Jurassic Park: Book vs. Movie

There was a Jurassic Park thread elsewhere with people questioning why Jurassic Park (the fictional island attraction) was abandoned. It was pointed out to the questioning party that, in the book, Jurassic Park was destroyed and for damn good reason. F Or one thing, the death toll was a lot bigger than in the film. Also the dinosaurs were escaping the island in droves.

Anyway, it got me thinking about this topic.

Now I re-read the book about once a year. I love it. It has been many years since I watched the movie though. I still don't hesitate to say I liked the book a lot more. I remember the movie well enough and I remember how it, being an adaptation, has to give you the Cliff Notes version of all the themes and ideas from the source material. It also did little things that kinda irk me, like having Sam Jackson mention the lysine deficiency. W Hy did he mention something that will literally never be discussed again? Because it was in the book and they wanted to be "faithful" in the lipservice sort of way.

Possibly a better example of my earlier criticism though is the scene where Sam Neil says the dinos are breeding. Now this is a HUGE plot point in the bok, what with the tracking system failing and all the talk about Dr. Wu's method of engineering the dinosaurs, and it really hammers home how the Park was doomed from the beginning. This also leads into the whole raptor nest part, as well as the bit about dinosaurs escaping to the mainland and surviving there because they can now breed.

In the movie though....what does this scene really contribute? Nothing. There are still only a handful of raptors, one Rex, and that's it. It's just kinda there. It's hardly a bad movie mind you but it's just not as interesting so I don't revisit it as much.

So that's my views. How about you all? Which do you prefer and why?

I preferred the movie's presentation, but the book's themes. Jurassic Park is kind of a Broken Aesop; the intended message is about nature refusing to be constrained, but it falls apart in both.

The movie mostly just blames Nedry for the park's failure, while the book goes out of its way to show us that at the heart of it all, John Hammond's poor decisions are what doomed the park to failure. Hammond's incompetence killed a lot of people.

In the film, Hammond is still incompetent, but he's Easily Forgiven by audiences and the film because he's a kindly old Santa Claus figure. If anyone deserved to be eaten in JP, it's John Hammond.

I think he's Easily Forgiven in the movie because he is just delusional and didn't realize what the dangers were, while in the book he was different, although it's been years since I've read the book.

Well, here's my opinion.

I can't help but see his kindly demeanor in the film as a facade. We see plenty of Greedy, Short-Sighted Fool Hammond in the film, you just have to be watching for it to notice. His "spared no expense" line is total bullshit.

We see him arguing with Nedry about money, for instance, and from that argument, we can glean that Hammond hired Nedry not for reliability or competency, but because Nedry was the lowest bidder. There's also the argument he has with Ellie about the flea circus.

His decisions are still suspect, as well, like the choice to bring his grandkids in the first place, and we can still see examples of other issues in the film. Those shotguns, for example, are completely f'ing worthless and do absolutely no harm to any raptor in the film.

Those of us who read the book know this is because Hammond was more concerned for his dinosaurs than his visitors and refused to allow Muldoon any weapons that could legitimately harm them.

There are a lot of minor details that undermine Hammond's kindly grampa image.

I also think our Jurassic Park page exaggerates the jerkiness of Book!Hammond versus Film!Hammond. The two are actually a bit closer than suggested. Book!Hammond is initially sarcastically said by Grant to be "as sinister as Walt Disney", and the book frequently refers to his fantasy of seeing children come to his park and light up aglow at seeing dinosaurs alive. Unlike Film!Hammond, however, he's never redeemed and keeps trying assure everyone this can all be controlled. He does have his Kick the Dog moments, such as when he chats with Wu about how helping mankind would never turn a profit, or at the end when he blames everyone but himself for failure, but he starts out with the same vision as Film!Hammond, and initially as affable.

The movie had animatronic dinosaurs; the book had just text on paper.

I'm tempted to vote movie, lol.

The most chilling thing about Book Hammond was the scene of eating ice cream with Dr. Wu. In the film when he eats with Ellie, it's a charming reminder of how he's a naive, childish visionary. IN the book, it reads more like a chat with a sociopath. Wu even notes how chilling it is to see Hammond calmly eating while people are dying everywhere. He simply did not care....at all.

Movie Hammond cared about his grandchildren. Remember he had muldoon go out to get them?

I'm doing my yearly re-read of the book. Just wanted to see if there are any more thoughts on this.

The thing I love about the Jp book is that it is so completely better than the movie. And I don't mean that as a dig at the movie...at least not completely. The facts are these - Spielberg apparently has some huge problems with guns. In a situation where innocent people, including children, are fleeing for their lives from abominations of science run amok, I think guns are fully justified in being used. This is not Rich White Assholes go out and shoot poor birds and other animals on their Rich White Asshole hunting preserve, this is a life or death struggle.

