YMMV / Jurassic Park (1990)

• Adaptation Displacement: Many of the darker implications people detected in Spielberg's whimsical first film, like Hammond's childish idealism, the ethics of corporate bioengineering, and altering the dinosaurs' DNA to be more docile, were already covered (fairly negatively) in the original novel. The 4th film even got praised for recycling one of Dr. Wu's speeches, about dinosaurs as engineered simulacra bred for entertainment, twenty-five years after the novel was published like it was some sort of revelation about the Jurassic Park concept.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • The colour-changing raptor. It seems like foreshadowing, but it doesn't lead to anything or get mentioned again.
  • Earlier in the novel, a giant dragonfly (presumably Meganeura) appears very briefly. Its appearance raises a lot of questions, such as how it could possibly have been cloned using the method stated in the book (Meganeura lived a very long time before mosquitoes, or even amber, were a thing), why there's a random Paleozoic animal in an otherwise Mesozoic-themed park, and how it survives in the modern atmospheric composition.
  • In chapter 12, we're told that to raise investment for building the park, Hammond had InGen create a full-grown elephant the size of a cat. While it does foreshadow the cost-cutting and morally questionable methods Hammond uses to get the final product, the idea of the elephant itself is completely inconsequential to the story, never gets mentioned again anywhere in the novel (or the franchise at all), and is just bizarre in a story about genetically reanimating dinosaurs.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Hammond asserts that he would never work in a practical field like medicine because he’d be forced to lower the price tag to make them affordable for the average person. This sounds oddly overoptimistic considering many health industries since have made profits forcing up the prices of essential medicines like insulin and vaccines.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Early in the novel Grant says that Procompsognathus is an obscure dinosaur species that the average person would probably have never heard of. The book and the later movies would help boost compies to stock dinosaur status.
  • It's mentioned shortly after the group encounters their first living dinosaurs that no mummified dinosaur remains had ever been discovered. Fast-forward to 2011, when Canadian miners unearthed the Nodosaurid Borealipelta that had been fossilized so perfectly that it was essentially mummified.
• It Was His Sled: Nedry is The Mole. The novel tries to make this a twist by not revealing the name of the person who met with Dodgson until much later in the book, but the film adaptation which popularized the franchise doesn't even bother (probably because it's a lot easier to hide a character's identity in writing than when acted out in a movie), retroactively spoiling the reveal.
• Once Original, Now Common: The books' constant discussion of the robustness of dinosaurs and the purpose and intricacies of DNA may seem excessive nowadays, but it's easy to forget that these only became common knowledge outside of scientific circles as a result of the books.
• The Scrappy: Lex Murphy for being The Load, complaining constantly, and belittling her brother's enthusiasm for the dinosaurs.
• Squick: Arguably the biggest change from the novels to the films, apart from Hammond's character, is the level of gore, which, in the books, borders on absurd. Those only familiar with Nedry's haha funny death in the film will get a nasty surprise when they reach that point in the novel, and afterward when his corpse is found. Another character, Dr. Wu, is ripped open by a raptor while still alive, feebly trying to fight it.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The Sequel Hook about the dinosaurs who have somehow escaped Isla Nublar and are going on a reign in terror across Costa Rica. Crichton abandoned this when he wrote The Lost World, having Marty briefly mention them being wiped out, and the filmmakers of the sequel movies contented themselves with the characters going back to the islands.
  • Becomes Hilarious in Hindsight when Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom adapts this exact plot point by destroying the island and having masses of dinosaurs escape onto the mainland.
• The Un-Twist:
  • In the book, Dodgson meets with his unidentified mole, who says he's going to meet Dodgson later in San José; later, Hammond picks up Nedry, and only Nedry, in San José, thus letting the reader deduce that Nedry will simply return to where he came from. The revelation of Nedry as the mole is nevertheless treated as a shock despite there being no other real suspects. It's otherwise an example of It Was His Sled—at this point in history, chances are you saw the movie before you read the book and so you'll have already known it was Nedry anyway.
  • The first part of the book attempts to keep the reader guessing as to what exactly is causing all these unexplained deaths and injuries in Costa Rica. Because of the movies, it amounts to an It Was His Sled moment since we all know it is about genetically cloned dinosaurs, though even the title and the original cover of the book give it away. And even if they somehow didn't see the film or even hear about it, it made Velociraptors famous enough that most readers would probably understand very easily what's happening when the worker in the prologue mumbles 'lo sa raptor' while it's stated that he was clearly mauled by a large animal.
• Vindicated by History: At the time the book came out, it was generally assumed that due to the sheer immensity of the DNA helix that a genome of anything would never be sequenced. However, this assumption seems to have been made by people other than computer scientists, who understood that Moore's Law was dramatically increasing the processing power, memory, and storage capacity of computers and that it really isn't that crazy an idea to let a computer run an algorithm for years on end (especially if the partial results and system state are being periodically saved, you could even turn the computer off and have it pick up where it left off when you turn it back on). Crichton questioned this assumption, and within ten years the human genome itself was one of the first mapped.

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