Adaptation Ruminations: Jurassic Park · 5:50pm Nov 10th, 2014
What is this blog?
Like a lot of folks of my generation, I am a voracious consumer of media. I’m a fan of a lot of things, many of them eclectic, from mainstream to obscure, across a variety of forms of entertainment, from books to film, stage plays to video games, comics to television, I have a strong appreciation for storytelling, as a writer and a consumer. A few weeks ago I started thinking about adaptations.
Adaptations are a huge part of the modern landscape of entertainment and have been in the DNA of filmmaking for over a century. It’s something that’s expected and is occasionally derided alongside sequels by the movie-going public. Everyone’s familiar with the old cliché of, “The book was better,” attached to any and every adapted film, regardless of quality. There’s plenty of push-back to that notion, too; I’m seeing more and more film enthusiasts holding up movies as the art they are.
This blog isn’t about which form is better. The art of adaptation is just that: an art, which accomplishes the creative alchemy of producing an independent piece of media that can both be a supplement of the original work and stand on its own as a separate entity with its own context completely removed from the original. Not all results are good, of course; there are duds on either side of the fence in adaptations, but books are not better than movies or vice versa. They are fundamentally different ways to tell a story.
At the heart of that difference is that process of transmogriphying a piece of art from one form of entertainment to another, and in this blog I’ll be talking about that process as it applies to one specific book and film, the necessary changes to translate it across platforms, where it works and where it fails, and what can be learned from it as a writer.
Before we get started, let’s set some expectations. We’ll start with reviews of the book and film as separate works, the good and the bad, and establish some working ideas about each piece on their own. Then we’ll get into both in the context of each other: the divergences between each—both the necessary and unnecessary—how each version informs the other for the better or worse, and how the differences inherent in the mediums play a part in those changes. Then we’ll wrap things up by looking at what sort of lessons can be learned from the adaptation as a writer, not necessarily from the perspective of how to go about adapting something, but when writing our own stories.
Last but not least before we start, this blog will contain spoilers. There is too much of a need to focus on nitty-gritty details to try and write something like this “spoiler free.” This is also your warning that this blog is very long. I’ve broken it up into sections and each section isn’t tremendously lengthy (around two thousand words or less), but it adds up to around eight thousand words altogether.
Alright, enough warnings, let’s get started.
Jurassic Park started its life as a 1990 novel by Michael Crichton. Before Crichton had finished work on the book, director Steven Spielberg had expressed interest in the movie rights, and in 1993 Jurassic Park would be brought to screens, starring Sam Neill, Richard Attenborough, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum. The book and movie both would be smash successes.
The Book
Jurassic Park follows a group of experts visiting Isla Nubar, an island off the coast of Costa Rica where a genetics research company called InGen has been secretly building an amusement park showcasing genetically engineered dinosaurs. The trip is made at the insistence of InGen’s investors to confirm the safety and viability of the park. While on the island, an act of corporate espionage goes terribly wrong, throwing the park into chaos, while questions are raised concerning how much control InGen really had to begin with over their creations.
Primarily a technothriller, Jurassic Park presents a cautionary tale of unchecked science, as well as an exploration of the implications of Chaos Theory within the story of the park’s downfall. From the start of the book, it is made clear to the audience how little control InGen has over the park; the first scene of the book proper concerns a dinosaur attack on a little girl that occurs on the mainland of Costa Rica. Before the story even starts, the dinosaurs have already escaped. A distinction is implied by the text of a separation between scientists; there are those who seek understanding of what’s already there, and those who seek to control the world with science, and it firmly comes down against the latter.
As the park breaks down following the programmer’s intentional sabotage during an attempt to steal genetically engineered dinosaur embryos, an illusion of resuming control is established and removed again repeatedly. The flaws in the thinking and assumptions of the park workers are poked and prodded by Ian Malcolm, a mathematician specializing in Chaos Theory who is injured in the first major dinosaur attack and spends most of the novel hopped up on morphine and slowly dying. Everything the park workers believe to be true regarding their ability to maintain the park is tested and mostly proven to be false as time goes on, while the owner of the park, John Hammond, blames those around him and refuses to see the full impact of his actions.
As a plot, Jurassic Park shines. The story is an interesting one, presenting a case for the dangers of the at-the-time new technology of genetic engineering within the framework of an amazing park that captures the imagination as a place of wonder and a terrible idea both at the same time. The series of events follow a logical path within the setting of the novel, and the ending is a satisfying one that follows the thematic core of the illusion of control all the way to a bleak conclusion.
Outside of the plot, the positives start to break down.
Prior to reading Jurassic Park and watching the film for this blog, my familiarity with Michael Crichton was limited to the film versions of both Jurassic Park and Congo, the former I hadn’t seen in around five years and the latter in around twenty, so I didn’t know what to expect going in. What I got was a good idea with lots of questionable execution.
Let’s start with the characters. Outside of Ian Malcolm and John Hammond, the two most fully-realized characters in the book—for good reason, as they serve as the cautionary tale’s angel and devil respectively—the main character we follow is Dr. Alan Grant. Grant is a paleontologist specializing in velociraptor research, who is there to give his expert opinion on the island’s operations. During the power outage caused by the disgruntled employee’s attempted theft, he and Hammond’s two grandchildren get lost inside the park. He presents an educated yet anti-technology viewpoint on the park, providing some key scientific information and accomplishing most of the quiet heroism in the book, all in dirty jeans and a Hawaiian shirt to show how ‘laid back’ he is.
He’s also about as interesting as dry toast.
It’s not really his fault, though; none of the characters are interesting. Grant is one of five or six interchangeable men on the island. We’ve got him, Ed Regis the park’s PR guy, Donald Gennaro who is representing the investment firm, John Arnold the park engineer, Dr. Harding the park veterinarian, Henry Wu the geneticist, and Robert Muldoon the game warden. I say interchangeable, because if you listed untagged dialogue for all of them you’d never be able to tell the difference. They’re all just guys, unremarkable, one-dimensional guys defined by their jobs and maybe—maybe—one character trait. Grant’s laid back (we’re told, though there’s not much evidence to support this in the text), Regis feels unappreciated, Gennaro is conflicted, Arnold smokes a lot of cigarettes, Harding is a doctor, Wu is young, and Muldoon drinks. Excited yet? Not to mention Tim and Lex, Hammond’s grandchildren, who could mostly be replaced by an alarm clock to alert nearby dinosaurs to attack without changing much of the story. Tim likes dinosaurs and knows a little bit about computers, Lex likes baseball and screaming. Ellie Sattler, the grad student paleobotanist, is apparently really hot and fades in with the rest of the cast. Dennis Nedry, the disgruntled programmer, is a fat slob who dies.
