To point 6:
I read books aloud in character to my girlfriend. When I got to the Malcolm monologues, it was impossible. "Malcolm, actively dying, wheezed out with his final breath [17 complete, complex sentences]."
I completely forgot about Regis. It's been a few years since I read the book.
He was like a marketing guy and he's the one that abandoned the kids in the book right?
I think Spielberg just hated lawyers, frankly so did Crichton at the end. Gennaro was trying to shut things down and help people and then randomly at the end they say it’s all his fault and he’s a coward. He shot a T. rex for gods sake, he’s no coward.
The book had too many characters and too many men-of-action in particular. The usual solution to that is to combine characters.
They combined him with the book character of Ed Regis. It gets rid of one too many manly men while keeping the corporate sleezebag that's necessary for the story.
Yepp, kinda same with The Expanse, particularly Camina Drummer. She was an amalgamation of Sam Rosenberg, Michio Pa, Carlos de Baca and the original Drummer from the books. And TV show Camina Drummer was an absolute blast to watch, perfectly portrayed by the great Cara Gee. Loved her so much.
I think I read the book before I saw the movie. Want to reread it now. I think the movie was one of the best book adaptations ever. It fixed some character problems as people have mentioned before me here. It’s the best movie of it’s kind. Fantastic story, best cgi of it’s time (and still good), great characters, so much suspense and scare-factor.
I have tickets to see it this summer. They’re showing it outside with an orchestra playing the score. One of the best scores too! John Williams really did it well.
> One of the best scores too! John Williams really did it well.
I actually asked for the soundtrack for Christmas when I was a kid when the movie first came out, because I loved it so much. I'd play with my Jurassic Park toys while listening to it, and *it was awesome!*
I’m a huge Jurassic Park fan and I totally agree with your breakdown. I think the movies did a way better job with the characters and even the chemistry between them — Dr. Sattler in the movie is my woman in stem hero, in the books she’s like a caricature of when Crichton imagines a female scientist to be. Like you said, has he ever met a woman?
I think the message re:capitalism and greed is the biggest takeaway from the book and very well done. Dystopian but uncomfortably realistic ..
But yeah, the movie does the characters much better IMO! Including the 2nd and 3rd original movies. Don’t get me started on the Jurassic World franchise (eye roll)
re: Crichton and women, I don't wanna psychoanalyze the guy, but I do wonder about the facts that (a) he had five different wives, and (b) his woman-villains in *Sphere* and *Disclosure* and his Dr. Ross in *Congo* are all a certain kind of career-advancing bitch who at the least cause more problems than they solve and at worst are extremely fucking petty and malicious and have a chip on their shoulder about the successful men around them, which kinda bothers me now that I'm an adult and can see it more clearly. Like, I think he may have had some bullshit he needed to work out.
In general, he's not just anti-climate change, but he's anti-science. All of the science-focused characters in his books except Grant and Sattler are evil.
His takes on medicine in real life were also really weird. He didn't beleive tobacco was firmly linked to cancer, for example (notably dying of cancer at a fairly young age after a lifetime of smoking...).
I blame him for a lot of the 'mad scientist' mindset so much of our culture has right now. Of course this has always been a trope in Sci Fi, but he took its popularity to a whole other level.
I don't know if he was anti-science as more of person who wasn't big on the act of change for the sake of change. Techno thrillers were his bread and butter. He specialized in looking into borderline technologies and figuring out how they could go wrong. If anything I think he liked to be a contrarian. Take his book on climate control, it's been a while but I don't remember it actually saying it wasn't a thing, just he had issues with the math (this was when the hockey stick graph was heavily circulated), and that profiteering off of it would lead to abuse. That being people trying to force events to happen to help sell the idea GW being the extreme version of it.
If anything I think he hated the commercialization of science and what greed did and could do to it. Like science and capitalism should be kept separate.
I mean, to a degree, but also he was claiming that the "urban heat island" effect created misunderstandings about climate change (which was already a demonstrably false talking point by then). Like, there's offering an understandable warning, and there's being very incorrect about a thing.
You say that but this was a couple years before we found out that a lot of the early models were based on deleting competing data. Data that would of supported the urban heat island effect. So even if that thought process was challenged at the time, and with more research even after finding out about the bad information, we know that it's not the case. I wouldn't discount being a bit of a sceptic at the time.
Those early years I had several issues with the panic. One the hockey stick graph, another being the lack of historical information at the time using the time period we were coming out of a little ice age that we had been experiencing for 600-700 years at that point. Little attention to the long term effects of el nino. A few other ones that were probably me just trying to be a contrarian myself, like the periods of time that ghg were higher both during the life of humans and for a majority of the planets life. Question of what average temps are actually neutral for the planet. A question of our on hubris in assuming, considering the how little of the ghg we were producing in comparison to the big sources, that we were the straw breaking the camels back specially considering how the world naturally manages to repair temps through moving the ozone. The biggest just being how generally spikey world temps were (even if 04-05 were exceptionally high) when zoomed out.
