Always loved how the novel and the movie are both solid entertainment in their own right and the combination gives us a much richer experience (think of them as the same event in two parallel universes).
In the minority here, I know. But I would love for them to make a Rated-R Jurassic Park Remake that followed the novel so that way we had both versions of the Jurassic Park concept.
I always thought that if, instead of Spielberg, if James Cameron had adapted and directed Jurassic Park in the early 90s (right after he had come off the success of T2), we would have ended up with an R-rated, more-like-the-book version of the movie. In many ways, I think the JP book is more like Aliens (1986), tonally, than the Spielberg movie. (I still love the movie as it is, but it’s a fun thing to think about.)
With you on that. And as Ghost Chaser said a mini series would work well. (In the right hands of course). One reboot I'd be more than happy to see rather than more Jurassic World. The book is so rich in story a loyal adaptation could be amazing.
One of the things I wish you would have brought up, that a lot of people miss, is the the running theme of Hubris Within The Expert and the Falsehood of Control. By this I mean nearly every character, save one, at one point or another believe they know what to do, that they have control and see things better than everyone else... and then they are proven wrong. disastrously wrong. And they are blind to this fault in themselves even as they mock others for having it. Spoilers incoming. You have your obvious ones: John Hammond dies after believing that not only is the park under control but he has backup plans to make new parks and that it was everyone else's fault that things failed, not him. And then he foolishly runs into the jungle, twists his ankle. drinks water when he has been told not to from a stream, and dies from the Compies. John Arnold celebrates that he has gotten Jurassic Park back up and running... and then a literal clock counts down from 30 seconds to signal their doom. Muldoon bemoans no one bothering to power up the radios, that no one checked the batteries... then forgets to check the batteries on the laser scope of his weapon and nearly gets him and Gennaro killed. Nedry believes his plan is easy, that he has it all thought out, no problem. He even talks about how he knows all the backways through the computer, which ways to go... except he ddin't, as Arnold discovers everything he did because of a simple mistake... because the computer thought Nedry was lost so let him do what he wanted. Just as Nedry gets lost in the park and dies. Wu is thrilled that he created a breeding dinosaur... and dies SECONDS later. These are the obvious ones. But our heroes, the people that are the 'good guys'... they ALSO have hubris and a false sense of control. Let's look at two that people point to as being the smartest of the book: Ian Malcolm and Ellie Sattler. Ian talks about respect for the natural world and that one shouldn't underestimate it. Yet when he witnesses the raptors attack the fence his first thought is to say they are stupid. A workman, who doesn't even get a name, looks down on Ian for that. Ian then again insults the intelligence of the dinosaurs when he states the T-Rex was a clumsy attacker who really wasn't in the mood to kill him and it wasn't that big of a deal. A few chapters later the Rex is activately stalking Grant and the kids, even though it has fed and isn't hungry anymore, to the point that it actually lies in ambush to catch them. Ian mocks people for getting too emotional... then flees the car and that results in his death. Ellie is another one. Ellie decides to distract the raptors to help Alan Grant. She asks how smart the raptors are and Muldoon tells her they are VERY smart. But when Muldoon and then Wu tell her to come inside, that she is in danger... she blows them off. "I know what I'm doing" "I've got this under control" she tells each of them. And then a raptor leaps down and kills Wu and Ellie nearly dies herself. She thought she was an expert, that she knew better than others... hubris got one man killed because of her thinking like that.
*Incoming obvious comment about hubris of conspiracy theorists of the internet and how their collective Dunning- Kruger- fuled distrust in science led to preventable deaths.*
Well, Ian didn't die, but everything else is mostly correct. Ellie is also overconfident of her cheerful luck, which almost gets her killed when Wu is killed and she has to outmaneuver the raptors.
Actually he did die. The 2nd book I see mostly as a bonus round than a proper sequel XD. Not bad a read mind you, but the 1st one was close to lightning in a bottle.
knowing nedrys backstory makes him a way more sympathetic character than the cartoon villain he was in the movie, and hammond doesnt seem like the absent minded billionaire grandpa with a dream anymore.
I think when Spielberg saw or read the "Flea Circus" monologue, plus Richard Attenborough's warmth and charm made it difficult to hate Hammond. If it's any consolation, Hammond gets his wake-up call when Ellie reminds him their loved ones are lost in a theme park where man-eating dinosaurs are loose, and just the insane amount of adult fear he's having in knowing his grandchildren are in danger.
I couldn’t sympathize with Nedry in the book, and allow me to explain why. It was my understanding that when Hammond came to Nedry for wanting a computer system, they had already negotiated the price for this theme park (that’s all Nedry knew it was at the time), and then later he realizes it’s a goldmine once he discovers this theme park has dinosaurs, so he tries to overcharge Hammond but is refused because they had already negotiated the price beforehand. I think Nedry was just as greedy here as he was in the film, plus his actions got people killed and stranded in the Park, so I don’t feel bad about the 8ft tall Dilo ripping his belly open and feasting on him
Film's Hammond is arguably more interesting, as whilst an ambitious man with a dream, he does - in the film's storyboards - get an even better redemption arc than we saw. Hammond was originally to be the one whom saved the main characters, shooting one of the Velociraptors, but visibly saddened thereafter by having to have had to do so. Rexy got the scene instead in the end, because she was rather too cool not to have reappear.
There is a particular line in the novel, saying, "it's not me, it's chaos". Malcolm is a human and is exposed to panic. And he always claims things are unpredictable, that humans can never actually be in control. As i said, he is a HUMAN. And him running out of the car is somewhat justified as the car provided no safety in the case of lex and tim. The people who he talks down are actually stupid. He never talks down grant, because grant doesn't have the illusion of control. Many people are mad at Ian because of what he says about climate, but what he says can and should be considered. One's political views aren't excuses to blaim others, both in the case of malcolm and the people who criticize him. He is a character and he has his flaws. Malcolm, along with most characters from the novel, is masterfully created!
Funny story. I was sitting at a restaurant reading this book, waiting for breakfast when I got to the scene when Dennis Neddry is attacked by the spitting dinosaur. As I’m reading the part where he’s blind, and holding his intestines in his hand, the waitress comes up to my table with my plate of eggs and... sausages. Oh dear. Suffice to say I had a to go bag when I left.
That reminds me: I was eating (VEG) CHILI this past week . . . whilst watching a TH-cam vid. The TH-camr (promptly) began discussing his more recent DEFECATION. (And) He was EXPLICIT. ¨ He went ON-and-ON-and-ON about 'how BIG it was' . . . 'how PAINFUL' . . . and 'how ALARMING' . . . I just kept right on w/ eating my CHILI, tho. ( ^__- )
@@jimithingjames I put too much jalopeno on my minced meat pizza the other week and stayed up until 6AM having a ass tearing diarrhea that was hot like hell. The pizza was delish tho.
First time I read the book and came upon the Tyrannasaur attack, unbeknownst to me a summer thunderstorm was brewing outside my window. "That's funny, I swear I can actually hear the environment in this scene..."
Here’s a fun fact: The movie adaptation is actually closer to Crichton’s original vision of JP than the novel is. He was pushed to make the novel darker by his publisher, who thought a darker tone would fit better with Crichton’s previous work.
Alamaru Having listened to both versions I have to admit that while Roberts’ delivery is superior in some parts, I prefer Scott Brick. There’s something about his voice that makes a lot of the scenes in the first half sound more foreboding, and in the second half add to the tension. There is something about his voice that just feels mildly haunting to me.
"Spared no expense" is something I translate as "I'm getting suckered by people who are telling me they have the best, but are lying and cheaping out on materials." Never tell a contractor that money is no object, because you'll be lucky if you get an honest man who will do the job right and NOT charge you a stupid tax for not caring about money.
Always brings to mind that wonderful DS9 episode where Quark explains to the Maquis lady "peace at any cost" is a foolish way to bargain for something you want from an enemy that wants war. If you're smart, and wait for the right time, you can get peace at a bargain.
"Spared no expense" is something I translate as "I'm getting suckered by people who are telling me they have the best, but are lying and cheaping out on materials." Sounds like something Trump would do.
I remember reading this book when I was a kid and being intimidated by. the sheer amount of technical minutia and detail that it throws at you in the first couple of pages. Having read a couple of Crichton books by now I can very well tell that it is a staple of his but it makes it hard for the younger audience to get into, no matter how much you love dinosaurs.
On a note about Greed v. Chaos: you're right in that it is hubris and greed that undoes the park overall. However, the events that *lead* to this being such are the whims of fate, which does tie into chaos theory. For example, Nedry's plan would have worked...were it not for the freak storm that hit at just the wrong time, causing him to lose his way in the jungle. Another example is how almost nobody could have predicted that using amphibian DNA to fix broken genome would give the dinosaurs the inherent ability to sex change in the wild. Perhaps the bigger example however, are the dinosaurs themselves. Even the paleontologists are shocked at some of their behaviour. Chance causes encounter after encounter and nailbiting escape after escape during the run of the book, making it so that it is not just skill, but sheer luck that allows some of the people to survive the horrors of prehistoric life. While a warning about greed and hubris is the theme of the book, it is ultimately chance that brings the whole operation crashing down.
"First you think of an idea that has already been done. Then you give it a title that nobody could possibly like. Didn't you think this through...? (time skip) ...was on the bestseller list for eighteen months! Every magazine cover had... (time skip) ...most popular movies of all time, sir! What were you thinking?!... (beat) I mean, thank you, come again."
JP was the first novel outside my weight class I read in elementary school. Naturally read it because of the Movie, and love both the book and the film. A great way to kick off all the JP content for the month :)
Honestly reading the book ruined the movie for me. The attempts to sound smart while having the barest understanding while not constant were activating when they come up.
@@jaycie5021 Still not as bad as having modern knowledge. Gladly Crichton was smart enough to write that those were mutants, so fact that they lack feathers make more sense.
"If he were healthy it would be seen as....." I still think it is seen as that way in both this book AND the follow up. Also as to questioning the intelligence of someone that ran down a thin enclosed road to try and escape a large predator, I already questioned his intelligence when he contradicted Dr. Sattler when she asked if it was too hot for the color black and he said that black was the coolest color and did not absorb heat, which is of course one of the many things he says with absolute confidence that fly in the face of not only common sense, but also science. He uses a mathematical system designed for showing unpredictability to predict things, and when something big happens always claims his model predicted that it would happen. He comes off to me as what I like to refer to as a "pseudo-intellectual" not an actual intellectual. He say a lot of big words and you get the feeling that he likes to make other people feel stupid, but what he says never really has any depth.
