Those Planet of the Apes pictures are encouraging.

I'm ok with the raptor training to some extent. There are people who regularly interact with lions and tigers so I don't think it's any kind of a leap to say that raptors raised in captivity could be ok with humans, or a human anyway. Overall I didn't get a great feel for the story, but I thought there were some great images and I liked the homages to the original.

I'm curious to learn more about how the story is supposed to shape up. As we've seen from the past two sequels, Jurassic Park might have been a fantastic premise, but it's a tricky world to weave a compelling follow-up narrative in.

I believe they trained the raptors like hunting dogs. That's what it looks like to me. They obviously release the raptors and they look at Pratt as if they're following his commands.

Purely guessing, but that is how I saw it. Which would be awesome... using them to help hunt down the new big baddie.

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Not sure why Chris Pratt is hunting an enormous dinosaur with the smallest gun possible,

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Because that's what the do at JP. You're out hunting raptors and you take one shotgun with two shells...amateurs.

I'm not going to pre-judge a movie that doesn't even come out for another 8 months, but that trailer had some elements that scare me about the direction of this movie...

• "People have already seen Tyrannosaurus for like 14 whole minutes of screen time over 3 movies. We need to invent a super-duper evil dinosaur monster! Now pass the cocaine..." - Hollywood
• Shoehorning kids into the damn movie for the 4th time. It worked the first time and just made the 2nd and 3rd movies worse than they already were.
• Great white sharks are incredibly rare, hard to catch, and not naturally occurring in Costa Rica. That aquatic scene absolutely reeks of "Oh, that's kewl, they fed that monster fish a Jaws LOLZ!"
• Is it just me, or has CGI gotten exponentially worse since 1993?

Anyway, I could definitely be wrong. And maybe I should quit b****ing about a dinosaur movie. But that trailer made me feel like they're going for the lowest common denominator.

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Not sure why Chris Pratt is hunting an enormous dinosaur with the smallest gun possible,

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Because that's what the do at JP. You're out hunting raptors and you take one shotgun with two shells...amateurs.

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Clever girl...

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I believe they trained the raptors like hunting dogs. That's what it looks like to me. They obviously release the raptors and they look at Pratt as if they're following his commands.

Purely guessing, but that is how I saw it. Which would be awesome... using them to help hunt down the new big baddie.

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The more I think about it, the more I love this idea. It's something we haven't seen before.

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Is it just me, or has CGI gotten exponentially worse since 1993?

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Go back and watch the original. Yes, the T-Rex sequence in the rain is still - to this day - some of the best CGI I have ever seen. But everything else? Not so great. I'm not saying the rest of the CGI is bad by any means, but the brontosaurus in that first scene where Allen & co see the dinosaurs for the first time doesn't hold a candle to even the one shot we see of a brontosaurus in this trailer. The level of detail/muscle movement/etc. is far more detailed now than it was back then. That said, again, these still aren't even finished effects we're looking at.

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I believe they trained the raptors like hunting dogs. That's what it looks like to me. They obviously release the raptors and they look at Pratt as if they're following his commands.

Purely guessing, but that is how I saw it. Which would be awesome... using them to help hunt down the new big baddie.

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The more I think about it, the more I love this idea. It's something we haven't seen before.

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We'd also never seen a talking raptor before JPIII...

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Chris Pratt in a velociraptor biker gang!

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"Christ Pratt in a velociraptor biker gang" band name. Called it!

There is no such thing as a brontosaurus

From the reddit thread:

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VFX artist here.

To those making comments about the quality of the CG critters in this trailer and to anyone who has ever wondered how it's possible for the original Jurassic Park to have had such awesome CG, while [insert some more-recent movie] didn't those are both interesting observations, and here's the deal with both.

First of all, it's important to remember that the further we are from releasing the movie, the further the VFX are from completion. Early trailers and commercials will always feature VFX that aren't "done," because our target for delivery is like six months from now, and our team doesn't find out for sure which VFX shots they're going to need for the ad campaign until... hold on... juuuuuuust about the moment they need those shots right this ****ing second oh my god. Papers get thrown, people run down hallways, it's a whole Broadcast News thing.