This is a problem that can be levied to the genre of the novel. As a technothriller, Jurassic Park is about the dangers of technology, and is far more concerned with the Techno aspect than anything else. Huge swaths of the text are devoted to exposition and background information. A reader is given a rundown of genetic engineering and dinosaurs throughout the story, as well as Chaos Theory and even a light amount of computer programming. The goal is to get across the sense that the thriller part is imminently achievable in the real world. These are problems that might beset a real group of engineers working to see if they can make dinosaur clones and fill a park, and the reader is to be keenly aware of the reality of the situation. This leads to a few important considerations with the work as a whole: the way the book was written, and the truth behind what was written.
For the latter, I wouldn’t claim to be an expert on either dinosaurs or genetic engineering. I’m sure there are pages and pages by others devoted to discussing the actual science in Jurassic Park, from intentional errors (velociraptors aren’t really anything like what they are in the book; the book’s creatures are closer to utahraptors which were undiscovered at the time of writing) to less intentional ones (I noticed that the computer system used motion sensors to track and count all the different species of dinosaur and I happen to know it’s still virtually impossible to teach a computer how to recognize the contents of a photo, especially circa 1990), but there are a few things to be said about the accuracy even as a layman.
The truth of the science in the book is both important, and completely unimportant at the same time. With errors, the “could happen tomorrow” aspect of the cautionary tale is damaged pretty severely. It’d be like warning everyone of the dangers of vaccines (yeah, I went there); if your warning is based on bull, your point is pretty well ruined. But, at the same time, the actual science on display is a metaphor for the cautionary tale. Jurassic Park isn’t a warning about the dangers of a company building a dinosaur theme park on an island in Costa Rica, it’s warning about the dangers of unchecked genetic engineering. At that point, the actual science is far less important. What is important is if the science that is presented—fake or not—is in support of the internal logic of the story told. Which it is.
It is quite unfortunate then how that interacts with the former idea concerning how the book was written: that if the story is simply working from a metaphorical cautionary perspective, the raw amount of exposition shoved in at every angle isn’t necessary. And there is so much exposition in Jurassic Park. Pages and pages of dialogue and narration are devoted to something or other about dinosaurs, where they have been found, how they probably behaved, the history of humanity’s understanding of them, what they might have looked like, how we might rebuild them, how similar they are to birds—the list goes on; it’s everywhere in this book. It is overflowing with exposition at every turn, and without the “it could happen tomorrow” aspect as important, it’s far, far too much.
So that covers the techno part, what about the thriller part? Well… let’s have an example of the prose.
”Ow!” Lex shouted, grabbing her hair. “He bit me!”
“He what?” Grant said.
“He bit me! He bit me!” When she took her hand away, he saw blood on her fingers.
Up in the sky, two more dactyls folded their wings, collapsing into small dark shapes that plummeted toward the ground. They made a kind of scream as they hurtled downward.
“Come on!” Grant said, grabbing their hands. They ran across the meadow, hearing the approaching scream, and he flung himself on the ground at the last moment, pulling the kids down with him, as the two dactyls whistled and squeaked past them, flapping their wings. Grant felt claws tear the shirt along his back.
(Crichton, 1990, p. 313)
Grant, Lex, and Tim are working their way across the park back to the visitor center and end up in the Aviary, which is currently delayed from opening based on how territorial and violent the pterodactyls ended up being. The danger is unknown to them as they stop briefly before they are attacked and forced to flee.
And… it isn’t scary. The prose is weak and matter of fact at best, devoid of tension with feeble descriptions. What does “a kind of scream” sound like? They collapsed into “small dark shapes”? It has some reasonably strong verbs to describe the action; grabbing, plummeted, hurtled, whistled, squeaked, flapping, and tear aren’t weak words. It’s also free of adverbs, which can’t be said about the rest of the book but is true here. The writing is utilitarian and reasonably serviceable, it’s just weak. There’s no tension here, no real sense of danger, because it’s delivered with no urgency. Gosh, giant pterodactyls are attacking, I hope everyone’s okay or something.
(Just be glad I kept this quote concise, because this is the spot in the book where the simile “like a bat” is used to describe the pterodactyls twice on the same page.)
Or how about this part, where John Hammond falls down a hill.
When it came, the roar seemed frighteningly close. Hammond spun so quickly he fell on the path, and when he looked back he thought he saw the shadow of the juvenile T-rex, moving in the foliage beside the flagstone path, moving toward him.
What was the T-rex doing here? Why was it outside the fences?
Hammond felt a flush of rage: and then he saw the Tican workman, running for his life, and Hammond took the moment to get to his feet and dash blindly into the forest on the opposite side of the path. He was plunged in darkness; he stumbled and fell, his face smashed into wet leaves and damp earth, and he staggered back to his feet, ran onward, fell again, and then ran once more. Now he was moving down a steep hillside, and he couldn’t keep his balance. He tumbled helplessly, rolling and spinning over the soft ground, before finally coming to a stop at the foot of the hill. His face splashed into shallow tepid water, which gurgled around him and ran up his nose.
(p. 428)
Here are those adverbs I was talking about, crowding everything up and weakening sentences that are already pretty shaky. But even without those, the prose is just so bland. Hammond is running for his life with such terror he charged into the unknown, barely able to stay on his feet, yet the series of actions reads like a laundry list. Well, first he fell, but then he stood up again. After that he fell, and stood, and fell, before standing one more time and falling. Isn’t this riveting?
These weaknesses are pretty wholly the problem with Jurassic Park. The prose is quite simply tedious to read. The characters are one-note and all sound the same, and when the text isn’t giving you exposition, it’s dry and lifeless. It’s a shame, too, because the idea is a great one and what happens in it should be exciting. The book is loaded with T-rex attacks, raptor attacks, intrigue, philosophical ruminations, and moments that should be tense. It’s just not delivered in a way that’s satisfying. Too much time is spent giving you background info and not enough on the characters due to a misunderstanding. The book assumes that if you know the hows, you’ll care about the situation, but fails to make you care about the whos and whys. What’s left over is a solid plot with great ideas and nothing else going for it.
The Movie
Jurassic Park, the film, also follows a group of experts brought to Isla Nubar to sign off on a theme park of engineered dinosaurs. Grant and Sattler, who are colleagues in a romantic relationship, are contacted by the kindly and visionary John Hammond, who is mostly indulging the greedy attorney, Gennaro, who brought along Ian Malcolm. When Nedry’s sabotage fails, Grant, who has a distaste for children, navigates Hammond’s grandchildren through the park as the rest of the park’s control systems get worse and worse.
The base plot of the novel is left relatively intact when brought into film. Portions of the story are truncated, a few characters combined, and the ending is changed, which will be discussed in the adaptation section, but for the most part the stories follow the same path. However, there is a difference in genres; the movie is an action thriller.