There is a particular line in the novel, saying, "it's not me, it's chaos". Malcolm is a human and is exposed to panic. And he always claims things are unpredictable, that humans can never actually be in control. As i said, he is a HUMAN. And him running out of the car is somewhat justified as the car provided no safety in the case of lex and tim. The people who he talks down are actually stupid. He never talks down grant, because grant doesn't have the illusion of control. Many people are mad at Ian because of what he says about climate, but what he says can and should be considered. One's political views aren't excuses to blaim others, both in the case of malcolm and the people who criticize him. He is a character and he has his flaws. Malcolm, along with most charecters from the novel, is masterfully created!
The vibe I’m getting from this review is that the book (and especially the characterization of John Hammond) is more like a modern version of The Island of Dr Moreau.
It's really not what he makes it out to be. The review is heavily slanted towards an anti-capitalist message. That's a character issue in the book, but not the main theme.
One thing about the book that struck me was the key difference between programming and intuition. The systems Nedry developed capped the dinosaur count so that the significantly larger than expected population is only realised when the cap is removed. Just by how much more the numbers are is truly chilling, yet another example of the lack of foresight shown in the Jurassic Park project.
Thank you for doing this, I liked the things you picked up on and discussed! For instance, I've read the Jurassic Park novel MULTIPLE times since childhood, yet I never realized that Hammond's lack of concern for the elephant's welfare beyond profit was symbolic/foreshadowing.
Jurassic Park is a novel and movie that could only be made in the early 90s - just after the end of the Cold War and at the peak of neoliberal techno-optimism. The Internet’s dot-com bubble was about to make everyone as rich as John Hammond, and governments were increasingly seen as archaic relics of the past. If Michael Crichton were alive today, I’m sure he’d have something to say about government handling of pandemics, the Wuhan Lab, and the unforeseen consequences of that too.
Thank you for bringing up that book Malcolm was full of himself. SO many people remember Jeff Goldblum's smarmy and charming character in the movie and forget how full of himself and straight up arrogant that he was in the book. He was one of the few characters along with Lex and Hammond that actually got improved on screen, most such as Dr. Grant, Muldoon, Tim, Ray Arnold, Gennaro, and Dr. Wu were either changed so much as feel almost like completely different characters, or just cut down by so much that they are barely there. And also even though I know that Michael Creighton was big proponent of Chaos Theory, I also get the feeling that he didn't understand it too well. For example in The Lost World Malcolm is describing a system that is identical to Intelligent Design and when one of the other characters points this out, he simply says, "No, that's backwards thinking." Without any attempt whatsoever to explain why it isn't. I think the character of Malcolm both brought interest and attention to Chaos theory, but also because of the over simplification he also killed it because it went out of favor very quickly after the second book came out and there was absolutely no mention of Chaos Theory in the second movie at all.
Chaos theory is only in the first book because it was trendy at the time. In reality, it has pretty much zero relevance to the subject of making a dinosaur theme park. Also, structuring the book as a fractal made for some incredibly tedious reading.
One of the things that gets me about the early part of the book now, especially compared to the film, is why Hammond calls up Grant if he doesn't know about the procompognathid. I used to think the entire "First Iteration" should have been in the film, but now the way it is done makes sense. The raptor attack leads directly to Hammond calling. All that other stuff is not causally connected to Hammond's invitation.
4:23 oh, don't worry, we know that Book!Hammond is a jackass who put everyone in danger. Though I wonder if he's like the CEO in Timeline. Hey, can you do Timeline?
TH-cam never ceases to amaze. Seven ads in a ~20min video. And yes, I know ‘’they’re a business’’ but they could at least try to make adverts proportional. I bet the days of unskippable ads (except for premium users of course) are not too far away.
It's been a while since I read the book, but your video is getting me in the mood to explore it once again. Though I love the movie, Crichton's novel is so much more complex. That's one thing that disappoints me about the new Jurassic World films: they take Crichton's themes and concepts and dumb them down to the point where you feel like you're watching Michael Crichton for dumbies!
It's amazing how Ian Malcolm is one of the most likeable characters in the film but one of the most irritating self inserts I've ever come across in a book. Whenever I'd come across another rant running for paragraphs (I think one of them is a full page) I'd get the heavy urge to put the book down for good.
I agree completely, and even more annoyingly, he does the same thing in the second book. Fewer rants, but they are even longer!! And also even though I know that Michael Creighton was big proponent of Chaos Theory, I also get the feeling that he didn't understand it too well. For example in The Lost World he is describing a system that is identical to Intelligent Design and when one of the other characters points this out, he simply says, "No, that's backwards thinking." Without any attempt whatsoever to explain why it isn't. I think the character of Malcolm both brought interest and attention to Chaos theory, but also because of the over simplification he also killed it because it went out of favor very quickly after the second book came out and there was absolutely no mention of Chaos Theory in the second movie at all.
Gennaro got the fucking shaft in the movie. He was my favorite book character. When the movie came out, I hated it for that. I have come around on it, but still hold it against it.
Exactly this. On top of that, Spielberg decided to dump Hammond's novel traits onto Gennaro so that the movie version of Hammond would be a sympathetic character.
The opening section where (Biosin?) board members examine Hammond’s investments one by one and finally reach the conclusion that he’s going to *clone dinosaurs* . Made me wish I could read the book for the first time again.
I always thought Malcom running from the T-Rex was his way to try and save the kids, more subtle than the movie but to show Malcom is not a complete dick like Regis. I always felt pity for Genaro in this book, when the Park went to shit he did try to fix the problem...and still got a bullocking from the whole cast.
That idea was actually Jeff Goldblum's idea. He wanted his character of Malcolm to be more heroic. They basically combined Regis and Gennaro together. Gennaro snapped out of his state of mind once Grant sternly talked some sense into him.
@RavnDream Crichton wrote part of the script for the movie. I don't think he minded that they hybrydized two characters (Genaro and Regis) So no, it ain't a diss.
@RavnDream That's not how the timeline shook out. Crichton cam back at tge end for final revisions as well. And the film is better than the novel. And I say that as someone who wrote a gosh darn PhD thesis on the novel. The film is less preachy and has much better characters. And again, let me stress, this is an expert opinion.
@RavnDream Oh great, that line again. I wrote this on my phone and didn't take the time to proofread it. Because it wasn't important. Happy now? So yes, I have a PhD, yes I make mistakes when I write on my phone, yes I wrote my thesis on JP, so yes I know what I'm talking about. Don't believe me? Just google my name, you'll find my thesis.
I just finished the book a couple weeks ago. I actually loved Ian in the Book way more then the Movie. Spoiler: Ian does not die and if you read The Lost World you find this out. I am about half way through The Lost World. The Lost World also really explores Dodgson store line which was set up in first but the Movies just let die.
In my opinion the film perfectly captures the theme of the book, man playing god all that while blowing up the "hollywood" moments. The t-rex and kitchen scene. I've read a lot of his books my favorite being Eaters of The Dead that was made into the 13th Warrior.
9:57 no ..it is chaos theory its just that one can mistake it for just greed cause of the depiction of hammond. which is one of the best changes the movie does.. as most of the things that goes wrong in the park are things that businesses entrepreneurs deals with all the time.
Funny you brought up Hammond carrying around a pygmy elephant, it was brought up that Biosyn had a meeting talking about it and the thoughts of merchandising the dinosaurs, especially if they could make pygmy dinosaurs to be sold as pets. Out of everything brought up in the book, this moment right here scared me because _this is absolutely true_ that "pet fads" exist. Imagine some dumbass parents buying a baby T-Rex for their kid just because he was super into dinosaurs, but then grew out of it and didn't want it anymore. And that's _before_ the dinosaur decides to "play rough" and take a chunk out of his face. It's just too bad this isn't an idea that's been explored in the franchise.
Jurassic Park introduced me to the idea of complex systems being unpredictable as complexity rises. As a kid learning to program back then it wasn't something I had considered. But as an adult it weighs heavily on my decisions. Assumptions of things always going a certain way, failure to account for things missing or something else failing. This should be required reading for people who deal with or design complex systems. Definitely recommend even if you have seen the movie. Crichton should be credited for writing about the dinosaurs and trying to be as accurate as possible. But it is fiction. Things are left out, embellished & scientists now know more. What we know about dinosaurs has changed a lot in 30 years. Velociraptors were feathered and closer to the size of turkeys. We have no idea which dinosaurs were poisonous. Leaps of logic and assumptions are made in order to create a believable world. The intent was good: We live in a sea of ignorance; never underestimate nature's danger. It's important to realize that Crichton was more interested in ideas and discussions. He was also very arrogant. His book on climate change (State of fear?) was demonstrably false and points to the dangers of arrogance and cherry picking your facts. Think of it like the Fox News bubble where people only get their information from one point of view. It's basic human nature that the book even explores a little. But his books are designed to tell you his beliefs and it's easy to be proven right when you write the narrative. But his books are fun, enjoyable reads. I have read Jurassic Park and his other books several times. I wish he was still around writing. If anything they offer a great opportunity to learn something and explore more after reading to see what is true and what's fiction.
Actually largest twist could be predicted if communication between teams would be better (most issues were caused by corporate side). Crichton actually was on of supporters of bird's dinosaur origin theory, what now we know is a fact (also all dinosaurs have feathers including even some pre-dinosaurs). He go around issue stating that those dinosaurs were mutants, but it is quite obvious that intended mistake was the fact that birds have reversed base sex (which is male) and some species actually are transsexual. Also velociraptor size isn't really a mistake in the movie because those are Deinonychus, just Spielberg keep name Velociraptor because it sound cooler and those were mutants anyway (and what is hilarious according to modern research, those actually are Velociraptorinae, lol).
@@TheRezro They're actually too big to even be deinonychus is the movie (those only come up to about a humans waist). The amusing thing is a species as large as those in the movie was actually discovered while they were making it, Utahraptor. I think the scientist that discovered it even considered naming the species after Spielberg.
@@CareerKnight Utahraptor raptor is actually way larger. They have only same height as Raptors in the movie move unnaturally upright (they are mutants after all). You are actually correct though that they are larger. They are closer to Dakotaraptor, now I think about it..?
