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65 comments · 98% upvoted · source · other discussions
It baffles me how much of this movie was practical or shot on location but ended up looking like CGI or poor compositing.
My biggest disappointment with the movie is how they absolutely BUTCHERED the location shoot. All the behind the scenes filming in Thailand and Vietnam and I get to the theater to see them running around Avatar land with spiral mountains and bullshit. Why bother?
This is one of my biggest critiques of the JW series of movies, they seem obsessed with making the background unbelievably “cinematic”.
One of the reason JP works so well is because what’s behind the T. rex is real life Hawaii, not a manufactured cinematic landscape that feels too good to be true, it’s a regular real life background, that is beautiful but not distractingly so, and you never pay attention to the background because the foreground is filled with dinosaurs.
If my attention is being pulled to the background while there are dinosaurs in the foreground you have F’d up. Plain and simple.
Your statement hit my soul. So true.
You got one of the most beautiful places in the world in Thailand, and the mangrove deltas and limestone formations in Krabi are an otherworldly kind of incredible. Straight up wasted on rebirth.
Why did they think "Oh, we absolutely need to spend money and time making a field of long grass here so we can shoot a benign and nonsensical scene here ultimately for nostalgia bait and to overlay anything outside of this field with cgi anyway"?
Like fuck me guys, you've already painted over the background so why do you even need a location at this point? Filmmaking has lost so much magic and depth now that nothing looks real.
that's what I'm saying, one of my complaints was that it looked like it was on an alien planet (which would be awesome in literally any other franchise), but I'm only now finding out the location was actually a real place
And it looks so nice in these pics. The movie its so clean and lifeless
They steamrolled production on this movie they just didn’t have time to polish it the way it needed to be
I’m not shading you here; tho as soon as I saw the post and I started scrolling to the comments, I was like “I bet I know what the top comment will be” and here we are lol
Totally agree with you tho, it’s also not the first and only time films have done this before. Granted, there’s many levels of CGI overlay that can make it look worse or better.
Every damn scene looks like a sound stage or a green screen background. Its crazy
People’s perception of CGI is mostly based on expectation.
Forest Gump is 32 years old and people still don’t notice the CGI shots because they’re not looking for them. They don’t expect CGI.
But give them something that makes them expect CGI, like a fantastic landscape in a dinosaur movie and they’ll see it everywhere, even when it’s not.
Its not even reaching their heads, how tf did it hide those things
Ah yes, the magical grass with the property of being able to completely hide a fully-grown "Titanosaurus"!
It’s not the grass’ fault that the land grew new hill pimples
The Titanosauruses are inflatable
Simple, they just so happened to be walking over a hole in those moments, so they were hidden well
This complaint makes me realize a lot of people would be terrible at terrain association and land nav
Have you ever seen tall grass with large animals in it?
I've seen things hide behind hills. It's amazing what elevation can do. Now I agree that they at least should have heard them, but if you're 6ft tall standing next to a 15ft hill, things can hide on the other side of that hill rather easily
I hope that grass wasn’t invasive 😱 grasses often are
Their greens department were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should!
Can we also just highlight that when they realized, “oh no, plants aren’t growing the way we want!” their plan for understanding how to grow things in Thailand wasn’t to find anyone in Thailand, but to pull in someone from the UK
Don't go in there
All that effort to grow this grass in a spectacular shooting location only to CGI the backdrops out in post to make it look like greenscreen lmao
If only they put half of that effort into developing a coherent plot.
Or memorable characters
The ecologist in me is not happy. Great way to introduce noxious weeds.
That’s pretty cool actually ngl.
Spent more time growing grass than writing a better script.
Impressive. They were even super careful not to bother local fauna and wake up by accident the Titanosaurus herd. Truly careful people 🤪
Grew all that and did nothing with it. Was the idea to grow the grass decided before a screenplay was written? It makes more sense for an enormous herd of gargantuan sauropods to be walking on stamped, dead dirt than long grass. How did it add to the scene?
I have a feeling they wanted to replicate a scene like that in TLW, creatures attacking people in the grass. Then it got written out of the script, and then they decided to use the grass for the Titanosaur scene.