There is a slow-build through the film as the audience is introduced to characters and given the setting and premise; it’s about twenty minutes in before the viewer even sees a dinosaur, and an hour in before the first action scene. After that, the action stays in place with downtime that acts as moments for the audience to breathe, with the intensity ratcheting up as more and more systems break down, culminating in the release of the raptors. The final twenty minutes play out like a slasher film or a creature feature such as the movie Alien, with the characters running from raptors while attempting to get the power on enough to call for help.
Jurassic Park is a technical marvel, a combination of brand new computer generated effects technology and incredibly ambitious practical effects, the former being the grand scale introduction of CGI by Industrial Light and Magic that really does hold up as some of the best CGI ever put to screen, and the latter being one of the largest projects Stan Winston Studios ever took on. The action sequences look great, feel great, and sell the realness of the dinosaurs.
Additonally, the characters and acting are strong. Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcom is a sleazy mathematician rockstar who captures every scene he’s in and holds them hostage. Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond encompasses the feeling of Walt Disney, that fatherly visionary who has found magic and wants to share it with the world. Sam Neill’s Dr. Grant is a charming ass who hates kids and technology (including airplane seatbelts…?). Any character with more than two lines of dialogue feels fleshed out and real, and it adds to the tension in the action scenes, because you know who these characters are and want them to make it through… for the most part.
Unfortunately, the two kids, Joseph Mazzello’s Tim and Ariana Richards’ Lex, are nearly unbearable. For most of the film, they are walking embodiments of the worst features of children characters in cinema. Just watch the first T-rex attack.
(Spielberg, 1993, 1:04:30)
Yes, Lex, good idea, nothing says, “Eat me and my brother,” quite like a high-powered flashlight beacon. Great job.
Tim is no better, immediately set up as the annoying know-it-all kid whose job is to pester Grant, but quickly turns into unwieldy cargo as they trek across the park. Grant’s trip is rendered a video gamey escort quest with stupid AI to a T, and it’s excessively difficult to want to see the characters succeed. In that way, the movie’s slasher roots shift from Alien to Nightmare on Elm Street; you’re not rooting for the heroes to survive, you’re cheering on the monsters, hoping the cast gets eaten.
And the kids aren’t just ignorable as side characters, because the movie creates a B-plot around them. Dr. Grant’s initial dislike of children is highlighted in his first scene in the film, and is immediately tested with the introduction of Hammond’s grandchildren. By the end of the film, he has bonded with the kids and a shared smile with Dr. Sattler confirms he has reconsidered his stance on having any of his own. It adds a layer of depth to Neill’s ‘charming ass’ characterization and at least assists the audience in caring about the kids’ wellbeing, though not enough to really redeem either Tim or Lex. Part of the problem is that Grant’s dislike evaporates almost immediately once the T-rex shows up. As soon as they’re lost in the park, he’s suddenly a patient mentor, saying just what needs to be said and encouraging them along. It’s less a character arc as it is a character right angle.
The two duds of Tim and Lex are joined by thematic murkiness in dragging the movie down. Jeff Goldblum’s turn as Malcolm is wonderful and the highlight of the film, but his character is a goof. His Chaos Theorizing is presented as crackpot armchair philosophizing, half to get into Sattler’s pants, half as a punchline of “ain’t he adorably crazy?” As such, there is no core to the point of the film. Similar to the novel, there is a cautionary tale being told about trying to control nature, but it’s more a theme of the film than the central pillar of what’s going on. Instead, there is no point. Nedry wrecks the park’s systems, they struggle to get them back on, people die, they give up the park as a bad job and hightail it to safety. It becomes a series of events that happen and then the movie’s over, rather than key events leading to a true plot climax.
This is clear in the ending. Surrounded by raptors with nowhere to go, the day is saved…by the T-rex. So much for any cautionary tale about the dangers of technology; the technology saved the day! The plot takes a backseat to the action spectacle, and what we’re left with as a standalone piece is some half-formed ideas that just proceeds from point A to point B. The only part of the story that actually has a firm conclusion, and thus can really be tied to the ‘point’ of the series of events that occurs is the B-plot. So there you go. The point of the film, Jurassic Park, was to tell a story about how an accident at an amusement park made Dr. Grant realize that kids aren’t so bad.
Terrific.
The film is good; for all my issues with it, I can’t deny that the second half of it is an intense ride that has you at the edge of your seat. The tangibility of the park itself, the sense that you could step foot on the island and the dinosaurs would really be there, is commendable and does its job in selling all that action. The raptors feel real, more real than 99% of the similar threats in other films, and that can carry a lot on its own. But ultimately, the movie fails to deliver on the story. It’s got a great premise, then stuff happens, and it’s over, and the anemic attempt at lending a point about control is at odds with much of the rest of the film.
You’re left with the impression that the tourist destination Jurassic Park itself wasn’t doomed to failure, but rather just struck with bad luck, and the lingering gazes over the island as they’re leaving sells a different message: that the island might be salvageable, which almost certainly shows it doesn’t buy its own Chaos Theory lip service. So a viewer is left with an impressive achievement in filmmaking that fails to actually tell a story.
The Adaptation
With just a cursory glance at each work, we’re left with an interesting dichotomy: one work with a stellar plot, but weak mechanics, and one work with stellar mechanics, but a weak plot. This idea suggests that somewhere in the middle exists a conceptual “perfect form” of Jurassic Park with top marks in every category, just by fusing what one did right over what the other did wrong. But, of course, it’s not that simple, and that thought doesn’t acknowledge the fundamental differences in the mediums. Both works are flawed, and flawed in different ways, but correcting those flaws would still lead to two different works, one a novel and one a movie. So, let’s look at what separates those media forms from each other by discussing the translation of Jurassic Park from book to film.
The most obvious difference between the two is running time. Clocking in at 448 pages and around 130–150,000 words, the novel covers a lot of ground and action that just couldn’t fit inside a conventional film’s running time, which Spielberg’s film hits at 127 minutes. Word counts don’t really directly translate to running time, obviously; all it takes is reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which are almost identical lengths, to see that word count has only a cursory effect on how long and involved a story actually is, and Jurassic Park’s story isn’t too large. A significant quantity of its length is devoted to expository information and dialogue to fill out the techno part of the thriller package, so content cutting of actual events isn’t too bad.
The shift from technothriller to action thriller definitely assisted in choosing what to cut. The film cuts the exposition down to a lean ‘necessary information only,’ amount. Most of it is delivered at times when the scene is doing double-duty for something else; Grant terrifying the kid who derided dinosaurs as giant turkeys set up his dislike of children at the same time as it revealed important background info on velociraptors that was necessary for the finale. The explanation for the genetic engineering process was delivered by the tour ride itself, which did triple-duty in providing that information, revealing some of the scope and extent of the ‘amusement park’ aspect of the park, and revealing character through how assorted people there reacted to the ride. Overall, the film does a nice job of delivering enough information for an attentive audience member to follow the science, at least insofar as the universe of the movie.