@@TheRezro Dakotaraptor is probably the closest to the movie size but it was unknown when the film was made (they had dug up some of its bones but no one got around to classifying it until years later).
@@CareerKnight I know. Point is that those are mutants. In fact they probably didn't have anything to do with actual dinosaurs. Only in movies they use some DNA, but even here heavily modified. After all it was mostly marketing.
Question; how did dinosaurs like Triceratops and Apatosauruses evolve into birds? They seem to lack the body structure to develop into those particular forms
They didn't. Birds are descended from small, bipedal theropods, closely related to dinosaurs like Velociraptor. Triceratops and Apatosaurus come from two completely different branches of the dinosaur family tree, which went extinct at the end of the Mesozoic. When we say birds descended from dinosaurs, we don't mean that all dinosaurs turned into birds, we mean that birds are a highly specialized group of dinosaurs that survived the event that killed their relatives.
They didn't. Both are almost on opposite side of the Dinosaur evolution tree. Birds belong to Dinosaurs -> Saurischia -> Theropoda -> Coelurosauria -> Maniraptora (they actually are close cousins or Velociraptors and slightly further or Tyrannosaurs and nether you mentioned is even Theropoda).
@@bigcat5348 Huh, the way people have gone about saying it for years make the entire point of trivia sound extremely misleading, like how some will say that the Chicken is the closest living relative or descendant to the T-Rex [there's a whole six degrees of separation there that seems to get constantly left out] A few more things, as I have been curious; Did only the specific raptor dinos have feathers? What would they have needed feathers for? Is the Triceratops being similar in structure to the Rhinoceros just a coincidence?
@@TorridPrime217 Relative? Yes. Descendant? Did someone sleep on biology? Also according to modern research feathers appear even before dinosaurs, so even unrelated species like Pterosaur did have them. They have feathers for same reason Mammal's have fur. Ability of flight is coincidental later evolution.
That’s very interesting with Nedry’s book backstory, I kinda feel bad for him. The sense I got in the movie’s universe is that he was probably paid very well for a programmer but is one of those people who can’t help but spend money as soon as he gets it and thus is always trying to get more money out of Hammond. And from Hammond’s POV it’s like “dude I’m paying better than another else in your field how have you already spent your salary?!”
I always thought that the JP novel was a lot better than the movie. The story was far more complex, and had a lot of substance to it. In my opinion, a combination of the film's character development with the Novel's complex story would have made for a truly great film
I would love to reboot the franchise entirely, beginning with an '80s period piece Netflix miniseries based entirely off this very idea: the film's character development and the novel's story, with each episode not devoted to the overall "get out of the park!" or "count the raptors" adventure being devoted to a specific character. One episode devoted to Arnold and his efforts to restore the park that ultimately lead to his (and the park's) downfall, one episode devoted to Nedry (from his initial hiring to his death-by-dilophosaurus), et cetera. I'd wager we could petition Universal/Amblin to make such a series as soon as the next film in the series fails. X-D
@@Dunebat I think that there should be a more style over substance period piece. We have too many 80s tributes though. Maybe a tribute to the 70s disaster films with the story being set in the early-mid 70s
I've always liked the way Grant takes out the raptors in the novel than having Rexy show up unannounced and doing it herself in the movie. I find it much more tense and gripping.
I read the book when I learned that Spielberg was turning it into a movie. What a huge mistake that was. It was so much better than the movie, that my knowledge of it seriously detracted from my enjoyment of the movie. The book was a thriller aimed at adults, the movie was an action adventure aimed at families.
That's how hollywood always does with movies adapted from books. 1. You can make a movie that's a faithful adaption from the book. 2. Make a movie by taken certain parts from the book and leave the rest behind. 3. Just take the name of the book but ignore the source material and make your own version. It's why novel fans are annoyed their was never a movie that was a faithful adaption to the book like War of the Worlds, I am Legend or Starship Troopers.
You should hear what they did to Frankenstein when it was first turned into a movie. You think they did Jurrassic Park dirty, oh boy you have a surprise coming if you ever read Shelly's Frankenstein
While I like the book and would have been delighted to see more elements adapted I do prefer the film. I think there is a chilliness to Critchon's writing that is intellectually interesting but leaves me feeling a bit cold. Spielberg might be a bit schmaltzy at times but he was also far wiser than Critchon in some ways; he understood that a lot of kids going to see 'Jurassic Park' (myself included) would have been rooting for the dinos. Give me a triumphant T-Rex roaring as a banner comes down over the Costa Rican airforce bombing everything.
I agree totally, I only read Jurassic Park and The Lost World, but I found, in Lost World especially, that the characters were totally unlikeable. Like the video says, Chrichton is more interested in exploring ideas than characters, but if, in doing so, he ends up writing characters that are actively awful (Richard Levine in the second book, exhibits what can only be described as grandiose narcassistic traits, and Ian Malcolm treats people like dirt on several occasions, but neither character has this behaviour called out by anyone else, and its almost like Chrichton didn't realise he had written them as awful people). Whatever else about the films, the characters seem to be functioning human beings with flaws they have to overcome, and of course, Jeff Goldblum could probably make reading a phone book interesting :-)
@@Bazookatone1 To be fair... these are realistic people. Everyone knows someone like Ian and Levine. People nobody calls out. Everyone knows the a-hole at work or school or in their friend group and knows that nobody ever calls them out on this behavior. We like to pretend we "call out bad people", but that only happens online... where you have no social stakes at hand. Where you can be anonymous. In real life... nobody calls out anybody for their BS. Because, if we do, someone will call us out for our BS. Or, they'll argue with us. Cause drama. Or end friendships. This is the difference between people who "live online" and those who "live in real life". Nobody calls out anyone in real life out of fear. Online, everyone calls out everyone because nobody has any personal vested interest or consequences for doing so or not doing so. The things people say online are things they would never say in real life. I've always sort of enjoyed the realistic portrayal of people in Critchon's work. They act and react pretty realistically to how people in the real world act and react. The downside to his writing, in my opinion, is the "rush to the end" it seems to take. It spends forever setting up everything and then the climax happens exceptionally quickly with the events moving at breakneck speed. Then, it's over.
My best friend's stepmother read & then recommended the book him. Then he passed it on to me. I literally couldn't put the thing down, and think I got thru it in one weekend. At the time, I remember thinking it would make a great Spielberg film. The film (....as I imagined he could make it...)....played out in my head, at the turn of every page. I was elated, when a month or two later, news broke that he had obtained the rights & intended to turn the book into a major film project. About a year later, when it hit the theaters......I was there on opening day. Have to admit though....I was a little disappointed with the finished result. My bad though.....as I shouldn't have tried to superimpose my own vision of what I THOUGHT he would produce.....over the top of what he DID produce. In retrospect, I like it more now. Some of what he didn't include from the book DID eventually make it into a few of the later films.
You keep telling in your videos that Malcolm is partialy wrong about the fall of the park, but the park was out of control long before Nedry sabotaged the system. Dinosaurs got of the island and were reproducing. For me that is the fall of the park (and I think that is what Michael Crichton was going for), Nedry's sabotage only makes the illusion of control disapear. After that all the problems became fully apperent, but they were always there. Malcolm is right.
I read the novel just as it had hit bookstores, way before the film hit theaters (still have the hardcover first edition on my shelf). I guess that's probably why I've always been kinda disappointed with the film - which I thought was too Spielbergian and superficial even back then. The novel is far grittier and has more "bite", so to speak. The movie OTOH bathes in the superficial glory of its special effects, adds an unnecessary romance and Spielberg's tired "absent father"-trope. It also turns Hammond from a greedy a-hole into a kindly grandfather-figure. That one probably annoyed me the most about the film. But more or less all characters are way more black and white in the film. Nedry is another great example. In the book, I was kinda rooting for him and could totally sympathize with his motivation to steal the embryos. In the film, he's just a greedy, sweaty comic-book villain with an annoying laugh.
I think one of the things that, since getting older and realising the parts of the book which are pure satire, Jurassic Park is an incredibly angry book. Critchon must have been processing what had been happening since the 70s (since West World at the very least) and how it had mutated into Corporate greed. The satirical elements are especially noteworthy when Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric at that time when that patent mentioned at the start was generating controversy, was the guy who made most of our lives freaking miserable (Walsh's reach hits nearly every single part of this globe of ours) by becoming the trend setter who began to cull staff by performance (10% of his staff at General Electric every year were fired if they didn't maintain their performance... Though it didn't matter anyway, because it didn't actually improve performance or help the company in the long term, but rather it made the Stock Market value of the company look good. Almost like human sacrifice to some degree to the Blood Gods on Wallstreet) and ultimately hollowed out production of General Electric to make it a brand entity that was draining talent out rather than a manufacturer. And he became a trend setter for the next 40 years which made all of our lives quite stressful. Manufacturing costed money. Mergers and acquisitions, alongside some "creative accounting" could generate money, especially when you did insider trading and sold it off at a profit but made it worthless in the meantime. Walsh wasn't the guy who started the whole outsourcing to other countries like India and East Germany, but he was one of the people who promoted it heavily, causing a large number of more rural communities that needed the factories that GE built to keep the places afloat. Walsh was the guy who helped to develop the idea that "Well let's shut those places down (even though they're generating a profit) and use that money to help cook the books with mergers and other shady deals. Why mention all this? I THINK it's fairly certain to that Hammond was based on his type (if not Jack Walsh himself). Cutting corners in his business and losing his god damned mind when he hears something he doesn't want to hear, defrauding investors and trying to save money that will cost people their lives. The kind of person who's POSSIBLY a genuine honest to goodness psychopath with little concern for people or anything beyond his own personal gain who tend to sit around a desk in tall towers that hold the lives of millions in their hands and it means nothing to them. I think I prefer the books ending for Hammond. Fitting that he brings it about himself.
the pair of novels were much darker and complex. spielberg had to sanitize a great deal of the plot. as a cinematic frenchise, JP is now very much it's own thing, so i wonder if we'll ever see a faithful adaptation, possibly as a t.v.series.
Too bad they never followed up on the raptors ghat made it to the main land. Though the book almost implies they aren't ingen raptors, more interesting ideas.
Wasn't there an off-hand remark towards the end of the novel about how the ship's crew had found those dinosaurs and killed them before they reached the mainland?
@@MLennholm pretty sure not. They turned back the boat but its not those raptors I am talking about. The nest raptors are implied to have escaped. Also mentioned in the lost world.