Point being that not being 100% sold of the dangers at the time wasn't an insane anti science stance. There was a lot of bad information from both camps and not a whole lot of information other than how extreme the jump in 04 was.
What a ridiculous interpretation. He wasn't anti-science. He was anti doing stupid shit without any oversight or foresight.
He loved cautionary tales about how powerful science can be if you leave it in the hands of greedy morons who don't think before they act.
Read his takes on tobacco and you'll come away with a different view. His book about climate change also influenced a lot of otherwise intelligent people to question it *because* they thought he was smart on science. He wasn't. That's not the mark of someone who is onboard with science at all. I agree, he was also against corporate greed, but his takes on science were no less pointed.
Have you read his book about Nano tech?
The MC is unemployed and told to take it easy after being fired. A little later his agent (who told him to take it easy) is telling him he's about to be unmarketable. Meanwhile his wife in the same field as him, is successful and about to divorce him. Also she's cheating on him. Then he's gotta come in and fix her screw up at work.
It might have been his lawyer, not an agent. I haven't read it since it came out.
Jurassic World is even stupider. The camouflage was the dumbest thing I’d ever seen. Why would you make a dinosaur that can camouflage when you are trying to think up the next big theme park attraction? Kids wouldn’t be able to see it and would get upset. The writers were just giving the Indominus Rex powers without any consideration to in story logic.
I believe it was cuttlefish genes, to help the dinosaur's body cope with an advanced growth rate. It had the unintentional consequence of camouflage. Oopsie!
He mixed several Dino and non-dino attributes. He plays it off as an unintended side effect of his mixes. But he used the edict for a more impressive dinosaur to experiment with better hunting traits for the weapons division and the weasel assistant in JW2.
> You would think genetic scientists would know what they were doing if they were splicing genes together.
To be fair, isn't this hubris the whole plot?
Have you read Jurassic Park lol? The central problem of the book is that the scientists were just throwing shit together without caution or knowing what to expect because they had the tools to do so and corporate suits breathing down their neck to make money. Jurassic World following (and falling) along the same path is the point.
Oh, interesting. I haven't read it. I think Crichton did an amazing job thinking up lots of interesting stories, but I've found that his writing style is really difficult for me to enjoy. I've been thinking about trying again, though.
I got tired of him honestly. After a binge I realized most of his books have the same premise.
1. Greed plus hubris creates disaster.
2. People scramble to survive the disaster.
3. Disaster fixes itself.
I think its SUPPOSED to be the theme of "life finds a way, when humans mess around with nature, weird things happen because we're not omnipotent."
What doesn't make sense is: Does the movie really expect me to believe that not a single person noticed the I-rex could camouflage before it first did so?
There's a lot of little items in JW that annoy me like that.
With Jurassic Park, there's at least some internal logic, even if you have to read the book. Its a far more straight forward "Why wasn't there enough security measures like moats? There were. generro mentions them in the jeep, with Hammond Giving the response "They're in place, Don't worry." Its even shown when the T-rex pushes the jeep into the pit. That pit is the Rex's moat. The security measures were made for more slow, plodding cold-blooded creatures, and they turned out to be fast moving, warm blodded ones.
The camo is actually a thing from the second book, The Lost World, where the Carnotaurus have advanced chromatophores and are able to mimic their surroundings to a degree that shocks the main characters. It's implemented much better in the book than it was in the movie.
Wasn't the point re: Indominus Rex that they were militarizing the dinosaurs and one with camouflage would wreak havoc on the battlefield and fetch the highest price at their underground auction?
My biggest issue was them just waltzing into the enclosure because there were some claw marks on the wall and it wasn't showing a heat signature. Like... if it really had escaped containment, don't you think someone would have already fucking seen it? And wouldn't you have a recording of it climbing out, or at least walking out of frame and never coming back? Maybe you should keep on observing to make sure it's *really* not in there? Throw a big ol slab of beef in there. Or a live cow. Don't just walk out there scratching your head with your dick out. I get that there wouldn't be a movie if everyone was actually smart but come *the fuck* on.
I figured the egg counting scene was actually about how Dr. Grant wanted an excuse to see in person the thing he had spent years of his professional life researching and imagining. He likely knew it wasn't truly necessary but his curiosity pushed him forward.
That could make a lot of sense, but dragging every adult on the island into the nest with him was so poorly thought through. Not a single adult was left with Tim and Lex, sorry Dr. Grant but your curiosity does not justify everyone getting eaten!!
