Hopefully it wasn’t lost on at least a few of you that we’re a bit late with this week’s review. There’s very good reason for that. See, for the last few months, I’ve been reading Michael Crichton’s smash hit Jurassic Park. My intention had always been to read the book and then do a compare and contrast of the book with the film, which is also a smash hit and a classic in its own rite. The problem is, I read really slowly. I was within 100 pages of the end as of Wednesday, and then there was Thanksgiving, and it’s a flimsy excuse, but it’s all I’ve got. At any rate, I redoubled my efforts and made a concerted push to finish and now, fresh off of a read through of the novel that launched a franchise, here’s my review of Jurassic Park, the books, and the movie.
Let me start by saying that this read through of the book was the first time that I had read this book. I’ve read The Lost World a couple of times, and so when people would smirk and shake their heads, I just didn’t fully understand, but that’s a conversation for later. I will try to keep on track. I had a few ideas of what to expect going into reading this book, but I have to say that I was pretty surprised by the differences in what went into the film of the same name, what was left out, and what was used later. I’m going to cover all of that in pretty high detail so if you haven’t actually read the novel for some reason, and you don’t want things spoiled, then read no further.
So the basic story between Jurassic Park the book and Jurassic Park the movie are more or less the same. Ingen, owned by John Hammond, has created a means of cloning dinosaurs and has used that knowledge to design a theme park attraction that they intend to open to the public in order to make all of the money. But there are problems. The investors are worried about never-ending delays, and some really inconsequential people affiliated with the Costa Rican government are worried about attacks that have taken place along the coast of the country. An odd looking leg is found and sent to a museum in New York City. In the meantime, the EPA is looking into Ingen’s activities in Costa Rica, and consult Grant and Sattler about their roles in the operation. Grant admits to consulting, but tells the investigator that it was all in the realm of the hypothetical. As a result of the investigation, and to assuage the concerns of the investors, Hammond asks Grant and Sattler to travel to the island in Costa Rica and take a look and then give their stamp of approval if they like what they see.
This set up, minus the overt concerns of the Costa Rican government, is pretty much the same as the film. It obviously plays out a little more intricately, but it’s basically the same stuff. We do find out a bit more about Gennaro in this set up. In the film, he’s just the corporate lawyer punching bag that Hollywood uses to ‘connect with the little guy’ by beating up on tired stereotypes. In the book, he’s a devoted family man who’s legitimately put out by the burden of taking this trip. We find out that he’s going to miss one of his kid’s birthdays as a result. It’s actually kind of nice to see him handled as a more dynamic character. Along for the ride are Ian Malcolm, and Tim and Lex as well, although they’re each handled slightly differently as well.
It’s when we get to the island that everything starts to diverge a great deal. For time reasons, the story and action of the film move at a pretty quick pace, but in the book, it all gets teased out a bit more. The arrival is pretty much the same, but very quickly, we diverge as the group are immediately treated to a more in depth tour of the main visitor’s facility. We get to see the lab where the genes are sequenced for the cloning process, but there’s a bit more explanation as to the how of things, and then the group gets to see the nursery where the animals are matured to a point where they can be released to the park. They also get to see the control room where the entire park is monitored, and it’s at this point that Hammond and some of the crew show off all of the safety mechanisms that are in place to keep everything under control. We’re presented with quite a bit more of the minutiae areas of the park, like the hotel, and Crichton takes great care to reiterate how unfinished a lot of it all looks. We’re meant to feel, and rightly so, that the park is still in the finishing stages of construction. It’s some subtle foreshadowing, but it really adds to the ambiance of the read.
It’s between the initial tour and the tour by truck that we’re introduced to the kids. The relationship is quite a bit different than in the film. In the book, the kids’ parents are getting divorced, a detail that was reappropriated in Jurassic World, and Hammond has only invited them to play the heartstrings of Gennaro so that Gennaro might make a more lenient judgement against the park to the investors. In actuality, Hammond sees the kids as quite the nuisance. The guided tour plays out a lot like the film. There are dinosaurs on the tour, however, and the group get to help Harding, the vet on the island, examine a Stegosaur, not a Triceratops. Also slightly different, Gennaro stays with Sattler and Harding when the rest of the party leaves. Actually, Gennaro acts pretty cool throughout. It isn’t until the end that he becomes a sniveling weiner. But we’ll get to that.