The Jurassic Park Film Came Out When I Was 7 And I Was Entranced, I Would Watch It On VHF Almost Weekly For Years,Then I Read The Book For The First Time At 12 And Have Went On To Read It And It's Sequel 20 Times Each, I Have Michael Crichton And To A Lesser Extent Spielberg To Thank For My Love Of Books And Film. And Thank You For The Review ❤️
See, when people discuss cloning dinosaurs, they always use Jurassic Park as an example as to why it's a bad idea as if they will escape and kill a ton of people. But to me (even though it's clearer in the book) the movie was enough for me to understand that the issue was greed.
The book is better than the movie. However, i don't think that Jurassic Park is a bad movie, it just diverges to much from its source material. I find it funny though, that Genarro is one of the 3 major point of view characters in the book, that he survives the whole mess, while he is just the first one to die in the movie. Oh, and Muldoon also survives in the book - while Hammond dies. Malcolm is declared dead in the book as well but this is left vague enough, so that Chrichton could revive him for the sequel...
I'm surprised how much of this I'm remembering as you go through it, considering that it's close to 20 years ago that I last read this novel. The Jurassic Park book is certainly very technical and very preachy, but it's defiantly not forgettable.
The abridged version of the novel on audio, IIRC, even glosses over that particular plot point. Just describing everything but the little girl being attacked on the island (since it was the catalyst for the investigation. There's a reason they ended up adapting that scene for the sequel) in a matter-of-fact tone like a news report. Same thing happened with Hammond's death scene.
In ( a half hearted ) defense of Ian Malcolm making an ill-advised run for it; he panicked plain and simple. A panicked mind is not analytical mind, it is not a thinking mind it is a reactionary animal.
@@TheRezro : Even as a young nerdy child I understood the basic idea behind cranial capacity and how scientists said dinosaurs were exceptionally stupid relative to what we're used, not just with mammals, but also reptiles and birds. I could let the super-smart raptors slide in the first movie because the first movie was great, but it's so schlocky in every sequel.
@@itsallfunandgames723 To be honest in Crichton work those actually were mutants, as he personally was supporter of Bird's Dinosaur origin, before it become a fact (in this case whole sex change actually make sense).
Michael Chrichtons preaching against strawmen approach would later culminate when he started denying the mere existence of a global warming. He is smart and he makes good points from time to time, but he lacks humility and self reflection when forming his opinions.
or lord, Crichton's a climate change denier? ......god, that's as bad as J.K Rowling using garbage pseudoscience and her position as a "Harvard graduate" to spread 5th Grade level transphobia. What's up with these big time authors getting a bug up their ass about a hill to die on that ultimately reveals them as not only such stupid people for being such learned, "intelligent" people but also TERRIBLE people using their position and their ego and self-righteously smug, foolish self-conclusions to be a hurtful idiot about things far beyond their own scope?
Why does everyone use the term high concept like it means something. Low concept = monster movie High concept = monster movie about a monster theme park
The term “high concept” in this usage is more comparable to the term “gimmick,” rather than denoting something that is the opposite of “low.” A more fit opposing term to “high concept” might be “generic concept.” In your example, a given monster movie could be considered “generic” if there are a number of other movies that follow a similar formula. It would be “high concept” when there is a gimmick or trick added to the generic concept. (In this case, a theme park for a resurrected extinct species of monster.) It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s classier or more intelligent if it’s “high concept,” just that there’s some kind of twist to it.
Hammond is definitely the closest thing to a human antagonist the movie has. His greed and corner cutting make the park incredibly insecure, which frequently hinder the efforts the various characters make in the name of survival. When the crisis is going on he goes full head in the sand, forcibly insisting Wu join him for dinner and refusing to admit anything is going wrong.
Maybe the biggest difference between Book!Hammond and Movie!Hammond is that Movie!Hammond eventually *realizes* that he was the villain... and that he wasn't pointlessly rude to everyone.
1:25 They would still be a dinosaur. That's like saying a flightless bird. Yes its flightless but it's still a bird or a non polar bear is still a bear.
Muldoon pronounces Gennaro's name as "Gen-AH-ro", too, in the film. Everyone else mispronounces it. (Makes sense: Muldoon is one of the most competent characters.)
Muldoon was competent to a point in my opinion. 2 things that made me question his competence came up in the film though. 1) It is stated that he knows more about the raptors than anyone. If that is so, how did he not know that they were trapping him by giving him a viable target? 2) why waste so much time setting his gun up? Couldn't he have done that in the bunker? He wasted so much time that in the end might not have made a difference to his life, but may have saved some trouble for the others.
@@Dunebat possibly. I mean the lack of logic in not having your weapon in a ready to fire position when hunting some of the most dangerous and intelligent hunters is staggering. Not to mention his weapon of choice was a 12 gage pump
@Terix Septim well I believe I would have been ok with his death had they not had the scene of Grant telling the kid just exactly how the raptors would kill him. It made me go "huh. The guy who only knows these things from bones knows way more about them than the expert who has watched them for however long they've been on the island".
@Terix Septim I think that flawed gene was a retcon in the Lost World novel. I don't remember them saying it in the movie, but I dew remember the part in the novel where the Biosyn team were going to get the Rex eggs and Malcolm and his team watched it on a CCTV when it all went pear shaped, like is prone to happen in this series, Malcolm comments on Dodgson standing still because of a theory Grant made about the Rex's vision and how wrong it was. I do agree though that Grant had way too much info from the get go in this movie. Although it makes me curious how much more he would have had in JP 3 if they'd have went ahead with the original plan of Grant living on Sorna studying the dinosaurs there.
Don't the Compy's get used to eat the other dinosaurs shit? Then they eat Hammond... almost as if Crichton was trying to say something about him isn't it?
6:10 It's amusing that those expectations were shattered by the popularity of Jurassic Park itself. So many of those outdated views of dinosaurs survived in the minds of the average person due to half-arsed dinosaur books that just copied older books (with chains of copying going back to before the dinosaur renaissance) without doing any real investigation into the state of paleontology at the time of writing. I wonder how many other books/movies had plot-lines rendered unbelievable by their own popularity (and not just in the genre-savvy sense).
It's not as if anything accurate at the time would still be considered accurate today. it's all rewritten every few years. I say just make them look cool besides it's canonical they were genetic chimerae.
@@KairuHakubi Fact remains that these dinos are genetic experiments. In the book it is explained by Wu's thoughts that Wu took many, many liberties when creating these animals. He could do anything he wanted with the power of genetics, just like creating figures out of clay.
Ian Malcolm's status as an author insertion is kind of endearing in a "child's first drawing" kind of way. Sure, it's painfully ugly, but you can appreciate what he was trying to do. It does, however, become outright _unbearable_ in the sequel. It gets really tiring at some point, to the point where you just want the book to have a "skip" button like videogames have. His speeches become longer and even less relevant to the story.
Always loved how the novel and the movie are both solid entertainment in their own right and the combination gives us a much richer experience (think of them as the same event in two parallel universes).
In the minority here, I know. But I would love for them to make a Rated-R Jurassic Park Remake that followed the novel so that way we had both versions of the Jurassic Park concept.
Same here. I was thinking they could probably put it on Netflix as a mini series. That way nothing gets left out this time.
I always thought that if, instead of Spielberg, if James Cameron had adapted and directed Jurassic Park in the early 90s (right after he had come off the success of T2), we would have ended up with an R-rated, more-like-the-book version of the movie. In many ways, I think the JP book is more like Aliens (1986), tonally, than the Spielberg movie. (I still love the movie as it is, but it’s a fun thing to think about.)
@@lifewithoutfudge Cameron doesn't do adaptations, though. Only original screenplays and one remake, True Lies.
With you on that. And as Ghost Chaser said a mini series would work well. (In the right hands of course). One reboot I'd be more than happy to see rather than more Jurassic World. The book is so rich in story a loyal adaptation could be amazing.
Totally! The book has some wildly gruesome and terrifying violence. It's absolutely awesome!
One of the things I wish you would have brought up, that a lot of people miss, is the the running theme of Hubris Within The Expert and the Falsehood of Control.
By this I mean nearly every character, save one, at one point or another believe they know what to do, that they have control and see things better than everyone else... and then they are proven wrong. disastrously wrong. And they are blind to this fault in themselves even as they mock others for having it. Spoilers incoming.
You have your obvious ones: John Hammond dies after believing that not only is the park under control but he has backup plans to make new parks and that it was everyone else's fault that things failed, not him. And then he foolishly runs into the jungle, twists his ankle. drinks water when he has been told not to from a stream, and dies from the Compies. John Arnold celebrates that he has gotten Jurassic Park back up and running... and then a literal clock counts down from 30 seconds to signal their doom. Muldoon bemoans no one bothering to power up the radios, that no one checked the batteries... then forgets to check the batteries on the laser scope of his weapon and nearly gets him and Gennaro killed. Nedry believes his plan is easy, that he has it all thought out, no problem. He even talks about how he knows all the backways through the computer, which ways to go... except he ddin't, as Arnold discovers everything he did because of a simple mistake... because the computer thought Nedry was lost so let him do what he wanted. Just as Nedry gets lost in the park and dies. Wu is thrilled that he created a breeding dinosaur... and dies SECONDS later.
These are the obvious ones. But our heroes, the people that are the 'good guys'... they ALSO have hubris and a false sense of control. Let's look at two that people point to as being the smartest of the book: Ian Malcolm and Ellie Sattler.
Ian talks about respect for the natural world and that one shouldn't underestimate it. Yet when he witnesses the raptors attack the fence his first thought is to say they are stupid. A workman, who doesn't even get a name, looks down on Ian for that. Ian then again insults the intelligence of the dinosaurs when he states the T-Rex was a clumsy attacker who really wasn't in the mood to kill him and it wasn't that big of a deal. A few chapters later the Rex is activately stalking Grant and the kids, even though it has fed and isn't hungry anymore, to the point that it actually lies in ambush to catch them. Ian mocks people for getting too emotional... then flees the car and that results in his death.
Ellie is another one. Ellie decides to distract the raptors to help Alan Grant. She asks how smart the raptors are and Muldoon tells her they are VERY smart. But when Muldoon and then Wu tell her to come inside, that she is in danger... she blows them off. "I know what I'm doing" "I've got this under control" she tells each of them. And then a raptor leaps down and kills Wu and Ellie nearly dies herself. She thought she was an expert, that she knew better than others... hubris got one man killed because of her thinking like that.