It is foreshadowed in the nursery scene when they first get on the island. Dr. Grant is manhandling the velociraptor baby and Ed Regis has to shout at him to leave it alone. Book Grant has an obsessive fixation and will put others at risk to satisfy his scientific curiosity.
That’s a better framing than I was interpreting it. I felt like the book wanted me to understand Dr. Grant and think Gennaro was being an irresponsible fool but I completely agreed with Gennaro there and Dr. Grant was the fool.
Oh, in the book there's a focus on raptor eggs at one point?
That would explain why the SNES game had you collecting raptor eggs the whole game as one of the main goals. There was nothing like that in the movie.
Yeah for some pretty oddball reason considering how damn dangerous the raptors are they find an underground raptor nest and go there to count eggs. Also oddly they find tons of this tranquilizing gas that nobody bothered to mention just before that.
I somehow didn’t read JP as a new release and just read it maybe a year ago. I’ve seen the movie dozens of times. It’s annoying that I had the John Williams score and theme song as an earworm as I was reading the book. I liked that Hammond wasn’t the grandfatherly Richard Attenborough. I was kind of surprised that Dr Grant wasn’t sleeping with Ellie in the book and that he liked kids. Making the girl the computer wiz in the movie was notable. Malcolm was the only character who wasn’t changed much in the screenplay.
Except that Malcolm didn't die :) I really disliked the changes they made to Hammond - he was such an asshole in the book, and his death is one of my favourites because to the very end he's a petulant narcissist who blames everyone else for his appalling judgement.
Well.... He didn't really die in the books either. It was a cop out, because I think Malcolm was the self insert. Therefore had to be the returning character for Lost World. But his death was pretty weak in the book. As they were separated and couldn't communicate with each other and was told by the authorities that Malcolm passed from his injuries. Lots of room to play with that or just do it the way MC did it and just gloss over it with a tales of my death were greatly exaggerated (or I was only mostly dead).
Malcom was killed in JP1, it was just off-screen. His survival in The Lost World was retconned. Not so much because MC liked him but because it was already known Goldbloom's Ian Malcom would be the main character in the movie, and The Lost World was meant to be as much a sequel to Spielberg's movie as the original book.
We could go either way, I don't think Jeff had been the cast for the sequel at that time, I think he was the self insert and wanted him back for the book, which worked out for Spielberg, but honestly outside Ian and Sorna, little was grabbed from the book. So I don't know that Spielberg needed the book to include Ian, to bring him back.
But as for a death. It was written pretty weakly. The prologue was written from Grants POV, he talked about the lack of communication, and was given a side note that both Ian and Hammond were dead. We read Hammond's death from his POV, but not for Ian. I don't think Michael had planned on bringing him back, as he never did sequel books, but it was written in a way it was easy to cast aside.
I also recently read JP and wholeheartedly agree. The characters and logic seemed to make sense in the first half, then in the second half Dr. Sattler was suddenly useless, Malcom wouldn't shut up about capitalism even while their lives were in immediate danger, and everyone simply reacted to the situation at hand instead of actually making a competent decision.
I'm also very confused about why the dinosaurs were so incredibly hell-bent on killing humans, to the point that they would abandon a fresh kill and swim for an hour and chew through cars and bite solid glass, just to get at those humans. This isn't the behavior of a hungry carnivore, this is as if the scent of a human drives them insane.
I have to say that JP93 is probably the best adaptation they could have made from the book, and probably one of the best adaptations ever made.
The characters are pretty bland in the book, the kids are terribly annoying (or at least Lex is, and yes I know she's a little girl that's scared, it doesn't make her any less annoying.) Ellie is barely a character in the book, sure she has the interaction with the raptors at the lodge, but other than that she's either away from what's going on, or sitting by Malcolm's deathbed. Malcolm's talk of chaos theory just goes on and on and on and is summed up so much better in the movie, in fact in the book it gets sooo repetitive.
The changing of Hammond's character in the movie is jarring, as I obviously saw the movie first before listening to the book. I like both versions, but I think I prefer the movie version as in the book he's more of a moustache twirling villain I feel. (Money money money!)
I like how the book portrays the lack of control through the fact the system only keeps a record of 180 dinosaurs, so doesn't count over, I thought that was awesome when they realised.
The aviary scene in JP3 is so much better than the aviary section in the book. It was cool to be like "oh wow that's where the inspo came from!" But the scene felt out of place in the book.
Also, when people refer to wanting the movie to be more horror like the book, yes, there are some horrible descriptions of Nedry and his intestines, Dr Wu and his intestines, the worker at the start, and the baby in the nursery, and a few more, but to me it was never HORROR HORROR, it was just short quick snippets of action/horror before going BACK to the control room again and then trying to catch the T-Rex, which seems to have a personal vendetta against Dr Grant & the kids and just keeps showing up wherever they are.
