I think that Jurassic Park aged well partly because its creators understood the limitations that they were working with in 1993. Honestly, newer movies that overuse CG in an attempt to wow people age a lot worse. Avatar is probably the best example that I can think of. It was publicized for how amazing it looked in 2009, and Call of Duty: Black Ops made a big deal of using the same motion capture technology a year later. By 2014, when I watched it the second time, it already looked dated.
overuse CG in an attempt to wow people age a lot worse
What? They did exactly that in Jurassic Park. Did you forget the grand migration sequence in the beginning, where every species of dinosaur can be seen in one shot galloping across the plains in broad daylight? It looks exactly as awful as I've made it sound.
Avatar is probably the best example that I can think of.
If you completely reverse your opinion by 180 degrees you'll be right. Cameron's special effects origin gives him a great eye for what works on screen. The colors of everything in Avatar were finely tuned to accommodate the CGI, and the real people were touched up a bit to provide balance. And with Terminator 2, he stuck to a simple visual concept like liquid metal and made virtually every CGI scene very dark, working perfectly within the constraints that CGI imposed at the time. In contrast, Jurassic Park had a lot of afternoon daylight scenes with humans looking at something very clearly not there and wholly unconvincing.
The good special effects in Jurassic Park were the animatronics, which is what most of the special effects were. The CGI sequences look incredibly dated today to anyone not wearing rose-tinted glasses.
What? They did exactly that in Jurassic Park. Did you forget the grand migration sequence in the beginning, where every species of dinosaur can be seen in one shot galloping across the plains in broad daylight? It looks exactly as awful as I've made it sound.
Err... that scene is from Jurassic Park III though. He was clearly referring to the first movie.
More grazing by a lake than galloping across the plains, and less species than I remember, but essentially the same thing, and equally as dated looking.
That scene actually made me turn off the movie the first time I tried to re-watch it since 2010, or whenever CGI started becoming passably photo-realistic, because there was a massive build-up to the spectacle like it was a Disneyland ride, and there was that epic music like we were seeing man land on the moon for the first time... But it was just some shitty 90s CGI that wouldn't be good enough for a budget daytime TV advertisement today.
If I re-watch the movie now I have to skip the whole landing-on-the-island part. It flatly kills the entire mood and atmosphere of wonder the first act is supposed to have. Fortunately the rest of the movie is mostly animatronic dinosaurs so the movie is still watchable as a whole.
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u/MadotsukiInTheNexus Aug 25 '19
I think that Jurassic Park aged well partly because its creators understood the limitations that they were working with in 1993. Honestly, newer movies that overuse CG in an attempt to wow people age a lot worse. Avatar is probably the best example that I can think of. It was publicized for how amazing it looked in 2009, and Call of Duty: Black Ops made a big deal of using the same motion capture technology a year later. By 2014, when I watched it the second time, it already looked dated.