Outside of the exposition, the movie cuts the book’s opening in Costa Rica, leaving out any and all signs that dinosaurs have made it off the island, cuts a large portion of Grant’s trek across the park, combines the characters Ed Regis and Donald Gennaro, and simplifies the actual problems that occur as the park breaks down in order to compress the story for running time.
The biggest shift comes in the central focus of the “screen time.” In the novel, the reader is treated to the science. Attention is paid toward making sure the reader understands dinosaur nature, and relies on that understanding to make the scares. The film, meanwhile, can let the dinosaurs themselves do the talking.
And the dinosaurs are impressive to behold in the film. The animatronic puppets used for close-ups are some of the best puppets ever put to film and the computer generated dinosaurs used for expressing complicated movement and long/wide shots are still pretty convincing. I personally have a chip on my shoulder over CG and despite what anyone says I can still tell the difference, but I do think it’s well done anyway. Any time you’re really looking close enough for it to matter that the dinosaurs look absolutely right, you’re looking at a puppet, and that skillful blending really sells the effects. The focus shift for the film makes sense in the medium, because in a movie you are looking at stuff, and the stuff you came to look at in Jurassic Park is the dinosaurs, and the fact that the movie sells its attraction as being really there is a huge plus in the movie’s favor.
With that shift in focus, however, some of the more important parts of the book get shunted. The story content that got cut or reduced was fairly necessary for the sake of the film’s pacing and focus, but also leads directly into damaging the aspects that ended up being the film’s weakest elements. The slow burn on the dinosaurs was a good choice to make for the creature feature soul of the film, and starting things off (at least after the raptor attack that wounded a park employee in the prologue) with a Procompsognathus biting a little girl on a beach would have damaged that buildup, but cutting it is a clear sign of the loss of the point of the story in the book. The dinosaurs had already escaped and the breakdown that happens while people were looking was just an object lesson in how little control they had from the start.
The movie overall has little concern with those messages of science reaching for the sky without considering if they should. The small amount of lip-service given to Malcolm pales in comparison to the amount of time devoted to Malcolm in the novel, but those changes weren’t made without cause; one of the reasons Goldblum’s performance is so often a fan favorite is because of how snappy and on-point it is. He embodies a crazy brilliance in the character, barely understood by those around him and easily ignored, but also the least crazy person there. And one of the biggest reasons people like him so much is because his dialogue is fast and witty. If he was loaded down with everything he said in the novel, his welcome would have been worn out very quickly.
Dialogue as a whole has a different value in movies compared to books. Lots of books have pages and pages of talking and still manage to be riveting. Even Jurassic Park, which suffers from the dialogue not having much character to it and being loaded with exposition, has several interesting and long conversations in it. Movies, on the other hand, don’t have nearly as much dialogue in them as a typical novel. Even movies that center around talking overall have less dialogue than comparable books. Dialogue just isn’t as interesting on film compared to when it’s written down; it takes too long to say and shreds the pacing to tatters.
Moving on to changes made not for time, but for other reasons, there are a few key alterations that do some heavy modifying, if on a subtle level. Most of these are encompassed under the expansion and alterations of characters in the story. Ed Regis, the cowardly and put-upon park PR manager, is rolled into Donald Gennaro, who also takes on many of the negative qualities of John Hammond. Ellie Sattler is changed from a grad student with a working relationship with Alan Grant to a Doctor on equal standing in a romantic relationship with him, and is given many of Gennaro’s later actions, as Gennaro’s role in the book lasts through to the end where his movie character dies where Ed Regis died. Tim and Lex were half-swapped, as Spielberg wanted to work with Ariana Richards, so Lex became the elder sibling. She was given some of the older characteristics of Tim in the novel, including his interest in computers, while Tim kept his interest in dinosaurs and got some of Lex’s younger characteristics.
It is unfortunate that some of Lex’s book personality still shines through, where she’s a pretty stock ‘annoying little kid,’ as outlined in the video clip earlier of Lex shining a light in a T-rex’s eyes. The computer thing was also handled clumsily…
(1:52:50)
Oh, you know this, Lex? A unix system, you say?
In the book, Tim’s interest in computers was a much more reasonable ‘vague familiarity’ with them, allowing him to bumble through the systems and get enough of an understanding of what he was doing by using common computer tricks to figure out what needed to be done. But showing that (both theoretically in the film and most certainly in the book) is boring, so it was made a fast fix with that, “I know this,” line and a throwaway line earlier where Tim called her a geek and she said she preferred to be called a hacker. It worked for keeping things fast, but it’s awful silly and doesn’t really endear either character, who are most certainly the low point of the film.
The most impactful character alteration is the change in John Hammond’s character. Hammond, in the novel, is ruthless, myopic, impatient, and mean. He serves as the devil to Malcolm’s angel and represents the worst of science’s petty, self-serving qualities that Malcolm warns against. In the movie he’s transformed into a kindly figure (helped along tremendously by being played by Santa Claus). This made him a sympathetic character and helped sell the wonder of the park itself, which in turn helped sell the dinosaurs and their attacks later on, but threw a large amount of the inner workings of the novel’s point out the window.
Next to the character, the biggest change in events is the ending. Even without the cast being saved by the T-rex, the ending was heavily changed. In the novel, they try and fail to figure out for sure how many dinosaurs got off the island, Hammond fails to learn anything from the experience and dies for it, and the island is napalmed into a smoking crater. It ends with the knowledge that all control they attempted had been for nothing and velociraptors had made it to the mainland, and the few people who had survived the ordeal were to be held indefinitely by the Costa Rican government. The movie, on the other hand, ends on a bittersweet note, lingering on the sense of wonder the park embodied. They had learned their lessons, but still could dream and contemplate what could have been. The movie is perhaps a kinder ending, but fights tooth and nail with the novel’s message.
Most of these things are small changes on their own, but they add up, and these sensible changes in focus and content for the benefit of the piece as a film lead to an overall weakening of the point the story was making in its novel form. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; as different pieces, both can very well have different points. Some of the best films ever made were adaptations, and some of those adaptations played incredibly fast and loose with the source material to the point where the stories being told had more in common with unrelated books or movies than they did with the actual novels they were based on. Examples include Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Doctor Strangelove, which both diverge heavily from their source material to the point of, in the case of the former angering the writer of the source material, and in the case of the latter completely changing genres. Making a different point isn’t a problem, and the change in focus and content could have easily led to a different story.