The book answered a question that I had always had. I always thought that the trucks had returned to the Tyrannosaur paddock because the tech, Arnold, had just run the trucks in reverse, but in the book, and much more logically, the tour runs by the paddock twice from two different sides. The power still goes out while the trucks are outside the Tyrannosaur paddock, and it’s still raining sheets. The attack is much more drawn out and suspenseful, but the results are about the same with a few exceptions. Lex, who is the younger sibling, gets thrown by the T-Rex. Malcolm gets bitten up by the creature instead of Gennaro. One of the trucks does get thrown off the road, and Tim still pukes in the vehicle before it falls out of a tree, an incident in which Grant plays no part. At the end of it all, Grant, Lex and Tim all end up together. Tim is also pretty cool throughout. He is the computer loving, dinosaur loving nerd, and Lex is a sports loving tomboy. She plays a useful role in being the youngest person in the party with the most accute senses. But Tim does quite a bit of problem solving throughout the experience, and he does a great job taking care of his sister. It’s actually pretty touching.
Nedry does shut everything down, but unlike the film, he doesn’t cover his tracks so well that Arnold isn’t able to reverse everything with a total shutdown of the system. Arnold does have to purge the memory of the commands before doing so though, and he’s able to track that down fairly quick. Actually, I think it’s interesting that with more leeway on the amount of time that the audience might devote to the experience, a lot of the intense elements of the story that get rushed in the film actually end up being solved in rather mundane ways in the book. Arnold tracks down the command that reverses the command that Nedry used to shut down all of the systems in the park. He does have to do a hard reset of the system to purge it from the RAM, but the reset is not as involved as in the film. Where the movie focuses, and for the better, the survival horror aspect of what the book offers, the characters in the book aren’t in a struggle for life until the last 100 pages or so. For the most part, they all think that they’re successfully working towards getting the park back to 100% under control. Arnold, Hammond, Wu, and even Muldoon all think that they’re just routinely reasserting their dominance over the park.
The expedition that Grant and the kids take is quite a bit different in places. They do nearly get trampled by stampeding dinosaurs that are getting chased by the T-Rex, but interestingly, the T-Rex is stalking them for most of their journey. There’s a sequence where they use a raft to travel by river towards the visitor’s center. During this time, they happen across the aviary, which features prominently in Jurassic Park III. It’s a different type of pteranodon that is used, but the principle is the same. This is a tense time in the book as they’re constantly stalked by the T-Rex. They also have a tense run in with the dilophosaurs, and it all climaxes with a plunge off of a waterfall. This part was borrowed somewhat in The Lost World. It’s at this part that they finally find a way to get back to the visitor’s center. The stakes are somewhat high as, unlike the film, Velociraptors have managed to sneak aboard the ship that ferries supplies to the island. And so Grant needs to let someone know to recall the ship so that the raptors don’t get onto the mainland.
As the book moves into the climax, it is quite a bit different. Hammond, who never really deals with the peril in the film, finds himself in the middle of the action. However, he’s in denial for most of the experience so I don’t think that that detail makes a lot of difference. The power is out during the climax, but it’s due to the reset draining the auxiliary generators as opposed to simply having to turn the main power on at the maintenance shed. The raptors do get out, and they do storm the visitor’s center, and one does get locked in a freezer, but several raptors also storm the hotel. Sattler gets to show off her athletic prowess as she runs as a distraction for the raptors. She climbs trees, and takes a plunge off of the hotel into a swimming pool. It’s quite impressive. It ends up that Arnold does go to the maintenance shed to get the power back on before someone else has to go, but in this case, it’s to get the second auxiliary generator on so that he can get the mains back online. Gennaro also takes a stab at it, unsuccessfully due to a raptor attack. In the end, it’s Grant that gets the aux generator on, and Tim uses that to get the main power back on.
On their end, Tim and Lex are chased through the restricted areas of the visitor’s center. Grant and Gennaro end up saving them, and Grant uses highly toxic chemicals to kill the raptors. The T-Rex does not save the day. Tim has to restore power under pressure because the raptors at the hotel are eating through the bars that cover the skylights at said hotel. I do have a problem with this part. While I have no doubt that a raptor could probably produce enough pressure to gnaw through a steel bar in theory, in practice, the steel is more dense than the raptor tooth, and I have to believe that the whole exercise would end with a toothless raptor as the steel would break the teeth, not the other way around. But whatever. Tim saves the day, and the raptors die horribly.