*Incoming obvious comment about hubris of conspiracy theorists of the internet and how their collective Dunning- Kruger- fuled distrust in science led to preventable deaths.*
Well, Ian didn't die, but everything else is mostly correct. Ellie is also overconfident of her cheerful luck, which almost gets her killed when Wu is killed and she has to outmaneuver the raptors.
@@Erick7Greenday yes he did. As many pointed out originally Ian Malcolm died in the books. It is a wreck on that he did not
Actually he did die. The 2nd book I see mostly as a bonus round than a proper sequel XD. Not bad a read mind you, but the 1st one was close to lightning in a bottle.
I say Mr Chaos, your analysis is a delight.
knowing nedrys backstory makes him a way more sympathetic character than the cartoon villain he was in the movie, and hammond doesnt seem like the absent minded billionaire grandpa with a dream anymore.
I think when Spielberg saw or read the "Flea Circus" monologue, plus Richard Attenborough's warmth and charm made it difficult to hate Hammond. If it's any consolation, Hammond gets his wake-up call when Ellie reminds him their loved ones are lost in a theme park where man-eating dinosaurs are loose, and just the insane amount of adult fear he's having in knowing his grandchildren are in danger.
I couldn’t sympathize with Nedry in the book, and allow me to explain why.
It was my understanding that when Hammond came to Nedry for wanting a computer system, they had already negotiated the price for this theme park (that’s all Nedry knew it was at the time), and then later he realizes it’s a goldmine once he discovers this theme park has dinosaurs, so he tries to overcharge Hammond but is refused because they had already negotiated the price beforehand. I think Nedry was just as greedy here as he was in the film, plus his actions got people killed and stranded in the Park, so I don’t feel bad about the 8ft tall Dilo ripping his belly open and feasting on him
This is less to do with backstory and more to do with the movie Hammond being a different character.
Film's Hammond is arguably more interesting, as whilst an ambitious man with a dream, he does - in the film's storyboards - get an even better redemption arc than we saw. Hammond was originally to be the one whom saved the main characters, shooting one of the Velociraptors, but visibly saddened thereafter by having to have had to do so.
Rexy got the scene instead in the end, because she was rather too cool not to have reappear.
Nedry's death in the book is actually terrifying.
There is a particular line in the novel, saying, "it's not me, it's chaos". Malcolm is a human and is exposed to panic. And he always claims things are unpredictable, that humans can never actually be in control. As i said, he is a HUMAN. And him running out of the car is somewhat justified as the car provided no safety in the case of lex and tim. The people who he talks down are actually stupid. He never talks down grant, because grant doesn't have the illusion of control. Many people are mad at Ian because of what he says about climate, but what he says can and should be considered. One's political views aren't excuses to blaim others, both in the case of malcolm and the people who criticize him. He is a character and he has his flaws. Malcolm, along with most characters from the novel, is masterfully created!
Funny story. I was sitting at a restaurant reading this book, waiting for breakfast when I got to the scene when Dennis Neddry is attacked by the spitting dinosaur. As I’m reading the part where he’s blind, and holding his intestines in his hand, the waitress comes up to my table with my plate of eggs and... sausages. Oh dear. Suffice to say I had a to go bag when I left.
That reminds me: I was eating (VEG) CHILI this past week . . . whilst watching a TH-cam vid. The TH-camr (promptly) began discussing his more recent DEFECATION. (And) He was EXPLICIT.
¨
He went ON-and-ON-and-ON about 'how BIG it was' . . . 'how PAINFUL' . . . and 'how ALARMING' . . . I just kept right on w/ eating my CHILI, tho. ( ^__- )
@@jimithingjames
I put too much jalopeno on my minced meat pizza the other week and stayed up until 6AM having a ass tearing diarrhea that was hot like hell.
The pizza was delish tho.
Kathleen Jackson You got a weak ass stomach. Although I admit, nothing really phases me anymore, which I don’t know is good or bad.
First time I read the book and came upon the Tyrannasaur attack, unbeknownst to me a summer thunderstorm was brewing outside my window.
"That's funny, I swear I can actually hear the environment in this scene..."
Hilarious
Here’s a fun fact:
The movie adaptation is actually closer to Crichton’s original vision of JP than the novel is. He was pushed to make the novel darker by his publisher, who thought a darker tone would fit better with Crichton’s previous work.
The William Roberts narration audiobook is the way to go. Really sets you into the world of the book.
Alamaru Having listened to both versions I have to admit that while Roberts’ delivery is superior in some parts, I prefer Scott Brick. There’s something about his voice that makes a lot of the scenes in the first half sound more foreboding, and in the second half add to the tension. There is something about his voice that just feels mildly haunting to me.
A lot of Michael Crichton's novels don't work because they operate on 90s politics. This is an exception. This book and The Lost World are timeless.
"Spared no expense" is something I translate as "I'm getting suckered by people who are telling me they have the best, but are lying and cheaping out on materials."
Never tell a contractor that money is no object, because you'll be lucky if you get an honest man who will do the job right and NOT charge you a stupid tax for not caring about money.
Always brings to mind that wonderful DS9 episode where Quark explains to the Maquis lady "peace at any cost" is a foolish way to bargain for something you want from an enemy that wants war. If you're smart, and wait for the right time, you can get peace at a bargain.
State owned firms are also well known for fraudulent practices, including mysteriously higher bills and lower quality results than what should be so.
"Spared no expense" is something I translate as "I'm getting suckered by people who are telling me they have the best, but are lying and cheaping out on materials."
Sounds like something Trump would do.
@@nicholasmaude6906 sounds more like any member of the Democrat leadership I could name.
I remember reading this book when I was a kid and being intimidated by. the sheer amount of technical minutia and detail that it throws at you in the first couple of pages. Having read a couple of Crichton books by now I can very well tell that it is a staple of his but it makes it hard for the younger audience to get into, no matter how much you love dinosaurs.
The first time I read it was in high school and that's with dyslexia. It wasn't that bad.
I for my part found it captivating for that very reason
On a note about Greed v. Chaos: you're right in that it is hubris and greed that undoes the park overall. However, the events that *lead* to this being such are the whims of fate, which does tie into chaos theory. For example, Nedry's plan would have worked...were it not for the freak storm that hit at just the wrong time, causing him to lose his way in the jungle. Another example is how almost nobody could have predicted that using amphibian DNA to fix broken genome would give the dinosaurs the inherent ability to sex change in the wild.
Perhaps the bigger example however, are the dinosaurs themselves. Even the paleontologists are shocked at some of their behaviour. Chance causes encounter after encounter and nailbiting escape after escape during the run of the book, making it so that it is not just skill, but sheer luck that allows some of the people to survive the horrors of prehistoric life.
While a warning about greed and hubris is the theme of the book, it is ultimately chance that brings the whole operation crashing down.
Don't you mean "Billy and the Cloneasaurus"?
Oh you have got to be kidding me sir!
"First you think of an idea that has already been done. Then you give it a title that nobody could possibly like. Didn't you think this through...?
(time skip) ...was on the bestseller list for eighteen months! Every magazine cover had...
(time skip) ...most popular movies of all time, sir! What were you thinking?!... (beat) I mean, thank you, come again."
@@NobodyC13 I miss Apu.
@@seatspud I miss the Land o'Lakes lady.
JP was the first novel outside my weight class I read in elementary school. Naturally read it because of the Movie, and love both the book and the film. A great way to kick off all the JP content for the month :)
Same Here ;-)
Me too😂
I also
dito
My favorite TH-camr talking about my favorite film. Today is gonna be a good day.
Honestly reading the book ruined the movie for me. The attempts to sound smart while having the barest understanding while not constant were activating when they come up.
@@jaycie5021 Still not as bad as having modern knowledge. Gladly Crichton was smart enough to write that those were mutants, so fact that they lack feathers make more sense.
@magnetothewhite I do love the book, but no. I have to give that to The Return of the King. Or Going Postal.
"If he were healthy it would be seen as....." I still think it is seen as that way in both this book AND the follow up. Also as to questioning the intelligence of someone that ran down a thin enclosed road to try and escape a large predator, I already questioned his intelligence when he contradicted Dr. Sattler when she asked if it was too hot for the color black and he said that black was the coolest color and did not absorb heat, which is of course one of the many things he says with absolute confidence that fly in the face of not only common sense, but also science. He uses a mathematical system designed for showing unpredictability to predict things, and when something big happens always claims his model predicted that it would happen. He comes off to me as what I like to refer to as a "pseudo-intellectual" not an actual intellectual. He say a lot of big words and you get the feeling that he likes to make other people feel stupid, but what he says never really has any depth.
I always saw him as an inarticulate genius.
There is a particular line in the novel, saying, "it's not me, it's chaos". Malcolm is a human and is exposed to panic. And he always claims things are unpredictable, that humans can never actually be in control. As i said, he is a HUMAN. And him running out of the car is somewhat justified as the car provided no safety in the case of lex and tim. The people who he talks down are actually stupid. He never talks down grant, because grant doesn't have the illusion of control. Many people are mad at Ian because of what he says about climate, but what he says can and should be considered. One's political views aren't excuses to blaim others, both in the case of malcolm and the people who criticize him. He is a character and he has his flaws. Malcolm, along with most charecters from the novel, is masterfully created!
Been waiting years to see you tackle this.
Recently listened to the audiobook so good timing!
Really loved this book.
All I see are people trashing it for the movie. The movie stands on it's own. However, so does this book.
Holly Gennaro McClane....pretty sure you heard it there :P
The vibe I’m getting from this review is that the book (and especially the characterization of John Hammond) is more like a modern version of The Island of Dr Moreau.
It's really not what he makes it out to be. The review is heavily slanted towards an anti-capitalist message. That's a character issue in the book, but not the main theme.
One thing about the book that struck me was the key difference between programming and intuition. The systems Nedry developed capped the dinosaur count so that the significantly larger than expected population is only realised when the cap is removed. Just by how much more the numbers are is truly chilling, yet another example of the lack of foresight shown in the Jurassic Park project.
That part of the novel is awesome.
@@kevin_ramirez2529agreed. The novel has such awesome, creepy, slow-building horror atmosphere!
