I just want them to be good, ok?
Dinosaur movies should be impossible to fuck up.
I’m not exactly a high bar. Put a dinosaur in your movie and I’m normally sold. But even I, with a dinosaur tattoo and more Jurassic Park merch than I care to mention can see that, by and large, they’ve been pretty bad for a while.
Gone are the days where you’d expect them to have people lining up for tickets, let alone stick in popular culture.
So why do dinosaur movies suck now?
And yes, that’s obviously quite a sweeping statement. There have been good dinosaur films since Jurassic Park. Its sequels range from almost as good to at least watchable. And more recently, Primitive War gave us Vietnam soldiers being hunted by dinosaurs which is a concept I’m surprised it took us that long to capitalise on. Also more people should watch Primitive War, it’s sick.
People are still trying to make dinos work on screen.
But there hasn’t been another Jurassic Park.
That isn’t just nostalgia talking. I wasn’t even alive when the first one came out. Jurassic Park is better because the dinosaurs aren’t only there to chase people. They’re the physical consequence of every stupid assumption the human characters have made.
John Hammond hasn’t just brought extinct animals back to life. He’s made them a product before he understands them. He’s built the gift shop, invited the lawyers and started calculating ticket prices while the creatures themselves are treated as little more than attractions.
The park’s technology gives everyone the illusion of control, right up until Dennis Nedry decided to get greedy and put shaving foam on a cake. God it still looks delicious though.
The dinosaurs are never really treated as evil, though. When everything falls apart, nature hasn’t suddenly become malicious. It has simply stopped cooperating with the plan.
That’s why the film’s ideas about chaos theory work. The park fails because Hammond believes a living system can be reduced to a set of clean numbers on a computer screen. Jurassic Park is about scientific arrogance, but it’s just as interested in commercial arrogance. It asks what happens when discovery becomes ownership, and whether creating something gives you the right to decide what it’s for.
Jurassic World tries to pick up where this idea left off, albeit with diminishing returns.
In a sort of meta narrative, its central idea is that ordinary dinosaurs are no longer exciting enough for the public. The park needs a bigger attraction, so the brand new (and somehow even more inept) company makes one.
The trouble is it doesn’t really settle on an argument that the company was in the wrong. Here’s the Indominus rex, the new special dinosaur with extra teeth, now go buy the Lego set.
The old films used dinosaurs to criticise the desire for bigger spectacle. The newer films mostly sell us bigger spectacle and occasionally have Ian Malcolm pop in to explain why this is bad.
Eventually, the dinosaurs even develop a kind of moral alignment. Big bad baby boy (gender neutral) Blue isn’t treated like a wild animal. She’s basically a Labrador with tasty foot knives. The T. rex becomes a heroic deus ex machina, the evil dinosaur gets defeated and everybody seems to understand which one we’re supposed to applaud.
They’ve stopped being animals and become scaly superheroes.
Dinosaurs used to mean things in movies. Not always profound things. Sometimes the meaning was simply to show off the latest technical innovations in cinema.
Take Gertie the Dinosaur in 1914. Not only was this one of the first animated films of all time, she was one of the first animated characters who felt like a character rather than a moving drawing. She had a personality. She got distracted. She misbehaved. She reacted to Winsor McCay as though she was this living, breathing thing sharing the screen with him.
A dinosaur was the perfect subject because nobody could film a real one. Animation wasn’t copying reality, it was conjuring something the camera could never capture.
Then The Lost World arrived in 1925 and showed audiences that model animation could carry a feature-length story. Willis O’Brien’s dinosaurs might look pretty quaint by today’s standards, but to people of the time, they were watching impossible animals move through live-action spaces.
Dinosaurs became the way to show off the cutting edge of what could be done with a camera and roll of film.
Without The Lost World, there’d be no King Kong, and later Ray Harryhausen would push stop-motion creatures further with films such as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and The Valley of Gwangi.
And those prehistoric monsters were often carrying the fears of the moment with them.
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is awakened by atomic testing, something that Godzilla would make even more poignant and stark not long after.
Yes, Godzilla is a kaiju rather than a dinosaur in the strict scientific sense. But look at him, he’s a dinosaur. Shut up.
The original 1954 film turns nuclear terror into a hulking beast. He’s less an animal than a walking disaster, born from a country processing Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the fresh horror of the Lucky Dragon No. 5 fishing boat being exposed to fallout from American nuclear testing.
He served as a walking disaster, personifying the trauma of an entire nation.
Godzilla Minus One showed that this still works. It returned to post-war Japan and reverted him from the protagonist we see in the recent American-flavoured films to the personification of survivors’ guilt. Godzilla becomes part of the main character’s trauma, not just something enormous waiting to knock over a building and do an admittedly really satisfying roar. Honestly I don’t know what it is about it but it just tickles my brain.