Jurassic Park, however, didn’t build to a new point, despite its changes. It kept the point of the novel, but failed to make it properly because too many of the changes piled up against it, some lessening the impact, others working in opposition to it, and in the end reducing it to a half-hearted theme in the movie. In this instance, remaining faithful to the novel hurt the movie. The thought that there is a theoretical ‘perfect Jurassic Park’ fusing the good over the bad really loses its tangibility right there. The movie would have been better suited to leave the themes of control behind for what it was actually wanting to show on screen and found a different point to make, or at least approached the point from a different angle.
And while some of the changes made for the movie would have suited the book—most notably stronger characters—too much of the goal just doesn’t work in words. The book has plenty of dinosaur action scenes, more than the movie does by far, but turning the book into a creature feature like the movie would have been disastrous for what works in it. The reality is that too many of the book’s problems come down to weak writing. The novel has plenty of time already to explore the characters without changing anything and certainly without taking cues from the characters in the film, the existing characters just needed more substance than what the audience got, with stronger character-driven dialogue. The novel has plenty of time for intense and riveting action or philosophy scenes, it just needed better prose.
Ultimately, the adaptation process for Jurassic Park was a successful one. The movie knew what it was and what it needed to hold an audience and made changes to fulfill those goals. Without the space and ability to use all the dialogue that goes into a novel, it brought the characters into sharper focus with better personality, partially aided by its casting, and it showcased state-of-the-art technology in its presentation that still holds up, producing a flashy piece that, while certainly not brainless, is on the thin side. A fun popcorn summer blockbuster that isn’t afraid to at least suggest things for the audience to think about. …Provided they’re willing to overlook the kids.
Both works have strengths and flaws, and it’s clear how they both managed to capture their audience’s imaginations. Through completely different means, they ask the viewer to buy a world with real-life, genetically engineered dinosaurs, and they manage the task. Despite their problems, it’s easy to see why so many people love them both.
Addendum: Meta Thoughts
Interestingly, I think part of what hurts the book is actually the existence of the movie. Not because the movie is better or anything like that, but rather by what the movie did to pop-culture. Dinosaurs have always been a fascination to some children since we first discovered them as a species, but western culture after Jurassic Park premiered in the cinema had a marked difference compared to itself from before. There continued to be a few dinosaur enthusiasts and lots of people who didn’t care much as there was before, and I don’t think it generated a higher number of the former (though I would never be surprised to hear every single university student studying paleontology cite Jurassic Park as what inspired them to pursue their degrees), but I do think it raised the base level pop culture knowledge about dinosaurs. It was such an event, such a thing to see and hear about, that even if a person failed to enjoy or care about it, they still knew more about dinosaurs than the average person from before its release.
This bogged down a lot of the book with exposition that truly became needless. Nobody needs to have ‘raptor’ defined for them anymore. Yet the book does so, because at the time of its writing it couldn’t make the assumption that raptors were common knowledge, part of our pop culture vocabulary. I tried to judge the book from the perspective of no common knowledge, but that proved difficult at times and really made the overabundance of exposition problem stand out.
On Writing
So, we’ve covered a lot of ground going through these two pieces, looking at them and the process of turning one into another. As a writer, there are lessons to be learned from practically anything, and this exercise in analysis is no different.
The thing that struck me the most while I was actually watching the film (for reference, I read the book before watching the movie again) was the delivery of exposition. The exposition really bogged me down in the reading of the book, and the thought as the movie went on was that much of the exposition had been cut, but a surprising amount of it was still in there. This made me pay attention to how the exposition was presented, and think about why so much of it faded into the woodwork of the movie.
The book is clumsy in delivering it a lot of the time, to say the least. I remember very early on furrowing my brow at a conversation between Gennaro and one of his bosses at the law-firm, where one of them referred to San Jose as the capital of Costa Rica to the other, and all I could think was, “These people have millions of dollars invested on an island in Costa Rica, why on earth would they ever need to remind each other that San Jose is the capital?” So much of the book is filled with clunky information drops that make characters come off less human just from the amount of unprompted knowledge they drop out of their mouths for no discernible reason.
The movie, though, wraps most of its narration up in double-duty scenes. The viewer is getting other pieces of the story or characters at the same time as they are given what they need to know—and the audience both needs but also wants to know it because it’s what the characters need and want to know. And even if the characters don’t know that they need or want to know it, it’s serving a purpose by showing something else.; we delight in finding out how velociraptors hunt and kill because it’s being used as a weapon to scare an obnoxious kid.
Even though this is in a movie rather than a book, there are direct lessons to be taken to heart as a writer. I highly encourage anyone who is interested in learning how to seamlessly insert exposition to watch Jurassic Park. A few scenes to pay special attention to:
(0:23:46)
Here we have the start of the tour and the largest, most blatant exposition dump in the film. A lot of background info is dropped, covering a fairly in depth (layman) explanation of the genetic engineering necessary to sell the science in the film. It’s easy to sort of dismiss the scene since it is so blatant, literally showing an informative video explaining the process, but pay attention to the reactions and conversations of the different characters. Yes, the audience of the film is watching the video along with the cast, but the audience is also watching the cast. We see the scope and professional polish of the park itself, with its semi-interactive intro of Hammond talking to Hammond, and the spinning seats with guard bar. We get a sense of how the park is ‘almost done’ as Hammond flubs his role in the intro and explains that the video’s sound effects are temporary stand-ins. We get additional background info in the form of the extraneous conversations between Malcolm, Grant, and Sattler, highlighting the fact that recovering viable DNA is such a problem. We see their individual reactions to this video and get a better sense of them; this is still early in the film and it’s still establishing personalities.
(0:46:29)
Here we have another sizeable info dump as Malcolm explains the basis of Chaos Theory to Sattler. It is, of course, a layman explanation that doesn’t go into an intense amount of detail, but it serves its purpose in providing as much information as is needed within the film for the audience to understand when it’s brought up. And within the context of the movie, you hardly even notice you’re being fed information; the entirety of the speech is draped in thick, sleazy, funny flirting. We get the vague love triangle (which Grant hilariously wants absolutely no part of), and a real sense of Malcolm’s character in this scene, to the point where the Chaos Theory information is the framing device for that stuff. The intention of the scene becomes the flirting, Sattler’s lack of reaction one way or the other to it, and Grant’s grumpy dismissal of the whole thing. And yet, all that information about Chaos Theory is delivered to the audience anyway. The rest of the movie does an excellent job of blending in background info and exposition in more subtle ways, too. The book itself could have benefitted from working in its exposition in ways the movie did.