5:11 - Crichton mentioned this ruling more fully in a later book - 'Next' that also deals with biotech
Thank you for doing this, I liked the things you picked up on and discussed! For instance, I've read the Jurassic Park novel MULTIPLE times since childhood, yet I never realized that Hammond's lack of concern for the elephant's welfare beyond profit was symbolic/foreshadowing.
Jurassic Park is a novel and movie that could only be made in the early 90s - just after the end of the Cold War and at the peak of neoliberal techno-optimism. The Internet’s dot-com bubble was about to make everyone as rich as John Hammond, and governments were increasingly seen as archaic relics of the past. If Michael Crichton were alive today, I’m sure he’d have something to say about government handling of pandemics, the Wuhan Lab, and the unforeseen consequences of that too.
Thank you for bringing up that book Malcolm was full of himself. SO many people remember Jeff Goldblum's smarmy and charming character in the movie and forget how full of himself and straight up arrogant that he was in the book. He was one of the few characters along with Lex and Hammond that actually got improved on screen, most such as Dr. Grant, Muldoon, Tim, Ray Arnold, Gennaro, and Dr. Wu were either changed so much as feel almost like completely different characters, or just cut down by so much that they are barely there. And also even though I know that Michael Creighton was big proponent of Chaos Theory, I also get the feeling that he didn't understand it too well. For example in The Lost World Malcolm is describing a system that is identical to Intelligent Design and when one of the other characters points this out, he simply says, "No, that's backwards thinking." Without any attempt whatsoever to explain why it isn't. I think the character of Malcolm both brought interest and attention to Chaos theory, but also because of the over simplification he also killed it because it went out of favor very quickly after the second book came out and there was absolutely no mention of Chaos Theory in the second movie at all.
Chaos theory is only in the first book because it was trendy at the time. In reality, it has pretty much zero relevance to the subject of making a dinosaur theme park. Also, structuring the book as a fractal made for some incredibly tedious reading.
I remember reading this one and the lost world over and over in highschool. Also sphere and prey but sphere largely went over my head then
One of the things that gets me about the early part of the book now, especially compared to the film, is why Hammond calls up Grant if he doesn't know about the procompognathid. I used to think the entire "First Iteration" should have been in the film, but now the way it is done makes sense. The raptor attack leads directly to Hammond calling. All that other stuff is not causally connected to Hammond's invitation.
Great breakdown!
4:23 oh, don't worry, we know that Book!Hammond is a jackass who put everyone in danger. Though I wonder if he's like the CEO in Timeline. Hey, can you do Timeline?
Muldoon pronounced "Gennaro" correctly in the film.
I think this was...Gennaro
I first read this book in a single summer day in 1992. I couldn't put it down. Read it nonstop cover to cover.
When I was a kid, I didn't read the original Jurassic Park novel, but I did read the novelization of the movie.
This explains so much about the film
TH-cam never ceases to amaze. Seven ads in a ~20min video. And yes, I know ‘’they’re a business’’ but they could at least try to make adverts proportional. I bet the days of unskippable ads (except for premium users of course) are not too far away.
It's been a while since I read the book, but your video is getting me in the mood to explore it once again. Though I love the movie, Crichton's novel is so much more complex. That's one thing that disappoints me about the new Jurassic World films: they take Crichton's themes and concepts and dumb them down to the point where you feel like you're watching Michael Crichton for dumbies!
Moleman: "Do you have anything by Robert Ludlum?"
Bookstore man: "Get out."
Costa Rica, to the best of my knowledge hasn’t had an active military since the 40s
Yup, 48.
It's amazing how Ian Malcolm is one of the most likeable characters in the film but one of the most irritating self inserts I've ever come across in a book. Whenever I'd come across another rant running for paragraphs (I think one of them is a full page) I'd get the heavy urge to put the book down for good.
I agree completely, and even more annoyingly, he does the same thing in the second book. Fewer rants, but they are even longer!! And also even though I know that Michael Creighton was big proponent of Chaos Theory, I also get the feeling that he didn't understand it too well. For example in The Lost World he is describing a system that is identical to Intelligent Design and when one of the other characters points this out, he simply says, "No, that's backwards thinking." Without any attempt whatsoever to explain why it isn't. I think the character of Malcolm both brought interest and attention to Chaos theory, but also because of the over simplification he also killed it because it went out of favor very quickly after the second book came out and there was absolutely no mention of Chaos Theory in the second movie at all.
So basically he's the Jurassic Park novel equivalent of Brian from Family Guy? oh god.
He Is The *GOAT*
Gennaro got the fucking shaft in the movie. He was my favorite book character. When the movie came out, I hated it for that. I have come around on it, but still hold it against it.
He basically got hybridized with Ed Regis. The same happened in The Lost World where Sarah Harding and Richard Levine became a merged character.
Exactly this. On top of that, Spielberg decided to dump Hammond's novel traits onto Gennaro so that the movie version of Hammond would be a sympathetic character.
Psh he got the shaft in the books too lol he died of I believe pneumonia between JP and TLW
@@TheOriginalPoon It was dysentery which, ironically, Crichton was inspired to use for the death of his version by the movie character’s toilet death.
The opening section where (Biosin?) board members examine Hammond’s investments one by one and finally reach the conclusion that he’s going to *clone dinosaurs* . Made me wish I could read the book for the first time again.
Great video!
I enjoyed the author's rants through Malcolm. And I don't think blogs were a thing in 1990
I always thought Malcom running from the T-Rex was his way to try and save the kids, more subtle than the movie but to show Malcom is not a complete dick like Regis.
I always felt pity for Genaro in this book, when the Park went to shit he did try to fix the problem...and still got a bullocking from the whole cast.
That idea was actually Jeff Goldblum's idea. He wanted his character of Malcolm to be more heroic. They basically combined Regis and Gennaro together. Gennaro snapped out of his state of mind once Grant sternly talked some sense into him.
@RavnDream Crichton wrote part of the script for the movie. I don't think he minded that they hybrydized two characters (Genaro and Regis) So no, it ain't a diss.
@RavnDream That's not how the timeline shook out. Crichton cam back at tge end for final revisions as well.
And the film is better than the novel. And I say that as someone who wrote a gosh darn PhD thesis on the novel. The film is less preachy and has much better characters. And again, let me stress, this is an expert opinion.
@RavnDream Oh great, that line again. I wrote this on my phone and didn't take the time to proofread it. Because it wasn't important. Happy now? So yes, I have a PhD, yes I make mistakes when I write on my phone, yes I wrote my thesis on JP, so yes I know what I'm talking about. Don't believe me? Just google my name, you'll find my thesis.
I just finished the book a couple weeks ago. I actually loved Ian in the Book way more then the Movie. Spoiler: Ian does not die and if you read The Lost World you find this out. I am about half way through The Lost World. The Lost World also really explores Dodgson store line which was set up in first but the Movies just let die.
Will there be someday, A Look at The Lost World (Novel)?
In my opinion the film perfectly captures the theme of the book, man playing god all that while blowing up the "hollywood" moments. The t-rex and kitchen scene. I've read a lot of his books my favorite being Eaters of The Dead that was made into the 13th Warrior.
I'd love If they would do a graphic novel, like how I Am Legend got a graphic novel before the Will Smith film back out.
9:57 no ..it is chaos theory its just that one can mistake it for just greed cause of the depiction of hammond.
which is one of the best changes the movie does.. as most of the things that goes wrong in the park are things that businesses entrepreneurs deals with all the time.
Funny you brought up Hammond carrying around a pygmy elephant, it was brought up that Biosyn had a meeting talking about it and the thoughts of merchandising the dinosaurs, especially if they could make pygmy dinosaurs to be sold as pets. Out of everything brought up in the book, this moment right here scared me because _this is absolutely true_ that "pet fads" exist. Imagine some dumbass parents buying a baby T-Rex for their kid just because he was super into dinosaurs, but then grew out of it and didn't want it anymore. And that's _before_ the dinosaur decides to "play rough" and take a chunk out of his face.
It's just too bad this isn't an idea that's been explored in the franchise.
Jurassic Park introduced me to the idea of complex systems being unpredictable as complexity rises. As a kid learning to program back then it wasn't something I had considered. But as an adult it weighs heavily on my decisions. Assumptions of things always going a certain way, failure to account for things missing or something else failing. This should be required reading for people who deal with or design complex systems. Definitely recommend even if you have seen the movie.
Crichton should be credited for writing about the dinosaurs and trying to be as accurate as possible. But it is fiction. Things are left out, embellished & scientists now know more. What we know about dinosaurs has changed a lot in 30 years. Velociraptors were feathered and closer to the size of turkeys. We have no idea which dinosaurs were poisonous. Leaps of logic and assumptions are made in order to create a believable world. The intent was good: We live in a sea of ignorance; never underestimate nature's danger.
It's important to realize that Crichton was more interested in ideas and discussions. He was also very arrogant. His book on climate change (State of fear?) was demonstrably false and points to the dangers of arrogance and cherry picking your facts. Think of it like the Fox News bubble where people only get their information from one point of view. It's basic human nature that the book even explores a little. But his books are designed to tell you his beliefs and it's easy to be proven right when you write the narrative.
But his books are fun, enjoyable reads. I have read Jurassic Park and his other books several times. I wish he was still around writing. If anything they offer a great opportunity to learn something and explore more after reading to see what is true and what's fiction.
Actually largest twist could be predicted if communication between teams would be better (most issues were caused by corporate side). Crichton actually was on of supporters of bird's dinosaur origin theory, what now we know is a fact (also all dinosaurs have feathers including even some pre-dinosaurs). He go around issue stating that those dinosaurs were mutants, but it is quite obvious that intended mistake was the fact that birds have reversed base sex (which is male) and some species actually are transsexual. Also velociraptor size isn't really a mistake in the movie because those are Deinonychus, just Spielberg keep name Velociraptor because it sound cooler and those were mutants anyway (and what is hilarious according to modern research, those actually are Velociraptorinae, lol).
@@TheRezro They're actually too big to even be deinonychus is the movie (those only come up to about a humans waist). The amusing thing is a species as large as those in the movie was actually discovered while they were making it, Utahraptor. I think the scientist that discovered it even considered naming the species after Spielberg.
@@CareerKnight Utahraptor raptor is actually way larger. They have only same height as Raptors in the movie move unnaturally upright (they are mutants after all). You are actually correct though that they are larger. They are closer to Dakotaraptor, now I think about it..?
@@TheRezro Dakotaraptor is probably the closest to the movie size but it was unknown when the film was made (they had dug up some of its bones but no one got around to classifying it until years later).