The point is that the book not only offers up superior plot in how it explains Jurassic Park's failures, it offers up superior action as well. Sure we might not be able to see the dinosaur in the book version but we still got Muldoon shooting off raptor legs and chasing after the T-Rex with a rocket launcher. I mean, COME ON. Isn't that more awesome than anything in the movie? There's also the whole T-Rex chasing Grant and the kids in the raft segment. I love that part so much.

The novel is just...it's the total package. This isn't a case like Lord of the Rings where i recognize the movie did a few things better. I like everything better in the book.

I think the fact that the heroes escape the island without firing a single gun makes the movie much more interesting. Any fool can shoot his way off an island full of hungry dinos, it's another thing all together to beat the island with the one thing you have that they don't: Brains. Yes, I know about the super-smart raptors, but they were still about dolphin-level at most. If guns solved all the problems in Jurassic Park, it'd be just another macho power fantasy wrapped up in smart clothing, like Total Recall, or worse, the Total Recall remake.

They seem to be mining out the books for movie material. Therefore I'm hoping we see people taking rocket launchers to dinosaurs in this fourth one coming out.

And I agree that the books are better than the movies in every way. I certainly liked the scene with the gymnast fighting raptors in Lost World, but it's surrounded by utter stupidity on the part of the other good guys.

They're both good in their own way. I like the book's greater detail about what's going wrong with the park, and really wish the movie had retained the idea that dinosaurs had been escaping from the island and incorporated that idea into the sequels.

But the story is one that benefits massively from being translated from text into an audiovisual medium, especially with the added element of a spectacular soundtrack. The movie has great action and suspense and spectacular special effects. I think film suits the story better than text does.

...what? No, they don't. Grant uses a shotgun while they're being chased by the raptors. It doesn't seem to accomplish anything, but that's because of the park's shitty weapons, not for lack of trying.

Also because Grant has no experience with weapons, while the The World's Expert (on Getting Killed) Muldoon was taken out quickly. Note that even in the book guns didn't solve much. Hammond had limited the amount of weaponry that could be shipped to the island because he didn't want to hurt his precious dinos, and preferred non-lethal means. But the dinos were so durable that you could hit them with a barrage of fire and they'd still keep coming. The T. rex, after being with a laser-guided traq rocket to the head, didn't even feel it for an hour. Grant also had to take out raptors in other ways, such as fooling them with poisoned eggs. It still wasn't a Rambo script.

Finished watching the Nostalgia Critic review to Jurassic Park 3, and it amuses me how the conflict at the end is solved with giving back the raptor eggs, when in the book Tim tries the same thing with the baby raptor seen in the lab, only for the adults to eat it alive.

edited 1st Jul '14 9:31:52 AM by Tuckerscreator

I wasn't saying it's Rambo, I was saying the humans were badass as opposed to worthless worms fleeing from everything. Genero actually fought a bit with a raptor without any weapon at all.

Remember that opening scene of the movie? SHOOT HER!!!! SHOOT HER!!!! That poor fodder was killed because for some reason it took a bunch of armed men a few minutes to shoot a stationary target.

Also while I know nothing about guns, apparently a SPAS is not a very good Raptor-hunting weapon. Even the limited weapons Muldoon had in the book were more sensible.

edited 1st Jul '14 11:43:44 AM by Nikkolas

Scales are often harder than skin. So you need something that penetrates. Slugs might work, but if you're using regular shot shells they're not getting far enough in to do anything real.

That's why they went for rockets in the book.

A guy elsewhere thought they were using birdshot because the holes made in the glass when Grant was firing the gun were too small.

I dunno, they are gun experts and had screencaps of the glass and the round that was jammed in the gun when Grant dropped it and they went on about how dumb it all was.

EDIT:

Here ya go.

edited 1st Jul '14 11:48:36 AM by Nikkolas

From that thread:

"Look, I can already see the direction this conversation is taking, so I'm going to skip to the end:

Q: How many T-rexes would it take to make the universe explode into Money?

A: One, at sufficient velocity."

Yup. I agree with that one.

Oh yeah, I vote movie.

I wish the movie had gone into more detail about the failings behind the park. They tried really hard to create an Aesop about how the park was doomed to failure because nature will not be restrained - which countless zoos around the world prove false constantly - and were left with an unintended Aesop about how one bad egg spoils the bunch, because everything was working fine until one bad man, Dennis Nedry, made a greedy and selfish decision that ruined everything.