Exposition is often derided by readers, based on how it’s viewed, because exposition is an unsung hero of writing. When it’s bad, it drags your experience down, but when it’s good, you don’t even notice it’s there. It takes a subtle touch, and Jurassic Park is a film that knows what it’s doing. There is a lot of info to dispense (as an add-on to my meta thoughts, the film didn’t have the benefit of the increased pop culture knowledge, either; it was the progenitor of it, so it was working from the same layman place as the book), and it does so admirably, without hitting the audience over the head with it and slowing down the pace. Something to aspire to in writing anything.
The second thing that really caught my attention is how the film is a good example of how NOT to write child characters. The book, for all its flaws on characterization, has less annoying children in it than the movie does. Part of that might just be that you don’t have to actually hear either kid be obnoxious, but that’s not looking at the whole picture. In the book, Tim is rather competent and proactive, while still not being a mini-adult like so many bad child characters. Lex is pretty dire, but she’s also really young and you get a sense of that quality in small children that makes one want to protect them, as a reader and also from Grant. In switching roles a little for the movie, it fails to make Lex competent in the same way as Tim in the book, and fails to make Tim as in need of protection.
Instead, you get two bad characters, who do stupid things while not feeling like it’s earned or understandable, as a result of Lex still having the childish aspects of her book self and Tim still having the stoicism and mature edge of his book self. Part of why Lex was changed outside of the specific actress Spielberg wanted for the role was to have stronger female characters in the film, a decision that works well with the changes to Sattler, but falls flat with Lex. We get cartoony kids as a result, ones who fall into so many child character pitfalls in fiction.
They also made me think of Newt in Aliens. Newt, as a whole, falls into a similar role as either Tim or Lex, but is so much stronger, so much better, so much more standable than either of them. I’d suggest watching Jurassic Park, and then watching Aliens, and contrasting Tim and Lex to Newt. Writing kids is tough, since as we writers get older we start to forget what being a kid is really like. Jurassic Park isn’t going to do a good job teaching someone how to write child characters, either the film or the book, but it’s a great example of how badly written ones go wrong. Especially Lex.
There are some other possible lessons to pull from these works, such as theming in fiction and how it can be damaged from elements that work in opposition, but they are nebulous at best in these specific cases. That sort of discussion is best suited to the armchair criticism I spent so much time doing already, rather than pulling specific advice, but it is worth looking at. Watch the movie and think about the actual story; separate yourself from the action and consider the series of events unfolding on screen. Think about the themes it’s presenting and what it gives more weight and focus to, and think about how those themes are treated by other events.
Well, that wraps up this analysis of Jurassic Park and its adaptation. What did you think of Jurassic Park, either book, film, or both? Disagree with my opinions? Feel that one of the sequels encapsulates something in the book better, worse, or even throws the book out the window, compared to the first film? Let me know!
Works Cited
Crichton, M. (1990). Jurassic Park. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.
Jurassic Park [Motion picture on DVD]. (1993). United States: Universal Studios.
Whew, that was a long one. Thanks so much for sticking around! I always appreciate everyone who bothers to read what I have to say.
This project is something I’ve been kicking around for a while. It’s a nice combination of interests I have and was a fun framework to stretch some critic muscles and approach some writing advice. I’ve been thinking about maybe making a series of blogs out of this concept, covering other adaptations; I read pretty constantly as it is and this sort of thing interests me. I enjoyed writing this, but I have no idea if this wasn’t just the most boring thing in the world to read, and this took a lot of time to put together. Were I to make this a series, it would be an infrequent one.
So anyway, what did you think? Would you like to see more of these sorts of blogs? I’d love to hear thoughts, both on the content of this blog and on the prospect of more.
Silly Bats! You do realize it is the concept and execution of a story that makes it popular and enjoyable more so than the prose itself, right? Most people are picturing the story in their head when they read it, not paying attention to the words themselves so much as the little movie they're imagining. As long as the flow is solid and the grammar correct, most people will overlook style and strength for the sake of the story itself.
You as a writer are no longer capable of not noticing such things. That is the curse for both writers and critics alike. You and I will never read a story again without seeing every flaw, every subtle weakness the story can present. The truth is, every novel ever written was made of the words of men. There will be flaws no matter how you look at it.
Also tl;dr.
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Just because most people don't pay attention to it doesn't mean it isn't important, and the weaknesses in the prose are not just "writer nitpicks." I did say in the blog that I understand why people like the book and film both, despite the flaws, but that doesn't mean the flaws aren't there or that people who aren't necessarily writers don't notice them. Yes, lots of people don't notice prose as they read it—unless it gets in the way, which I will argue is definitely the case with Jurassic Park for anyone with a reading level sufficiently over grade 9. And not only that, someone could like something as a whole while still finding portions of it boring or bad.
That and literary analysis isn't much concerned with the idea of, "If people like it as a whole, there's no reason to talk about it." That reason means it's more relevant to talk about. It's art that had an impact on people, and it's worth looking at critically, both as a viewer and as an artist.
2586361 I actually agree with you there. While a lot of people may eat up poorly written drivel like '50 Shades of Grey', that doesn't make said novels any less of an example of poor writing. Jurassic Park is objectively terrible in this regard, and this weakness is doing nothing but holding back some of its strongest points. While it did achieve a certain level of popularity, this was because of both the movie adaptation and the crowd of people who cannot read better works. Had this been more properly organized and thought out, I'm fairly sure it would've been a much stronger story.
There is one thing you're forgetting though; most of the people reading published novels are either doing so as students in a school or as a select few among a burgeoning population. Most of the target audience for such science fiction is intended for a group of people of whom the majority cannot even read better writing if they wanted to. To put it simply, most people are either too stupid or too apathetic to learn what objectively 'good' and 'bad' writing is.
The same is true for fimfiction, especially in its earlier days when people like you didn't bother telling users otherwise. Quite a few of the 'popular' stories on this site aren't even properly edited, let alone planned. Stories like The Arrival of Ford Mustang are simply aweful from the perspective of anyone with a lick of writing sense, but it's still significantly more popular than a lot of the better works on this site.
I've encountered this myself with my own works. While I have not been nearly as prolific as most of the other writers with my number of followers, I have been featured several times and I've noticed a trend where my better works are overlooked for the sake of self-aggrandizing pieces of pretentious shit.
The bottom line is quite simple, really. Most people are looking for escapist drivel, not thought provoking philosophy. A steamy clopfic with almost no story will usually fare better than a piece of heartfelt prose. It might drive you insane if writing the latter is your intent, but that's just how the world works. :/
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None of that precludes the notion of talking about these things critically and pulling lessons from them. I frankly don't care that the majority of people who read something or other aren't going to think about it; the majority of people who see a movie or view a painting or experience any sort of art aren't going to think about it. But some people do, and some people want to, and some people find thinking and talking about art interesting. It's also something I feel is important as an artist. So what if not everyone cares or is willing to look? Criticism as a practice doesn't care, and it also isn't trying to set standards on what is or isn't good art or a worthwhile use of someone's time. I may not have liked either Jurassic Park iteration, but I do not think it is negative in any way that others do like it, and I'm not suggesting that people need to grow up or boycott it or anything like that. This is just about taking a look below the hood at art, coming to conclusions, and extrapolating further ideas and lessons from there.