@@CareerKnight I know. Point is that those are mutants. In fact they probably didn't have anything to do with actual dinosaurs. Only in movies they use some DNA, but even here heavily modified. After all it was mostly marketing.
Question; how did dinosaurs like Triceratops and Apatosauruses evolve into birds? They seem to lack the body structure to develop into those particular forms
They didn't. Birds are descended from small, bipedal theropods, closely related to dinosaurs like Velociraptor. Triceratops and Apatosaurus come from two completely different branches of the dinosaur family tree, which went extinct at the end of the Mesozoic. When we say birds descended from dinosaurs, we don't mean that all dinosaurs turned into birds, we mean that birds are a highly specialized group of dinosaurs that survived the event that killed their relatives.
They didn't. Both are almost on opposite side of the Dinosaur evolution tree. Birds belong to Dinosaurs -> Saurischia -> Theropoda -> Coelurosauria -> Maniraptora (they actually are close cousins or Velociraptors and slightly further or Tyrannosaurs and nether you mentioned is even Theropoda).
@@bigcat5348 Huh, the way people have gone about saying it for years make the entire point of trivia sound extremely misleading, like how some will say that the Chicken is the closest living relative or descendant to the T-Rex [there's a whole six degrees of separation there that seems to get constantly left out]
A few more things, as I have been curious;
Did only the specific raptor dinos have feathers?
What would they have needed feathers for?
Is the Triceratops being similar in structure to the Rhinoceros just a coincidence?
They didn't. It was a completely different branch (the one that contained the raptors) that did.
@@TorridPrime217 Relative? Yes. Descendant? Did someone sleep on biology? Also according to modern research feathers appear even before dinosaurs, so even unrelated species like Pterosaur did have them. They have feathers for same reason Mammal's have fur. Ability of flight is coincidental later evolution.
That’s very interesting with Nedry’s book backstory, I kinda feel bad for him. The sense I got in the movie’s universe is that he was probably paid very well for a programmer but is one of those people who can’t help but spend money as soon as he gets it and thus is always trying to get more money out of Hammond.
And from Hammond’s POV it’s like “dude I’m paying better than another else in your field how have you already spent your salary?!”
The movie makes Nedry’s motivation a lot vaguer because movie Hammond is a significantly nicer character than the asshole his novel counterpart is.
I always thought that the JP novel was a lot better than the movie. The story was far more complex, and had a lot of substance to it. In my opinion, a combination of the film's character development with the Novel's complex story would have made for a truly great film
I would love to reboot the franchise entirely, beginning with an '80s period piece Netflix miniseries based entirely off this very idea: the film's character development and the novel's story, with each episode not devoted to the overall "get out of the park!" or "count the raptors" adventure being devoted to a specific character. One episode devoted to Arnold and his efforts to restore the park that ultimately lead to his (and the park's) downfall, one episode devoted to Nedry (from his initial hiring to his death-by-dilophosaurus), et cetera.
I'd wager we could petition Universal/Amblin to make such a series as soon as the next film in the series fails. X-D
I wouldn't exactly call it complex.
@@Dunebat I think that there should be a more style over substance period piece. We have too many 80s tributes though. Maybe a tribute to the 70s disaster films with the story being set in the early-mid 70s
Well a movie is always going to be less complex than a full novel. Curse of the medium.
I've always liked the way Grant takes out the raptors in the novel than having Rexy show up unannounced and doing it herself in the movie. I find it much more tense and gripping.
John McLane pronounced his wife's name as Holly Gen Air O in Die Hard, if that helps.
I read the book when I learned that Spielberg was turning it into a movie.
What a huge mistake that was. It was so much better than the movie, that my knowledge of it seriously detracted from my enjoyment of the movie.
The book was a thriller aimed at adults, the movie was an action adventure aimed at families.
That's how hollywood always does with movies adapted from books.
1. You can make a movie that's a faithful adaption from the book.
2. Make a movie by taken certain parts from the book and leave the rest behind.
3. Just take the name of the book but ignore the source material and make your own version.
It's why novel fans are annoyed their was never a movie that was a faithful adaption to the book like War of the Worlds, I am Legend or Starship Troopers.
I agree
You should hear what they did to Frankenstein when it was first turned into a movie. You think they did Jurrassic Park dirty, oh boy you have a surprise coming if you ever read Shelly's Frankenstein
While I like the book and would have been delighted to see more elements adapted I do prefer the film. I think there is a chilliness to Critchon's writing that is intellectually interesting but leaves me feeling a bit cold. Spielberg might be a bit schmaltzy at times but he was also far wiser than Critchon in some ways; he understood that a lot of kids going to see 'Jurassic Park' (myself included) would have been rooting for the dinos. Give me a triumphant T-Rex roaring as a banner comes down over the Costa Rican airforce bombing everything.
I agree totally, I only read Jurassic Park and The Lost World, but I found, in Lost World especially, that the characters were totally unlikeable. Like the video says, Chrichton is more interested in exploring ideas than characters, but if, in doing so, he ends up writing characters that are actively awful (Richard Levine in the second book, exhibits what can only be described as grandiose narcassistic traits, and Ian Malcolm treats people like dirt on several occasions, but neither character has this behaviour called out by anyone else, and its almost like Chrichton didn't realise he had written them as awful people).
Whatever else about the films, the characters seem to be functioning human beings with flaws they have to overcome, and of course, Jeff Goldblum could probably make reading a phone book interesting :-)
@@Bazookatone1 To be fair... these are realistic people. Everyone knows someone like Ian and Levine. People nobody calls out. Everyone knows the a-hole at work or school or in their friend group and knows that nobody ever calls them out on this behavior.
We like to pretend we "call out bad people", but that only happens online... where you have no social stakes at hand. Where you can be anonymous. In real life... nobody calls out anybody for their BS. Because, if we do, someone will call us out for our BS. Or, they'll argue with us. Cause drama. Or end friendships. This is the difference between people who "live online" and those who "live in real life".
Nobody calls out anyone in real life out of fear. Online, everyone calls out everyone because nobody has any personal vested interest or consequences for doing so or not doing so.
The things people say online are things they would never say in real life.
I've always sort of enjoyed the realistic portrayal of people in Critchon's work. They act and react pretty realistically to how people in the real world act and react. The downside to his writing, in my opinion, is the "rush to the end" it seems to take. It spends forever setting up everything and then the climax happens exceptionally quickly with the events moving at breakneck speed. Then, it's over.
Neato, I read it for a book report in elementary school.
the most painful inaccuracy of the book is that Costa Rica doesn't have an air force.
That's just, like, what they WANT you to think, man.
@@robeyclark Ha ha ha, with our budget, an air force would be a guy sticking a revolver out the window of a cessna.
Anyone else feel like this should've been a collab with Dominic Noble for Lost in Adaptation?
My best friend's stepmother read & then recommended the book him. Then he passed it on to me. I literally couldn't put the thing down, and think I got thru it in one weekend. At the time, I remember thinking it would make a great Spielberg film. The film (....as I imagined he could make it...)....played out in my head, at the turn of every page. I was elated, when a month or two later, news broke that he had obtained the rights & intended to turn the book into a major film project. About a year later, when it hit the theaters......I was there on opening day. Have to admit though....I was a little disappointed with the finished result. My bad though.....as I shouldn't have tried to superimpose my own vision of what I THOUGHT he would produce.....over the top of what he DID produce. In retrospect, I like it more now. Some of what he didn't include from the book DID eventually make it into a few of the later films.
Hold the frack up, SFDebris is on youtube now?
BINGE MODE ACTIVATED
You keep telling in your videos that Malcolm is partialy wrong about the fall of the park, but the park was out of control long before Nedry sabotaged the system.
Dinosaurs got of the island and were reproducing. For me that is the fall of the park (and I think that is what Michael Crichton was going for), Nedry's sabotage only makes the illusion of control disapear. After that all the problems became fully apperent, but they were always there. Malcolm is right.
I read the novel just as it had hit bookstores, way before the film hit theaters (still have the hardcover first edition on my shelf). I guess that's probably why I've always been kinda disappointed with the film - which I thought was too Spielbergian and superficial even back then.
The novel is far grittier and has more "bite", so to speak. The movie OTOH bathes in the superficial glory of its special effects, adds an unnecessary romance and Spielberg's tired "absent father"-trope. It also turns Hammond from a greedy a-hole into a kindly grandfather-figure. That one probably annoyed me the most about the film.
But more or less all characters are way more black and white in the film. Nedry is another great example. In the book, I was kinda rooting for him and could totally sympathize with his motivation to steal the embryos. In the film, he's just a greedy, sweaty comic-book villain with an annoying laugh.
Nice editing work 🤣🤣🤣
I think one of the things that, since getting older and realising the parts of the book which are pure satire, Jurassic Park is an incredibly angry book. Critchon must have been processing what had been happening since the 70s (since West World at the very least) and how it had mutated into Corporate greed.
The satirical elements are especially noteworthy when Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric at that time when that patent mentioned at the start was generating controversy, was the guy who made most of our lives freaking miserable (Walsh's reach hits nearly every single part of this globe of ours) by becoming the trend setter who began to cull staff by performance (10% of his staff at General Electric every year were fired if they didn't maintain their performance... Though it didn't matter anyway, because it didn't actually improve performance or help the company in the long term, but rather it made the Stock Market value of the company look good. Almost like human sacrifice to some degree to the Blood Gods on Wallstreet) and ultimately hollowed out production of General Electric to make it a brand entity that was draining talent out rather than a manufacturer. And he became a trend setter for the next 40 years which made all of our lives quite stressful.
Manufacturing costed money. Mergers and acquisitions, alongside some "creative accounting" could generate money, especially when you did insider trading and sold it off at a profit but made it worthless in the meantime.
Walsh wasn't the guy who started the whole outsourcing to other countries like India and East Germany, but he was one of the people who promoted it heavily, causing a large number of more rural communities that needed the factories that GE built to keep the places afloat. Walsh was the guy who helped to develop the idea that "Well let's shut those places down (even though they're generating a profit) and use that money to help cook the books with mergers and other shady deals.
Why mention all this? I THINK it's fairly certain to that Hammond was based on his type (if not Jack Walsh himself). Cutting corners in his business and losing his god damned mind when he hears something he doesn't want to hear, defrauding investors and trying to save money that will cost people their lives. The kind of person who's POSSIBLY a genuine honest to goodness psychopath with little concern for people or anything beyond his own personal gain who tend to sit around a desk in tall towers that hold the lives of millions in their hands and it means nothing to them.