"I have a feeling they wanted to replicate a scene like that in TLW, creatures attacking people in the grass. Then it got written out of the script, and then they decided to use the grass for the Titanosaur scene."
Actually, I think the writers wanted to play with the audience's expectations from the beginning. Due to TLW, they know people will think they will make a recall of that raptor scene the moment the movie shows tall grass. So they use the scenery and use the classic "keep it quiet to raise tension" technique to trick the audience into thinking there's gonna be a raptor fight, only for them to show the Titanosaurs and do a complete 180 from tension to awe.
I don't say this excuses how that grass could hide that gigantic reptile, but I do think this was a smart move. Just not great when it comes to screen play. And they should have given some raptor scenes to balance things out.
EDIT: Keep in mind that I haven't kept up with the behind-the-scenes stuff, so I don't know if they said anything regarding the initial purpose of the grass.
They got so much things right in the production of this movie with an incredible crew, but in the end the script by Koepp is just awful and I feel Universal wasted Edwards' potential (and he must learn to opt-out of a bad script). The OG environment scenes didn't need the CGI embellishments, and the overall look felt flat and fake.
Don't go into the long grass!
Remember when Rebirth's marketing only showed us images of the long grass instead of any dinosaurs?
This is why movies cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Couldn't just find a field we had to pay a team of people to grow grass
It all feels really unfortunate. They go to these stunning places (I've actually been in Krabi and it's beautiful just as it is), even physically grow a fielf of grass, only then to basically cover all that up with green screens and CGI. It's quite baffling.
The movies are supposed to be about Dinosaurs in our world - not some alien planet.
Hopefully they'll make better use of the actual locations in the future.
Beautiful location ruined by shitte vfx
such shit vfx it was nominated for an oscar!🙄
Yeah they did a great job of making a beautiful shoot location look like an alien planet filled with monsters.
I no joke forgot this movie came out lol
I don’t go in long grass
Spared no expense
Id be checking for ticks nonstop
I have to get in my soapbox so please indulge me if you will.
The reason that Every one of the JW sequels fails visually is because they are so up their arse about making the background extraordinary.
Look at this shot from JP, it’s literally just Hawaii, it’s not distractingly cinematic, it’s a beautiful location for sure, but it doesn’t ever overshadow the focus of the dinosaur movie which IS THE DINOSAURS.
Every JW sequel is obsessed with making the backgrounds unbelievable, and when you stack unbelievable dinosaurs in front of unbelievable backgrounds, I don’t believe what I’m seeing.
But when you stack unbelievable dinosaurs in front of a visually pleasing but not distracting background that’s grounded in reality, suddenly I actually start to believe it.
AND THAT IS THE MAGIC OF JURASSIC PARK. Not that it’s a great story or that it’s well acted, JPs greatest achievement is making you BELIEVE that the dinosaurs you’re seeing are real. And very single JW sequel has failed in making me feel like their dinosaurs are real.
Thank you for your time.
And somehow it still all looked like the whole film was shot on a green screen.
And those gigantic titanosaurs were hidden so well for that "epic" reveal.
Kudos for them actually growing the grass instead of just CGIng it.
They also had a bit of trouble growing the elephant grass in TLW (i think its called elephant grass) 😄
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Oh I'll check it out! I learnt about the grass trouble from the ultimate visual history book.
So in some ways they WERE trying to create a wild Jurassic Park.
I wonder why they didn't just do a small patch and CG the rest, or go with fake plants? I get wanting to make things as believable as possible (even in a movie about dinosaurs brought back to life), but that seems like way more trouble than it's worth.
This becomes even funnier when you realize they filmed on location and went through all this effort and then put shitty CGI backgrounds and lighting on everything, especially on this scene in particular.
I watched the extras on the Blu-Ray and there was much less CGI going on than I expected. Regarding the backgrounds, they changed the lighting a bit and especially added some fog to make them look more mysterious, but it's not far from the real scenery if I remember correctly.
this long grass has nothing on the other long grass
Rickgou 60 points · Apr 2026 · :spinoflair: Spinosaurus
Both long grass scenes are probably the best in their respective movies. One being terrifying and brutal, the other beautiful and awe-inspiring.
DefinitionNervous 4 points · Apr 2026
We got GREAT GRASS in this movie guys