>not MLA citations
hugelolcdn.com/i700/43091.jpg
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I grew up on APA and I like how they look better, I'm sorry!
2586413 I'm sorry, do I sound like I'm attacking your criticism? That was never my intention, so I apologize if I have at all come across that way. No, I'm simply trying to point out that there is more to a story than its prose and that you should take that into at least as much consideration when you judge a story critically. While Jurassic park weakened itself with its own writing, it was still quite a strong story for its own time and set the bar for many later works of fiction.
The story visited a concept of considering consequences before action in a time when the world was just starting to advance beyond itself. This is no less true today, and Jurassic Park has led many other stories to explore the same philosophy. While the writing itself didn't do the concept justice, the execution and delivery of the story was spot on.
The moral wasn't stated until almost halfway through the film (and around the same point in the novel, if I recal), after all the accomplishments that mankind could achieve were already displayed. The moral that 'Mankind has become so fast at doing a thing that they haven't had the time to consider if they should' was then stated. That philosophy was then emphasized with the second half of the story as those consequences displayed themselves. That is, quite simply, good storytelling.
The details are not lost here, either. The moments with the raptors, the hunts, and the desperation felt emphasized the moral perfectly. The writer didn't let everyone escape without scars and some of the likable characters died in a manner that would almost certainly suit the situation, again emphasizing the point.
If you looked at this story only for the sake of the writing alone, you will miss what was good about the story in the first place. I'm not saying that you shouldn't judge a story's flaws, just that you should also take into consideration its strengths as well. For me, Jurassic Park held more merrit than weakness. Perhaps this is different for you, and I respect that. I just ask that you look at it with an eye for the whole picture, not just part.
I found this to be a very interesting read, so it's a bit of a shame that I'm only vaguely familiar with the book and the movie. One of the things that did strike me in regards to the book was its similarity to a sci-fi piece in our very own fandom: Friendship is Optimal. I love the ideas presented in that story, and it mirrors Jurassic Park in that it presents a case for the dangers of developing AI technology. However, while I don't quite have an eye for expository dialogue (unless it's really, really awful), I did notice how weak and interchangeable the characters were in the story. Do you think sci-fi/technothrillers fall into this trap more often than other genres, or that widely lauded stories of this genre are more likely to overcome such a weakness?
If this became a series, I'd happily read each entry.
Huh, interesting. It's been a while since I've seen Jurassic Park, and I never read the original book, but in retrospect I think you have a point on the muddled expression of theme through plot. But that's probably a fairly natural result of Spielburgian wonder not playing well with a more grim message about the dangers of playing God. As you say, it likely would have been better served to have the movie clearly go for its own messages.
I'd definitely be interested in reading more of these!
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I, uh... Um, I went into a lot of detail about how good the plot of the book was in this blog. Like, a lot. This is one of the first things I said about the plot of the book:
Further, a lot of what I had to say about the movie and the process of adaptation was coming from the perspective of how great the plot of the book is and how the movie fails to match it in a lot of ways. I never claimed the plot was bad, far from it. The book's plot is sharp as a blade.
I must say, this was an enjoyable and intriguing look at Jurassic Park, book and movie.
I actually read the book a long time after seeing the movie for the first (dozen) time(s), and noticed those differences, though at the time I didn't know enough of literature to understand them.
A suggestion for a future look at this: The Abyss, movie and novelization. That ought to be an interesting one to look at, especially once you learn how both were created.
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I think it's an issue of "right tool for the job" sort of stuff. Technothrillers as a genre are concerned with getting the science and scares out to the audience and less concerned with characterization, just as a matter of course in the types of stories told in the genre. It's the same sort of thing as saying an action story is concerned with showing exciting stuff happening, or a romance story is concerned with showing characters believably in a relationship, and thus might not be as well suited to doing other things. For an example, the Harry Potter books are fantasy adventure mysteries, and the focus and scope of the stories in them is well suited for telling stuff directly related to those genres, BUT has weaknesses in areas not covered by those genres (such as the sort of feeble romance in the series). It's not just that Rowling wasn't good at writing some things (which may or may not be true; that's debatable) it's that the story itself was less concerned with those elements than it was with stuff directly related to the genres.
Technothrillers are less suited to being character pieces. That doesn't mean they can't be, it just means that if your goal is to read something that's really character driven, technothrillers are the "wrong tool for the job." Someone with a lot of skill and finesse can manage to hammer in a nail with a screw-driver, but you're going to see more consistently better results of nail-driving if you're looking for stories that used hammers.
2586457 Gah! That's what I hate about tl;dr blogs; you get lost in them.
You spent so much time pointing out all the flaws that I forgot that you even mentioned the merits. Forgive me my silliness, oh Bats. 
I haven't watched either movie in years, though I remember borrowing a second VCR so I could splice together my own "director's cut" of Aliens using the standard rental footage and the extended version which only appeared on TV (at the time).
Newt was trapped in the ventilation ducts and surrounded by xenomorphs for 20+ days, after having witnessed the deaths of everyone she knew. It's believable that she'd be stronger, tougher, more jaded by the time the Marines get to her, which is where we first encounter her. Only a harder Newt could have survived; if she'd been helpless or in shock she'd have died far earlier. We're not told (in the movie) whether she did anything stupid in the first days of the alien attacks. Contrast that with movie Lex, a suburbanite kid who has likely never seen anything more troubling than a Disney death. I can believe she'd freeze up or make poor decisions in the first hours of a dinosaur disaster.
What would Lex have looked like in movies if Jurassic Park 1.5 had her character bio read, "shellshocked preteen female, lone survivor of an island facility wiped out by dinosaur predators, survived alone by hiding and foraging for a month"?
I know you cited the movie as hurting the book in terms of the exposition, but I can't help but wonder if the movie helps the book with its flat action and characters. After all, anyone reading the book after seeing the movie will have a much more vivid picture of the characters, dinosaurs, and setting, so for those people the book might be "Jurassic Park: The Movie: Extended Edition (Now with a plot that makes sense!)"
Which is frankly something that we see a lot in fanfic-- a lot of fanfic characters are much flater than book characters would be, if you look at them, but we fill in the blanks as long as there's nothing blatantly OOC and the occasional nod to the canon character.
I've never read the book, but it's just a thought.
PS: Do Interview With the Vampire. It's always fun to see reviewer's slow decent into madness when tackling Anne Rice's prose.