It’s a proper human story that happens to contain a radioactive dinosaur. Or kaiju. Whatever.
Even something like The Land Before Time understands that dinosaurs can hold an idea without needing it to be spelt out. It uses a prehistoric world to tell children about grief. Littlefoot’s journey starts with a truly heartbreaking loss, then shows us how to keep going in the wake of it.
The extinction hanging over these characters gives the whole thing a sadness children might not be able to name yet, but they can feel it. And if you’re anything like me, it’s something that sticks with you long into adulthood.
The point is that dinosaurs were useful because they were impossible, and filmmakers kept finding new ways to make the impossible feel possible.
Gertie helped demonstrate what a drawn character could be. The Lost World made stop-motion creatures part of feature filmmaking. Then Jurassic Park used digital effects to create animals that didn’t move like models at all.
That final leap matters because Jurassic Park wasn’t merely using the best available CGI. Its team had to literally invent parts of the process to make it work. ILM developed new tools for adding texture to digital models and tracking camera movement. They also needed a way to bring those instincts of traditional stop-motion animators into computer animation.
The film only contains about six minutes of fully computer-generated dinosaurs, blended with roughly nine minutes of practical puppetry. And honestly when you think of Jurassic Park, you’d think it was a lot more for how iconic those brief moments are.
The rest of the film is Spielberg making you stare at a trembling cup of water and doing half the work inside your head.
The effects are still convincing because the movie is built around them rather than dumped on top of them. A full-sized animatronic is used when a dinosaur needs to physically occupy the set. CGI takes over when you need to see them in motion so real, you’d think they were really chasing you.
In the same spirit as Jaws, you see the dinosaurs when it matters. Like when you see the Brachiosaurus emerge from the canopy, it isn’t hidden. The camera holds on it because the image itself is the event.
There have obviously been huge advances in visual effects since 1993. The strange thing is that dinosaurs stopped being the creatures used to announce the future. There hasn’t been another moment where a dinosaur appeared on screen and the audience collectively wondered how the film had done it.
People are more savvy to how films are made nowadays, and it feels like that genuine craft of stop-motion animation has become more and more distant as CGI technology has become faster and easier. You can slap a T-Rex into a scene, but it feels less deliberate, and dear I say cheap.
That isn’t the fault of VFX artists. Most bad CGI is really a result of bad production meaning the craft is sacrificed for efficiency and late decision-making.
Jurassic Park’s limitations forced decisions. Modern blockbusters sometimes avoid decisions until somebody has to render them.
And is it just me, or are there not even that many major dinosaur movies now.
The Jurassic series has become so culturally dominant that it appears to have swallowed the genre around it. Dinosaur movies aren’t treated as a broad category in the way that ghost stories or alien films are. It feels like studio heads are more worried about whether people will pay to see a lame imitation of Jurassic Park with a gimmick.
Even when older dinosaur films were bad, the genre was at least brave enough to try something different. You had atomic panic sitting beside children’s animation. There were lost worlds, Harryhausen adventures and cheap horror films that looked as though the dinosaur had been made in somebody’s bath.
Now one franchise defines what a dinosaur film is supposed to look like.
And despite technology and tools being more readily available than ever, it feels like dinosaur movies have go big or go home. A proper dinosaur film is often expensive, but it doesn’t need to be. The mid-budget creature feature has been squeezed out, so we tend to get one of two things: a giant franchise production or a tiny streaming film where it looks like someone’s layered ‘raptor.png’ over their garden hedge.
Look at the mainstream live-action options outside Jurassic over the last few years. There was 65, an ambitious idea that tried to modernise the 50s B-movie, but failed in execution. Primitive War got a limited theatrical release and found much of its audience later. And at the time of writing, The End of Oak Street is on the way.
That’s all the comes to mind in nearly a decade. Not exactly a genre that’s thriving.
And like I said with 65, when the opportunity does arrive to make a case for dino movies, more often than not its fumbled.
Adam Driver crash-lands on Earth 65 million years ago. He has futuristic weapons. There are dinosaurs outside. You could write that on a napkin, slide it across a table and reasonably expect somebody to hand you a hundred million dollars.
Yet the film feels scared of its own premise.
The prehistoric world rarely feels like a place worth discovering. Most of the creatures behave like generic video-game enemies that have been told to enter the frame, scream and get shot. Several are so visually vague that they could be aliens, which might’ve been the point, but it just leaves it feeling diluted and generic.
It treats prehistory as a level to escape rather than a world worth exploring.
Jurassic World Dominion somehow makes the opposite mistake. It finally delivers the setup the franchise had teased for years, dinosaurs living alongside modern humanity, then spends an astonishing amount of time worrying about fucking locusts. It’s like making a new Jaws film where the mayor is concerned about irregular bin collections.
