I mean, complaining about the color realism of a film with gigantic monster dinosaurs (whose coloration we may never know to begin with) seems a bit silly. Movies are not documentaries. I'd buy in a bit more for things like the BBC's 'Planet Earth' needing color realism, but even then it's ok to dramatize things.
...but the whole point of the effects in those movies is to bring the idea to life, to make the unbelievable seem real and believable. If it fails to do that, it’s not silly to discuss how and why.
I thought movies were to make money, at least ones like the recent spat of Jurassic ones. JP, yeah, realism to a degree, BoB Horner became a household name because of it. And it was somewhat realistic for the research at the time. But nearly all the dinos should be covered in furry Emu-like feathers now if we want realism. And shaggy dirt-brown feathers aren't good looking and 'dazzle'. Maybe for some it's worth $10.50 to watch, but not for most.
When JP was filmed, the discovery of dinosaurs having feathers hadn't happened yet, and big efforts were made on providing accurate representations of what was known about the creatures. Back then scientists still thought dinosaurs were reptiles' ancestors, so the skin had to look reptile-like; personally, I think they succeeded, and a bigger success was shown in The Lost World, years after.
The relationship between dinosaurs and birds has been observed for at least 150 years, although until the 1990s the idea was that birds were descendants of dinosaurs, not the other way around.
Still, the idea that at least some dinosaurs might have had feathers predates Jurassic Park by decades. I distinctly remember learning about this possibility in my first grade classroom, which would have been 1988 at they latest.
You are correct. The idea of dinosaurs with feathers is older than the 90s, even Dr. Alan Grant suggests this when speaking about raptors, on the other hand evidence appeared until mid 90s.
But with Dinos, we can't. We've no idea what their color was, if they even have color receptors in their eyes, nor their movements. Fantasy is just as good as reality when it comes to T-Rex coloration and if they had feathers or not.
BTW, I tried to do a quick google on the current research and mostly came up with mixed answers. If anyone form HN knows about dino feather coverings, please chime in!
No, the studios want returns on their investment, at least enough to recoup costs and the perception of realism, to an audience, is not realism. What an audience thinks is real is often not real. Audiences love to hear sounds in space movies, yet that is impossible. Audiences think that spies have techno baubles and cool stuff, but they mostly have budget rate bureaucracy. Audiences think that we all live happily ever after, but we all know that's not reality. Movies aren't documentaries, they are entertainment you pay for.
Also, a realistic T-Rex may never survive in our modern atmosphere. Those lungs are so large because O2 content was about half of today's (http://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/atmospheric-oxyg...) and the mix of dinos they have in JP is just a mess of evolutionary reality.
I mean, yeah? The Jurassic series has a special place in my heart, the films, by and large, are great monster movies. But they are just that, monster movies.
Trying to say that the dinos are realistic is just crazy. Maybe, kinda, in the first one, they were, a little bit. Even then Jack Horner got a lot of flak from the community over his consultation on the films. But the evidence we have now just points to a much different creature than what we though of even a few years ago. They aren't monsters, just standard terrestrial vertebrates trying to make their way in a different world. We have so much to learn from them, about climate change, about physiology, about adaptation, etc. So trying to keep the monster and the known 'reality' separate is a big deal to me.
I think you are really missing the point here. The audience doesn't care whether the dinosaurs depicted are scientifically accurate, they only care whether they look like they could be accurate, and that is a big distinction. It is about matching the viewer's expectations, not reality. In JP the dinosaurs look like they could exist, whereas in JW they looked like CGI (the so-called 'uncanny valley' effect in CGI). That being said, of course JW succeeded from the perspective of the investors since it made so much money. Still, that aspect of the film is completely orthogonal to the aesthetical aspects that people here are discussing.
"Fantasy is just as good as reality when it comes to T-Rex coloration".
Then let's go for plaid and gingham dinosaurs, like the pink elephants on parade!
It doesn't need to match reality, it needs to aid suspension of disbelief. If color choices make the audience say, "That looks so fake", it hurts the storytelling.
Every Frame a Painting goes over Michael Bay's work and includes some color content he uses and WHY: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2THVvshvq0Q