37:22 GMT 5
That should fall under the "respecting science" category. It's not a deal-breaker and not every film with dinosaurs must be scientifically accurate, it would be just nice if there were more that were, for the reasons stated before (and even for those who are not, avoiding stereotypes is a nice thing to do).
These stereotypes are kinda annoying, but they are just a way of showing for whom the work is. Not every piece of media that includes dinosaurs must be for us dino nerds.
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Post by dinosauria101 on Nov 20, 2019 0:36:55 GMT 5
Well, honestly, you do have a point.
Having said that, I dislike JW Fallen Kingdom the most for this as well as COTD - as entertaining as they are, both contributed to the myth of 'sauropod=helpless mountain of meat' with rampant slaughtering of Apatosaurus and Sauroposeidon by much smaller animals. JW Fallen Kingdom also reinforced the meme of Carnotaurus being the laughingstock of the dinosaur world.
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Post by creature386 on Nov 20, 2019 0:42:43 GMT 5
You can't apply the same standards to a film like JW that you apply to a documentary like COTD.
And I was really hoping "scientific accuracy" didn't mean "they agree with me on who beats whom in a matchup" to you. I can get that this matters to the paleo-community, but this is also one of the hardest details to get right, much harder than to treat animals like animals or to give the raptors feathers. That being said, treating large herbivores as helpless mountains of meat might be a side effect of turning nearly every predator into an unstoppable monster.
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Post by dinosauria101 on Nov 20, 2019 3:23:35 GMT 5
1: You can't apply the same standards to a film like JW that you apply to a documentary like CODT. 2: And I was really hoping "scientific accuracy" didn't mean "they agree with me on who beats whom in a matchup" to you. 3: I can get that this matters to the paleo-community, but this is also one of the hardest details to get right, much harder than to treat animals like animals or to give the raptors feathers. 4: That being said, treating large herbivores as helpless mountains of meat might be a side effect of turning nearly every predator into an unstoppable monster. 1: COTD, while very entertaining, is absolute trash as documentary material. 2: No, that's not the case. The problem is that it's blatantly obvious Tyrannosaurus rex would beat Carnotaurus with little difficulty, if any at all, but JW Fallen Kingdom just HAD to make it a big scene and now Carnotaurus gets the brunt of a ton of T rex jokes, the worst being the T rex vs Carnotaurus meme that's rampant on the web nowadays. 3: The thing about it is that it tends to create a lot of hype everyone gets into - JP3 Spino, or the JP Velos for instance. Don't forget frilled and poisonous Dilophosaurus! 4: A very nasty side effect at that. I have a very strong hunch that general media theme is what contributes to rampant T rex fanboyism against sauropods as well as the crazed fanboy who voted T rex against Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum |
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Post by creature386 on Nov 20, 2019 3:33:56 GMT 5
1: Sure, but it still has different stated goals and a different target audience than a mainstream entertainment movie, so the bar is higher here. Scientific accuracy is not optional in a documentary (although the exact extend is debatable). In more entertainment-based media, it is.
3: That's true, though it only applies to the stars of the particular films. I'm not sure how many people (apart from us Dino-nerds, who generally know better) who watched the original Jurassic Park even remember the name Dilophosaurus.
4: It's no secret that popular media prefers the carnivores over the herbivores. They are the violent killers and violence is exciting. Neither is it a secret that T. rex gets more media exposure than all other dinosaurs combined. That being said, the AVA community of course receives a very different media exposure than the general public with a stronger emphasis on documentaries (which admittedly also often downplay sauropods, as you mentioned).
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Post by dinosauria101 on Nov 20, 2019 4:26:35 GMT 5
1: My point was that one's a sci-fi movie and one's a documentary but both are similar in accuracy terms and also deception of the public
2: Velociraptor and Spinosaurus beg to differ
3: And it can really stink if it brushes off onto those of us in the AVA community - this is probably where the person who voted Tyrannosaurus rex over Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum was influenced by, like I said earlier. And it's every bit as bad as people like SuperGuerreroXY
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Post by creature386 on Nov 20, 2019 4:37:53 GMT 5
1: The thing is, depending on the genre you are, you make promises to your audience. A thriller promises suspense. Fantasy promises wizards and dragons. Documentaries promise scientific accuracy. Sci-fi movies do no (unless they are hard science fiction - admittedly, Wikipedia classifies JP as hard SF). That was the point I was making.
2: They were the (co-)stars of JP I and JP III respectively, weren't they?