So, we take whatever work is done on one of those shots, save off a copy, and rush a quick alternate version to completion. Maybe the animation is final, but the comp isn't. Maybe nothing is final. Maybe everything is final, but later someone changes their mind and adds another thing to the shot. Whatevs. We give them Some Version of the shot complete with, like, color and everything, it's super official and they release the trailer, and we go back and keep workin' on it like we were already doin.' This is how you end up with comparison albums featuring, for instance, the difference between trailer and movie VFX for Guardians of the Galaxy. Happens all the time.

As for the more general complaint that I hear a lot "but, we were able to make everything photoreal in Jurassic Park in 1993, what gives?" there's a lot that gives. It's complicated. Aside from utilizing a whole slew of fairly basic (albeit smart) tricks that make it easier to look photoreal, Jurassic Park also had a few things going for it, historically speaking.

As a thing to attempt doing, it was more or less unprecedented. Just a ton of work, a ton of question marks, unforeseen innovations were certain to be required, and custom scripts and software would have to be written. They knew what it had to look like, but they didn't know exactly how to get there. Their target was a look. They'd know it when they saw it.

So, they started hammering away at it. There wasn't even a solid optimism that it was possible to pull off so much CG, at that level of quality, at that point in time much less an absolute *******ed foregone conclusion thatobviously it's possible to do twenty times as much CG at that level of quality and so they benefited, a bit, from the exploratory nature of it. As far as executives and producers and studios and expectations go, the attempt to make that first CG dinosaur movie was akin to Apollo 11. "Oh god, I hope this is ****ing possible." When it actually worked, it was an accomplishment.

That was the context for that CG work. These days, the context for the CG in, like, The Avengers, is akin to Southwest Flight 782, service from Oakland to Burbank. "Oh god, I hope I'll be able to rent a red car when I obviously make it to Burbank." It became "obvious" (to the higher-ups) that we could do CG VFX. The process got figured out, the pipelines established, the groundwork laid, the procedures sorted... and now, the process of arriving at the end of the VFX process is seen as the goal. First you do your story art, then you do your modeling, then you do your layout, then you do your animation and sims, then you do your comp, then you render out the result. "That's how ya do it." Once the process is complete, your VFX are complete. Congratulations, let's move on to the next movie.

The problem and distinction is that, remember, Jurassic Park's goal was a look. They didn't know what theprocess would be, but they'd know it when they saw it. Now the goal is, largely, a process. Finish the process. Are we capable of delivering CG at the level of quality you see in Jurassic Park? ****ing absolutely. (And, "duh," quite frankly. Most movies with big CG setpieces are actually at that level of quality.) When that doesn't happen, these days, it's because we're working under a very different set of limitations. For instance, way, way, way more shots, way more complex shots, way harder shots, an atmosphere of assumed possibility, a wee bit of studio apathy, less-and-less money, higher-and-higher rez, stereoscopic delivery... and, uh, not to put too fine a point on it... not much of a premium being placed on quality of life for the artists. (That's a whole separate thing.)

In addition to that, like I said a few paragraphs ago, Jurassic Park also (smartly) utilized a handful of tricks to make life easier. In CG, realistic shiny things are easier than realistic matte things, so they made the T-Rex wet. They did the T-Rex scene at night. They did a tremendous number of hand-offs between the CG Tippet critters and the practical Winston critters. Not to mention, there's way fewer CG shots in that movie than you're probably remembering, and on and on.

So. Yeah, it was twenty years ago, but they were also climbin' a different mountain. Now, it's important to note that Jurassic Park deserves every bit of the VFX credit it gets. (That Gallimimus sequence blows my mind.) It's outstanding work, it stands the test of time, it's great I know I'm basically saying, "yeah, good job with the ****ing Coliseum, you guys, you scrappy group of rag-tag weirdos," but. I want to make sure it's clear that I'm not throwing shade at Jurassic Park. I love Jurassic Park.