They briefly touch on the point from the books, that no, everything was NOT working fine before Nedry screwed up everything, but it's just lightly dusted. John Hammond gets chewed out by Dr. Satler in one brief scene that fits more with the film's theme of nature refusing to be caged than the actual point about his corner-cutting, cost-saving, and just generally terrible decisions to protect his investment being responsible for the deaths of several people. "Spared no expense!" has become a popular line of snark in my household when we watch this movie, when bad things happen for stupid reasons that could easily have been avoided if Hammond was willing to spend more money on the project.

And then Hammond gets to ride away, safe and sound with the rest of the group as if all of this wasn't entirely his fault, from beginning to end. That's one area I much prefer the book in: if anyone deserved to be eaten by Jurassic Park, it's John Hammond. I don't blame people for their mistakes, Mr. Hammond, but I do ask that they pay for them.

edited 1st Jul '14 12:25:56 PM by TobiasDrake

The problem with the movie, like I listed in my old OP, is it pays a lot of lipservice to the book but that's just not enough. The line about the lysine dependency goes nowhere and is just shoehorned in because it was in the book, the stick Trike subplot goes nowhere but that was important in the book as well...

It's like you said, the park was already a spectacular failure even before Nedry's sabotage. Dinos were breeding and escaping the island all the time. The numerous safegaurds had all failed, the monitoring/animal counting system had failed, it was just a big mess that was slowly spiraling out of control. All Nedry did was accelerate the inevitable doom.

Actually it wasn't even all Nedry's fault in the book. One of my favorite parts of teh book is that the team gets the computer systems restored after shutting down the power. Everything seems to be going okay and returning to normal with minimal damage. And then...."Auxiliary Power Low." And then Muldoon realizes that the electric fences have been off all this time and the raptors have been loose for God knows how long. Cue screaming in the distance. It's really only then that everything goes to Hell.

edited 1st Jul '14 12:35:26 PM by Nikkolas

Exactly. In trying to frame it like what they were trying to do was inherently unattainable and man should never have dared to play God, they created a situation where the more probable explanation is to just blame it all on Nedry. But it wasn't all Nedry. Jurassic Park failed because John Hammond made some of the worst decisions imaginable in the interest of cutting costs and reducing risks to his expensive animals. Jurassic Park was a disaster waiting to happen, but that was for economical reasons, not ecological ones, and certainly not simply the consequence of one asshole's sabotage.

Hell, even Nedry can be linked back to Hammond's desire to spend as little as humanly possible. In the film, Nedry has a financial argument with Hammond, where he brings up "what I bid for this job". Hammond hired him because he came cheap. The book goes on to tell us that Hammond was also trying to make the park fully automated in order to avoid having to pay salaries, and that his scientists were all hired straight out of college, because college kids are much cheaper than established scientists.

Hiring Nedry was a mistake, but even with Nedry, do you know what could have kept the entire fiasco with him shutting down the power from happening? One man with a gun standing next to the door to the vault where the DNA is kept, whose entire job is to keep people like Nedry out. Hammond's entire security team on the island is one guy with a shotgun and a thick accent that, admittedly, could cleave lesser man in half by the weight of its manliness, but still, Muldoon's accent can't be everywhere at once.

edited 1st Jul '14 12:55:39 PM by TobiasDrake

On zoos: "Zoos don't recreate nature. Zoos take the nature that already exists and modify very slightly to create holding pens for the animals. Even those minimal modifications often fail. The animals escape with regularity. But a zoo is not the model for this park. This park is attempting something more ambitious than that. Akin to building a space station on earth. Except for the air, everything about this park is meant to be isolated. The animals are never to escape. Such isolation is impossible. It simply can't be done. (p.91)"

edited 1st Jul '14 1:28:23 PM by Tuckerscreator

Malcolm has the best quotes. All my favorite lines from the book are from him.

And Book!Nedry had a real motive, he had been cheated by Hammond and forced to work on this system and its gigantic list of bugs all on his own. If he tried to back out of it, they'd lawyer him into bankruptcy. He wasn't just trying to make a buck by stealing the embryos, he was trying to save his livelihood from what John Hammond had done to it.

Also people like to go on and on about hos Movie!Hammond is "better" than Book!Hammond. True, the latter is a sociopath but the first one isn't any better. He flat-out ignored the warnings of his designated "park warden", warnings which were founded on the fact the raptors had killed God knows how many workers. Plus, before Jurassic Park, who even knew what a Velociraptor was? Fucking nobody. There'd be no demand to see them and thus absolutely no incentive to keep these highly dangerous animals alive. Movie!Hammond is just as irresponsible as Book!Hammond but for different reasons.

edited 1st Jul '14 1:57:52 PM by Nikkolas

I think Book!Hammond was more a selfish jerk while Movie!Hammond was just a bumbling idiot, but even idiocy can kill people, especially when it involves hungry dinosaurs.

Most bumbling idiots don't get to make money, though, and if they inherit it or luck on it they tend to lose it very quickly.