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I totally agree with you that Newt is the physically and mentally stronger character, and—total fault on my part—I confused the language from that concept with the idea of a well-written character. It's not just the fact that Newt is a more battle-hardened character than Lex, it's that she's an all around better, more believable character in a similar vein of 'competent child that needs protection' as Lex. Lex making mistakes and being scared isn't the issue, it's the way the movie handles those aspects in an unpleasant, cartoony, and unsatisfying way.
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It might certainly be that way for some people; I know that even with the distance of several years since seeing the movie I was picturing the actors from the movie in the book roles and hearing their voices for the dialogue. However, the characters are altered enough from book to movie that I don't think it could be said that it was consistently improved by the movie. Grant, Sattler, Malcolm, and Nedry were perhaps heightened by the movie, but everyone else was changed enough that the movie roles end up being poor fits for picturing the characters. I also think the characterization was thin enough across the board to continue to be a problem, even when bolstered a touch by the film.
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This may be the longest blog I have see on this site, at the very least in recent memory.
For me going back to a book for a reread after seeing a movie adaptation it usually isn't the humans that are visually imposed upon my reading but the setting and non-human elements. I may be strange but when I read stories the humans (thinking beings in general) are usually nebulous clouds of thoughts without clearly defined form that only come into focus when the story calls attention to it. It is a rather strange 3rd person multiple 1st person hybrid that I had never really given much thought to until you brought this up.
Also Jurassic Park = That T-Rex head = Bones =
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I read the Harry Potter books before seeing any of the movies, though I'd seen images around the net, and of course I had the dust jackets to go on. I had a mental picture of the characters and their voices, and I could play out each scene as a mini-movie as I read it (which is how I read everything). Same for LOTR. After I'd seen the movies, my mental character mockups got revised to match their movie versions but I kept both in mind. I wanted the crossover, the visual representation, even if I had to revise my own imagining of every scene. I could splice them together into a mental "director's cut" and use the movie's images to recreate book scenes that didn't make it to film. I use the movie to flesh out the book and vice versa.
My wife generally wants one or the other: if she's seen the movie, the book doesn't interest her; same goes for Walking Dead, which we watch religiously but whose comic books she couldn't be bothered with. She's read every Terry Pratchett Discworld book and story but refuses to watch any of the screen adaptations. To her, it's a settled matter.
Yes. Yes yes yes. More. More of this please. The process of adaptation is always interesting to me, and it's clear that you have similarly interesting thoughts on the subject. I would love to see more of these.
I really liked this blog post and would be interested in seeing more things like it.
That being said, I think you missed a rather large issue, which is namely that the plot of the book doesn't really work. Michael Crichton's purpose in writing the book was to talk about how genetic engineering was dangerous and how immoral people who didn't think things through would put us all in danger. His choice of how to do this was to write a book about making an amusement park full of dinosaurs and then told us that this is a bad idea.
How many people got past "an amusement park full of dinosaurs"?
That's really the problem with the book; the theme of "science is dangerous and bad" doesn't work because he shows us how AWESOME it is. An amusement park full of dinosaurs is intrinsically really cool and desireable to people - everyone loves the idea. And the idea that it is actually all that dangerous is a bit silly - dinosaurs, even if they got loose, would be more of a nuisance than an existential threat. Humans are extremely good at killing animals, and the only reason that the dinosaurs posed any threat at all was because they were facing off against humans with sharply limited resources. Killing the dinosaurs who got to the mainland would be a pain, but it is eminently doable, and they wouldn't pose any sort of real, major threat to mankind - they might kill a few people, but whatever. Thus, not only does he undermine the thrust of the plot by making a poor choice in what to write about, but he also makes a poor choice in that the cost of the hubris is very low. Cool amusement park plus low stakes of failure doesn't really make for a compelling moral, and indeed, it is no surprise that a lot of people walked away thinking about how awesome it would be to go to such a place in real life - or to learn how to build it.
If you wanted to advertise how awesome genetic engineering is, "an amusement park full of dinosaurs" is pretty much the best selling point ever, especially to little kids who become inspired to go into the field. I think that Jurassic Park resulted in a lot of people becoming interested in the field, and drew a lot more attention to it - and we all know that if anyone could make such a park, they would have sent him tickets.
Thus the choice of the movie to downplay the idea of "this is inherently a bad idea" makes a lot more sense. Indeed, some of the things they do with Malcolm show this off - Malcolm, for all his talk of hubris by Hammond and his scientists, is full of hubris himself. He's arrogant and described as a rock-star scientist, and he got himself hurt by unnecessarily trying to play the hero with the T-Rex.
The movie, by not really trying to have a point, does what it wants to do and does it well without letting the original attempt at a plot with some sort of point getting in the way. It may not be the best way to tell a story, but it was really trying to entertain, awe, and impress the audience, and I think it did that quite well.
Crichton, on the other hand, totally failed in his goal of presenting Jurassic Park as a bad thing.
I'm sure the giant piles of money was some comfort.
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There's one central problem with this way of thinking, and indeed that way of thinking is covered in the book. You say the dinosaurs will be easily killed and contained by humanity. That is a reasonable assumption to make, based on your prior knowledge of human tenacity and probably a healthy dose of knowledge about dinosaurs, but one of the central stances of the novel is that we know absolutely nothing about these creatures, or how they will actually interact with our current ecosystem. It's fine to make those assumptions, as they are reasonable, but it was a constant theme in the novel that everything that was assumed about the dinosaurs was wrong. So, within the context of the novel itself, saying that the dinosaurs will be easily hunted down and contained, or at least marginalized to the point where they have the same impact as any other sort of large predator species that could kill a human like crocodiles or something, is making the same mistake as Hammond made.
And yes, 'theme park with dinosaurs' sounds utterly awesome, but that's the point. It needs to sound utterly awesome so that the scientists and businessmen would run off half-cocked and do it off the books and as quickly as they could manage because they saw dollar signs and had an assumed level of fundamental control and mastery over nature. The book suggests that these assumptions are fabrications, illusions, and we have no real control over anything.
I'm not saying it's factual, but within the context of the created universe of Jurassic Park, it is internally consistent.
2588256 Heh... Heh heh...
TD?
I want you to imagine what'd happen to the Costa Rican Rainforest when it's overrun by the most invasive -- and nearly unopposed -- species it's ever encountered.
Flocks of Compsognathus and various Raptoroids. Killing everything. Everywhere.
Fuck what Dinosaurs would do to the humans (and fuck the big species they're irrelevant), they'd destroy entire ecosystems.
This was an interesting analysis, and it's definitely made me think about the differences in how films and books (should) be written (esp. with regard to dialogue). I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on other adaptations as well.
Also holy shit this was long for a horse blog, respect for staying motivated.