But, for being a trip to the moon with nothing but a tin can and a calculator sorry, I'm very analogy-heavy this morning for being just this impossible thing, it also managed to avoid some of the pitfalls of the modern CG experience. Expectations, mostly. Different flavors of expectations, at different points along the line. Being the first to do a very hard thing well isn't easy. For that matter, neither is being the 6000th to do a very hard thing well, when people are totally unimpressed with the assumption that you can do a very hard thing well. Like "come on, knock itout. We're on a schedule here."

Not that they weren't on a schedule, but. You know what I mean. I've rambled on long enough.

tl; dr trailer VFX are often a work in progress, and Jurassic Park's CG was incredible, but arguably managed to benefit from "pioneer" culture, and set out to clear a bar much lower than we typically deal with these days

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We'd also never seen a talking raptor before JPIII...

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I literally don't remember a thing from Jurassic Park 3... a Raptor talked?

It communicated with other raptors via honks/sounds/grunts

I thought he was referencing the scene where Grant is dreaming while asleep on the plane, and a raptor appears to say his name, then he wakes up to his name being called.

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There is no such thing as a brontosaurus

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Bully for Brontosaurus!

I didn't need to remember that...

Intended for shark

Scene I'm really hoping for.....

Kid talking to Pratt's character: "So what do you feed the raptors?"

Pratt: "Mouse, Rat, whatever we have that day."

On the plane ride there, Dr. Grant had a bad dream about a raptor, and Billy - the assistant who decided "hey, raptor eggs, let me take a few!" started talking to him, he woke up, but not before hearing Billy's voice through the raptor's head.

To refresh your memory, this movie also included:

William H. Macy wearing the biggest mustache outside of a porn movie ever.

Tea Leoni both outrunning and outclimbing multiple velociraptors.

A T-Rex getting destroyed in a fight by a combination dinosaur/swordfish in like 6 seconds.

A kid with a smoke grenade outfoxing 10 velociraptors.

And unrelated, I just realized Billy the assistant also played Pollux Troy in Face/Off. MIND BLOWN
Same kid somehow acquiring T-Rex urine.

Something that looked like an Allosaurus walking right up to the heroes, and a big pile of crap, looking at them, but showing no hostility whatsoever.

Laura Dern cashing a paycheck for being in three scenes.

The US Navy? Coast Guard? mobilizing the 6th Fleet to rescue 5 idiots stranded on an island owned by Costa Rica.

Billy the Super Assistant being smashed into a rock wall, falling 100 feet into 2 feet of water and then repeatedly attacked by pterodactyls, but showing up later in the movie with no visible bruises or scratches.

A 35-foot tall dinosaur unable to outrun Sam Neil and a 10-year-old kid.

Awesome post, Brian. That's interesting.

The kid they picked is not a terrible actor. I actually liked him in IM3.

They should've made Timmy the father of the kid. I haven't done the math but I think it's possible.

Then again, he'd never let his kid go to the park. Nevermind, dumb idea.

"Yeah well dinosaurs eat people sometimes. No need to be a ***** about it."

So is this a redo of the first film? Or is it that the other films happened and then someone else took over the program and island and made the park anyways?

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So is this a redo of the first film? Or is it that the other films happened and then someone else took over the program and island and made the park anyways?

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Other films happened. This is a sequel technically. A new company bought the park and made it successful.

Anyone else think this new Dino's vision is based on movement (similar to T-Rex, at least in the JP world)? Two things make me think that: one is the shot with chick holding the flare (nice throw-back) and the kid sitting very still while the dino appears to be searching.

Anybody notice the claws on that big bad dino? Seems to confirm that it is indeed a T-Rex / Raptor mix.

So Chris Pratt is a Jane Goodall for velociraptors???

ALLSOME!

I hope he gets to throw his own feces . . . er I mean . . . yeah

In any of the movies, has a dinosaur actually ever been killed by a gun?

This trailer looks like more of the same. Meh.

I'm psyched out of my mind. Love Chris Pratt, love JP, I think the trailer looks awesome.

4.2 million views in 9 hours.

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4.2 million views in 9 hours.

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18million views on their fb page in 8 hrs....

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So Chris Pratt is a Jane Goodall for velociraptors???

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Either that, or he's the Timothy Treadwell of velociraptors.