There are glimpses of the movie it could have been, like seeing dinosaurs on farms and roads, and the idea of a black market trading prehistoric assets is actually quite interesting.
Then it runs back towards secret laboratories and familiar faces because the franchise no longer trusts anything that doesn’t remind you of a better Jurassic film.
Jurassic World Rebirth was a little bit better. It has sequences with actual tension, and the quiet moment with the titanosaurs reminds us that dinosaurs should still take our collective breath away.
But even Rebirth feels less like a rebirth than a refurbishment. Another remote location. Another corporation doing something ethically rotten. Then another genetically modified creature acts as a final boss.
The films keep inventing fake dinosaurs while ignoring, thanks to more up-to-date real world research, strange the real ones have become. That might be the most frustrating part.
Jurassic Park rode the wave of the so-called dinosaur renaissance and helped replace the public image of slow, dragging reptiles with active animals who you couldn’t run from. Sure, it wasn’t perfectly accurate even in 1993, but it was engaged with contemporary palaeontology. The dinosaurs felt new because our understanding of dinosaurs was changing.
Science has moved on again. We have far richer ideas about feathers and display structures. Our understanding of how these animals behaved continues to change as new fossils are discovered.
I don’t need every dinosaur film to become a lecture. Scientific accuracy isn’t automatically good storytelling, and a feathered dinosaur can be just as boring as a scaly one if the script has nothing for it to do.
But someone please take advantage of how cool some of these discoveries are!
Imagine a horror film built around a Dromaeosaur that moves more like a ground bird than the Jurassic Park raptors. Birds can be proper scary, and using this as a starting point would make for something truly horrifying.
Primitive War works for me, despite its flaws, because it understands the value of a new context. Dinosaurs in the Vietnam War. You don’t need much more than that.
It doesn’t spend forty minutes apologising for the premise or trying to connect to a cinematic universe. It borrows heavily from war movies and yes, the effects sometimes show the budget, but it has an identity. You can feel that somebody wanted to make this specific weird thing. And that’s really cool.
The End of Oak Street gives me hope for the same reason. Like I said, I haven’t had a chance to see it yet, so I could be completely wrong, but damn it, let me dream.
The idea of an ordinary suburban street being ripped out of its world and dropped somewhere dinosaurs roam is so out there that I’m immediately interested, and layering on familial tension and a 70s aesthetic is never going to hurt.
It’s way more exciting to me than another helicopter approaching another secret island.
A great modern dinosaur movie needs to make dinosaurs strange again. Not necessarily bigger. Definitely not a new hybrid with a brandable name and a tragic backstory.
Give me a dinosaur film that uses what cinema can do now, but also knows when not to show everything. Put it in a real landscape. Let the actors have something real to act off of. Most importantly, give the dinosaurs a reason to be in this particular story.
The obvious modern theme is extinction. Dinosaurs are the most famous reminder that dominance is temporary.
We’re really living in the dark times, and there’s lots to be said about it with dinosaurs. You wouldn’t even need to deviate too far from what Jurassic Park was saying in the 90s. We’re still trying to control nature while sleepwalking into destroying it, and dinosaurs could be a great way of showing nature biting back.
Maybe it’s about a private company releasing recreated animals into a rewilding project because the ecological crisis has become another market.
Maybe it follows a scientific expedition that travels back in time and accidentally changes the present through their arrogance or ignorance.
It could also just be a cowboy fighting a Carnotaurus. Honestly, I’m not difficult to please.
What I don’t want is another film that behaves as though dinosaurs are exhausted. They aren’t. We’ve barely used them.
Horror has an entire fossil record of monsters to choose from. A western could treat dinosaurs like dangerous wildlife on the frontiers of a new society. Hell, do another war film. I’d love to see raptors chew their way through some trenches.
You could make a film with no people at all and trust an audience to care about an animal because it behaves like an animal. The possibilities are enormous, which is why the current state of dinosaur movies feels so small.
Jurassic Park didn’t succeed because dinosaurs were enough. It succeeded because Spielberg understood that conjuring awe is an art, and because the film had something to say underneath the surface.
The technology mattered, but the technology served the idea. Every footprint had weight because the story knew what that footprint meant.
Modern dinosaur films keep trying to recreate the roar without thinking about the silence before it.
So no, I don’t think dinosaur movies suck now because Jurassic Park set an impossible standard. They suck because too many filmmakers have mistaken the surface of Jurassic Park for the thing itself.
The island. The logo. The raptor chase. The inevitable reveal of an even larger baddie.
They copy the attractions and leave the ideas behind.
The dinosaur movie isn’t extinct. It’s just waiting for someone to chip it out of the amber.
While you’re here, please subscribe to Upside Down Shark on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts!
Tom Baker
I like Star Wars, heavy metal and BBQ Pringles.
