Science Quote by John Dykstra

An “embarrassment of riches” is supposed to be a compliment, but John Dykstra weaponizes the phrase as a warning label. He’s talking about spectacle the way an engineer talks about a system under too much load: excess capability becomes failure, not luxury. The jab at “directors who don’t better” (almost certainly meant as “know better”) lands like shop-floor impatience with people who have the tools but not the discipline. In Dykstra’s world, more isn’t more; it’s noise.

The intent is corrective, not poetic. Dykstra helped invent the modern visual-effects workflow, and his critique comes from someone who’s watched technical possibility outrun storytelling restraint. When he says, “you don’t know where to look,” he’s describing a broken contract with the audience. Cinema is attention management. If the frame won’t prioritize, the viewer ends up doing the director’s job, scanning for meaning like a driver reading too many billboards at speed.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of a certain era of filmmaking: digital pipelines that make adding “stuff” cheap, and therefore tempting. The word “self-indulgent” is the tell. He’s not condemning ambition; he’s condemning ego disguised as production value. What works here is the inversion: riches become embarrassment, creativity becomes clutter. It’s a technician’s version of taste - not anti-spectacle, but pro-clarity, insisting that the most impressive effect is knowing what to leave out.