3: Well, it takes more than inaccurate media to turn someone into SuperGuerreroXY. Fanboyism is a complicated beast. Most of us became attached to certain animals through exposure in some form of media. Maybe fanboys were just hit too hard by that gift of animal love.
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Post by dinosauria101 on Nov 20, 2019 16:14:22 GMT 5
1: If it's hard SF than it's maybe a bit better. But both had similar effects on the public
2: They may have been, but look at what the public could remember!
3: Looking a bit closer, it looks as though SuperGuerreroXY ISN"T a lion fanatic but a pretending lion hater.
Having said that, I think it's very plausible to watch a few movies on Tyrannosaurus killing large dinosaur after large dinosaur than vote for T rex against large dinosaur on an animal site you're on.
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Post by Life on Nov 20, 2019 18:08:56 GMT 5
Well, honestly, you do have a point. Having said that, I dislike JW Fallen Kingdom the most for this as well as COTD - as entertaining as they are, both contributed to the myth of 'sauropod=helpless mountain of meat' with rampant slaughtering of Apatosaurus and Sauroposeidon by much smaller animals. JW Fallen Kingdom also reinforced the meme of Carnotaurus being the laughingstock of the dinosaur world. I also find JW Fallen Kingdom disappointing; although environments were great but story was lackluster. The originals (Jurassic Park and Jurassic World) are best films of the franchise. About the slaughtering of Apatosaurus; well, Indominus rex was a bioweapon - far stronger than normal theropods. Its only weakness was not being amphibious and it was therefore unable to shrug-off Mosasaurus but it had also suffered extensive injuries by this point and had not much left in it anyways. It was very aggressive and reckless and continued to suffer injuries in its exploits - this is not normal behavior. It behaved like a weapon (which it was), not an animal. |
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Post by dinosauria101 on Nov 20, 2019 19:16:25 GMT 5
Well, honestly, you do have a point. Having said that, I dislike JW Fallen Kingdom the most for this as well as COTD - as entertaining as they are, both contributed to the myth of 'sauropod=helpless mountain of meat' with rampant slaughtering of Apatosaurus and Sauroposeidon by much smaller animals. JW Fallen Kingdom also reinforced the meme of Carnotaurus being the laughingstock of the dinosaur world. I also find JW Fallen Kingdom disappointing; although environments were great but story was lackluster. The originals (Jurassic Park and Jurassic World) are best films of the franchise. About the slaughtering of Apatosaurus; well, Indominus rex was a bioweapon - far stronger than normal theropods. Its only weakness was not being amphibious and it was therefore unable to shrug-off Mosasaurus but it had also suffered extensive injuries by this point and had not much left in it anyways. It was very aggressive and reckless and continued to suffer injuries in its exploits - this is not normal behavior. It behaved like a weapon (which it was), not an animal. Yes, true. I-rex is - literally - a death machine. Mosasaurus was the Achilles heel. Movie was pretty good overall However, have you ever watched COTD? It's even WORSE than JWFK - 2 111 kg animals kill a 60 tonne animal with almost no effort. |
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Post by creature386 on Nov 20, 2019 19:44:45 GMT 5
1: If it's hard SF than it's maybe a bit better. But both had similar effects on the public Not sure. JW might have affected more people, but do you think your neighbor who watched Indominus rex snack a bunch of sauropods logs in into Carnivora? People in the AVA community know not to take JP/JW too seriously. COTD is a whole different beast, however. TopPhilosopher1 and his clones kept citing it as a source (alongside the more reliable Planet Dinosaur). Why dinosaur documentaries are a suboptimal (and in specific cases even terrible) source thus is hard to convey. Especially if it's one of these documentaries that hides behind the authority of talking heads. The ridiculous scenes of the Deinonychus taking down the Sauroposeidon are superficially supported by the authority of leading sauropod-expert Matt Wedel. In the case of COTD, we can at least show that they spread outright misinformation by taking his quotes out of context: svpow.com/2009/12/15/lies-damned-lies-and-clash-of-the-dinosaurs/However, there are other terrible documentaries, like Mega Beasts/Monsters Resurrected, which committed no similarly easy-to-demonstrate reputation-destroying blunders. All these terrible dino documentaries have had more resources and scientific advisors than random people on the Internet critiquing them which is why people confuse them with reliable sources. 2: They may have been, but look at what the public could remember! Don't see your point. The general public remembers Velociraptors very well and they were stars throughout the whole JP franchise. Spinosaurus is less well-known, but that's mainly because JP III was not that much of a success (it made 1/3 of the box office of the original JP). "Dilophosaurus" is hardly a household name, on the other hand. |
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