I think I prefer the books ending for Hammond. Fitting that he brings it about himself.
the pair of novels were much darker and complex. spielberg had to sanitize a great deal of the plot. as a cinematic frenchise, JP is now very much it's own thing, so i wonder if we'll ever see a faithful adaptation, possibly as a t.v.series.
6:05 That sounds like Jurassic World. The beginning of the Indominus
Despite the complex themes, I think the author made a mistake when mentioning the Costa Rican military. Because it has none.
Maybe the army was Militaires Sans Frontiers?
Well, the story *does* seem to be set in a slightly alternate timeline/near future, so maybe we can chalk it up to that.
They have small bodies of troops to keep order. Gooooogle it.
Too bad they never followed up on the raptors ghat made it to the main land. Though the book almost implies they aren't ingen raptors, more interesting ideas.
Wasn't there an off-hand remark towards the end of the novel about how the ship's crew had found those dinosaurs and killed them before they reached the mainland?
@@MLennholm pretty sure not. They turned back the boat but its not those raptors I am talking about. The nest raptors are implied to have escaped. Also mentioned in the lost world.
The Jurassic Park Film Came Out When I Was 7 And I Was Entranced, I Would Watch It On VHF Almost Weekly For Years,Then I Read The Book For The First Time At 12 And Have Went On To Read It And It's Sequel 20 Times Each,
I Have Michael Crichton And To A Lesser Extent Spielberg To Thank For My Love Of Books And Film.
And Thank You For The Review ❤️
3:17 Obviously Chuck has never watched Die Hard, then.
See, when people discuss cloning dinosaurs, they always use Jurassic Park as an example as to why it's a bad idea as if they will escape and kill a ton of people. But to me (even though it's clearer in the book) the movie was enough for me to understand that the issue was greed.
The book is better than the movie. However, i don't think that Jurassic Park is a bad movie, it just diverges to much from its source material.
I find it funny though, that Genarro is one of the 3 major point of view characters in the book, that he survives the whole mess, while he is just the first one to die in the movie. Oh, and Muldoon also survives in the book - while Hammond dies. Malcolm is declared dead in the book as well but this is left vague enough, so that Chrichton could revive him for the sequel...
The velociraptors in the movie:
Huh huh he dummy he ran into in a reflection
The velociraptors in the book:
It will cut you open in the darkness
I think the Mad Magazine parody had the concept down pat... "Jurass-Has-Had-It Park".
I'm surprised how much of this I'm remembering as you go through it, considering that it's close to 20 years ago that I last read this novel. The Jurassic Park book is certainly very technical and very preachy, but it's defiantly not forgettable.
I’ll be honest, I’m glad that they adapted out certain deaths, because I don’t think I’m could handle infants being killed even in fiction.
The abridged version of the novel on audio, IIRC, even glosses over that particular plot point. Just describing everything but the little girl being attacked on the island (since it was the catalyst for the investigation. There's a reason they ended up adapting that scene for the sequel) in a matter-of-fact tone like a news report. Same thing happened with Hammond's death scene.
@@kyuven huh, interesting.
In ( a half hearted ) defense of Ian Malcolm making an ill-advised run for it; he panicked plain and simple. A panicked mind is not analytical mind, it is not a thinking mind it is a reactionary animal.
Ok is feel wrong if don’t use the movie theme song When you do movie review
You can't trap raptors in a closet. They're too smart.
They are literally just birds. They are smart but not that smart. Smart as dog as best.
@@TheRezro : Even as a young nerdy child I understood the basic idea behind cranial capacity and how scientists said dinosaurs were exceptionally stupid relative to what we're used, not just with mammals, but also reptiles and birds. I could let the super-smart raptors slide in the first movie because the first movie was great, but it's so schlocky in every sequel.
@@itsallfunandgames723 To be honest in Crichton work those actually were mutants, as he personally was supporter of Bird's Dinosaur origin, before it become a fact (in this case whole sex change actually make sense).
The Critic had some good moments.
@@CareerKnight This guy gets it.
And I have never heard the name pronounced Genarro
Michael Chrichtons preaching against strawmen approach would later culminate when he started denying the mere existence of a global warming.
He is smart and he makes good points from time to time, but he lacks humility and self reflection when forming his opinions.
or lord, Crichton's a climate change denier? ......god, that's as bad as J.K Rowling using garbage pseudoscience and her position as a "Harvard graduate" to spread 5th Grade level transphobia. What's up with these big time authors getting a bug up their ass about a hill to die on that ultimately reveals them as not only such stupid people for being such learned, "intelligent" people but also TERRIBLE people using their position and their ego and self-righteously smug, foolish self-conclusions to be a hurtful idiot about things far beyond their own scope?
ᵗʰᵉNight★Star Crichton’s been dead for 10+ years, just to let you guys know, he ain’t doing much of anything, anymore, LOL.
Even after multiple reads, I still can only see Dennis Nedry as another victim of greed. I can't blame him for anything he did.
Why does everyone use the term high concept like it means something.
Low concept = monster movie
High concept = monster movie about a monster theme park
The term “high concept” in this usage is more comparable to the term “gimmick,” rather than denoting something that is the opposite of “low.” A more fit opposing term to “high concept” might be “generic concept.” In your example, a given monster movie could be considered “generic” if there are a number of other movies that follow a similar formula. It would be “high concept” when there is a gimmick or trick added to the generic concept. (In this case, a theme park for a resurrected extinct species of monster.) It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s classier or more intelligent if it’s “high concept,” just that there’s some kind of twist to it.
Hammond is definitely the closest thing to a human antagonist the movie has. His greed and corner cutting make the park incredibly insecure, which frequently hinder the efforts the various characters make in the name of survival. When the crisis is going on he goes full head in the sand, forcibly insisting Wu join him for dinner and refusing to admit anything is going wrong.
Maybe the biggest difference between Book!Hammond and Movie!Hammond is that Movie!Hammond eventually *realizes* that he was the villain... and that he wasn't pointlessly rude to everyone.
1:25 They would still be a dinosaur. That's like saying a flightless bird. Yes its flightless but it's still a bird or a non polar bear is still a bear.
Spared no expense
Muldoon pronounces Gennaro's name as "Gen-AH-ro", too, in the film. Everyone else mispronounces it. (Makes sense: Muldoon is one of the most competent characters.)
Muldoon was competent to a point in my opinion. 2 things that made me question his competence came up in the film though. 1) It is stated that he knows more about the raptors than anyone. If that is so, how did he not know that they were trapping him by giving him a viable target? 2) why waste so much time setting his gun up? Couldn't he have done that in the bunker? He wasted so much time that in the end might not have made a difference to his life, but may have saved some trouble for the others.
@@shawnconder4984 Makes you wonder if he was a drunk in the film, too, but that got cut out by Spielberg.
@@Dunebat possibly. I mean the lack of logic in not having your weapon in a ready to fire position when hunting some of the most dangerous and intelligent hunters is staggering. Not to mention his weapon of choice was a 12 gage pump
@Terix Septim well I believe I would have been ok with his death had they not had the scene of Grant telling the kid just exactly how the raptors would kill him. It made me go "huh. The guy who only knows these things from bones knows way more about them than the expert who has watched them for however long they've been on the island".
@Terix Septim I think that flawed gene was a retcon in the Lost World novel. I don't remember them saying it in the movie, but I dew remember the part in the novel where the Biosyn team were going to get the Rex eggs and Malcolm and his team watched it on a CCTV when it all went pear shaped, like is prone to happen in this series, Malcolm comments on Dodgson standing still because of a theory Grant made about the Rex's vision and how wrong it was. I do agree though that Grant had way too much info from the get go in this movie. Although it makes me curious how much more he would have had in JP 3 if they'd have went ahead with the original plan of Grant living on Sorna studying the dinosaurs there.
I want a tiny pet elephant..
cmon that's the only way they're gonna survive as a genus. all the cute but feasible to feed.
Did you miss the part where they are miserable little bastards?
oh like it's so much fun to be a regular elephant. they die of starvation when their teeth wear down to nothing!
19:24 Ha ha ha , Crichton gave us an army? Still, I'm giving Spielberg the cake for making our landlocked capital a beach.
It sounds like the screenplay I wrote - "BILLY AND THE CLONOSAURUS!"
Don't the Compy's get used to eat the other dinosaurs shit? Then they eat Hammond... almost as if Crichton was trying to say something about him isn't it?
Best book ever written
... is either "Moby Dick" or "Les Misérables"
But Costa Rica has no military...
Anyone else here think that Crichton has a serious hard on for mathematicians who are full of themselves???
6:10
It's amusing that those expectations were shattered by the popularity of Jurassic Park itself.
So many of those outdated views of dinosaurs survived in the minds of the average person due to half-arsed dinosaur books that just copied older books (with chains of copying going back to before the dinosaur renaissance) without doing any real investigation into the state of paleontology at the time of writing.
I wonder how many other books/movies had plot-lines rendered unbelievable by their own popularity (and not just in the genre-savvy sense).
It's not as if anything accurate at the time would still be considered accurate today. it's all rewritten every few years. I say just make them look cool
besides it's canonical they were genetic chimerae.
@@KairuHakubi Fact remains that these dinos are genetic experiments. In the book it is explained by Wu's thoughts that Wu took many, many liberties when creating these animals. He could do anything he wanted with the power of genetics, just like creating figures out of clay.
@@gokaury _ees what I say!_
Ian Malcolm's status as an author insertion is kind of endearing in a "child's first drawing" kind of way. Sure, it's painfully ugly, but you can appreciate what he was trying to do.
It does, however, become outright _unbearable_ in the sequel. It gets really tiring at some point, to the point where you just want the book to have a "skip" button like videogames have. His speeches become longer and even less relevant to the story.
Costa Rica doesn't have a military.
Nobody ever looks at Jurassic park as a video game
Why torment yourself? They made, what, maybe a handful of good games and a bunch of "so-so" clones?
Because they suck? Only worth mentioning is Dino Crisis.
@@TheRezro Hey, Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis and Jurassic Park: The Game were decent.
@@Dunebat Decent is not good enough.
Are the Lego games the best in the franchise?
Jurassic Park was originally going to be a children's picture book.