There’s a brief lull after this as Grant pushes to see how many raptors have hatched since the creatures had been introduced to the park because the wild breeding is totally a subplot, and an enjoyable one. It’s nice because the T-Rex is kind of the main villain leading up to the climax, but then the raptors become the main villains to everyone during the climax and the film uses this setup really effectively as well. But as a result, Grant, Sattler, and Gennaro have to go to where they believe a raptor nest has been built in order to count how many eggs have been successfully hatched. This is a sort of anticlimactic bit leading up to one of the main differences that I had been aware of for quite some time, and that is that the Costa Rican military napalms the crap out of the island to kill all of the dinosaurs. That element actually gets borrowed in Jurassic Park III as well.
I want to talk about one of the major differences that ends up being a pretty big problem later. Malcolm totally dies by the end. So does Hammond for that matter, but the Malcolm death is particularly troublesome because he’s a main character in The Lost World, both the film and the novel. We’ll talk about this a bit more when I finally get around to reviewing that book/film combination. However, at this juncture, it’s important to acknowledge that Malcolm ends up being one of the most popular characters in both the book and the film. I have to admit that I’m a little frustrated by this, not because I think he wasn’t a great character, but because I really feel like those who have read it and sing his praises fail to understand what Crichton was using this character to say. We’re all a bunch of Hammonds with our fingers in our ears. We refuse to admit that science inherently has no moral compass, and that our current scientific practices don’t require the development of the kind of discipline necessary to wield science safely and constructively. We just have a bunch of scientists out there trying to make a name for themselves, and become rock stars like Bill Nye and Neil DeGrasse Tyson so that they can be famous and rich. It’s an arrogant and juvenile way to do science and until we’re willing to admit to our own lack of humility as a species, we’re going to make some major blunders I think. I feel like those who praise Malcolm might have a drastically different opinion of him if they actually thought about what he was preaching the entire time. Just saying.
As far as the film goes, this movie holds a special place in my heart. My grandmother took me to see it in theaters the summer that it came out. I was 10 so I felt like it was a rite of passage experience for me as I got to see this PG-13 film at such a young age. That whole summer was filled with JP toys, and seeing the film and getting to talk with the grownups about the film. It was a great experience for me. I love pretty much everything about this movie. I really think that Spielberg made the best decisions possible in considering what to include in the film adaptation, and what to leave out. What remains captures the spirit of the narrative exceptionally well, and what was left out would probably either have been cost prohibitive, or detrimental to the pace of the film. I think all of the roles were well cast. Each actor just did a bang up job portraying their literary counterpart, and it’s delightful to watch them on screen! The action is nail biting! Everything about this movie plays into the tension and serves to build that tension all the way up until the resolution of the climax. The special effects are just amazing, guys! The practical effects look so real! Even under the scrutiny of high definition, the effects draw you into the film. You really believe that you’re seeing an actual T-Rex, and a living triceratops as you watch this movie. The story and the plot move at a rate that allows you to soak everything in, but it doesn’t move so slow as to bore you. You’re given all of the information that you need, either exposition, or being shown things so that you never feel lost. There’s a perfect blend of horror and humor that make that building tension bearable. Of course, John Williams wrote some great themes for this movie. His theme for this film is iconic. I think one of the things that I find particularly poignant about this movie is that it was released right at the end of the practical effects era. Jurassic Park was one of the first films to really look at using computer generated effects. Spielberg used this tool sparingly, which I think was wise, but due to its success, a lot of films that came after started to over use CGI. I can’t say that this was necessarily all bad, but it definitely had a profound impact on how we watch movies, and it’s been used clumsily in a lot of cases. For that reason, this movie really stands as a testament to the type of ingenuity and brilliance that can make a great film without the crutch of using a ton of CGI.
I love this film! It’s been a huge part of my life since my childhood, and I’m thankful for the role that it played in my personal development into adolescence and eventually adulthood. It’s the type of film that will fill you with awe during each viewing. It’s definitely one that deserves to be passed down from generation to generation, and I can’t recommend it enough! If it’s been a while, give it a watch. Even if it hasn’t, give it another watch anyway! It’s absolutely worth the time, and you won’t ever be disappointed! Happy Thanksgiving! Stay tuned as we move into the season of that other holiday as I start looking at some holiday appropriate stuff that will hopefully light up your life!
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