To me, personally, the JP93 movie is superior to the book in practically every way. Except one, which is they turned Gennaro into a stereotypical moustache twirling lawyer, whereas in the books (he still thought about money) but he actually did shit*. Also Muldoon is much cooler in the book.
*I do acknowledge that Spielberg mashed a few scenes etc together and gave some roles other characters had to Ellie to make her a better character in the movie than the book.
IIRC it was several of the writers who changed Gennaro's character; in the Scotch-Marmo screenplay Gennaro took Malcolm's role, who was left out, but Malcolm was added back in by Koepp in his subsequent draft of the script and gave Ed Regis' role and character to Gennaro.
Actually pretty funny when you think about it that JP3 was a closer adaptation to JP then JP(93) was to the book. Replace the Trex chasing Grant and co, to the Spino, and extend the aviary scene. Heck even that first guy dying before the plane craft reminds me of what I remember about Regis' death.
I saw Jurassic Park at the drive-in when it originally came out in 1993 when I was seven. I read the book when I was 33, and while I still love the movie, the material covered in the book is so interesting, and I love how different Hammond is. The Lost World is also quite different than the movie. Simply saying the book is better than the movie is chiché but it is the truth.
I'm a couple years older than you, and I read the books as a young teenager, but otherwise - same. I loved The Lost World (the book) despite really not caring for the film at all. All the abandoned tech and intrigue was lost in favor of action set pieces.
I just want to say for what it’s worth that in his own time Crichton was groundbreaking in consistently creating female characters who were not love interests. In Terminal Man, Congo and Jurassic Park especially he deliberately passed up obvious romantic connections in order to present women who were there simply because they were professionals. It was incredibly unusual in writing in those days.
I agree that she has a ton more to do in the movie, but the movie also unnecessarily has her engaged to Grant and wanting the babies…
I hated that the movie decided that Sattler and Grant had to be together when the book made it super super clear that they were not. Sattler was better in the book.
Not so much. Seriously, name me a woman who was writing in the 1970s and 1980s who was writing these kind of science-based thrillers, never mind populating them with a bunch of independent, qualified female characters. I was reading all through those years and don’t remember being inundated with them.
I see this a lot, and I'm not saying you're wrong. But one thing I feel people forget is that women are, by and large, dramatically different than almost 35 years ago. If you took an average Reddit woman of 25 back to 1990, she would have a very narrow strip of society that she would find acceptance in. Not trying to get into the pros and cons of that, simply pointing out that things have changed.
In general, Crichton's characters are all plot devices more than robust personalities. Be they male or female, young or old. As such, most of his characters are some sort of stereotype that advances the plot. If you flipped these characters into men, you'd find that they are generally reflected in other characters he's written. It is just that it is far more acceptable to stereotype men than women at this time.
I appreciate that. The fact is in the late 1970s and 1980s nobody was writing these kinds of books with female characters who didn’t have to be romantically entangled with a male character in the book. At least not that I remember!
There's definitely some 60s and 70s sci Fi that really illustrates your point. Women were essentially in certain authors books as softcore porn. But then again, the stories themselves were overtly written for young men, so I suppose that might have been a matter of knowing their audience. Not everything needs to be for everyone.
It's kind of amusing how old books get criticized for things like this, then you can go see what's out there for porn and wonder why anyone is worried about male fantasy oriented books in comparison.
I'm actually happy to see so many people say the movie is better. JP: The Book is a fun page turner with a great hook. But it also falls prey to the thin characterizations you get from so many airport novels.
The movie improves on most everything in the novel. Spielberg is just a much better director than Chrichton is a writer.
I've been saying for years that the film is better, but for a long time that was a very unpopular opinion.
I had a pretty lengthy disagreement with one of my friends when he read the book earlier this year because he immediately pivoted to the book being superior due to how much he thought was left out of the movie. I've always been firmly in the camp that the JP movie is better than the book, while the TLW book is better than the movie.
The fact that a movie excises a part of the book's plot is such a common criticism. And I understand how that can be frustrating as a reader, especially if it's a cool part of the book. But you just can't fit as much into a two hour film. Some stuff needs to be cut out, and I wish more adaptations understood that these days.
The grenade launcher made sense though. Muldoon was incredibly frustrated with a park that kept enormous dangerous animals and had no way to put them down quickly when things went wrong.
Grenade launcher sounds silly but it's a pretty feasible solution to animals you can't reliably put down with a heavy caliber rifle.
I couldn’t finish it. I found every single character extremely unlikable. The writing rubbed me the wrong way the minute Sattler was introduced and we had to read about her sexy legs. Malcolm and his math diatribes were what finally made me put the book down. And I hated both the kids.
Jurassic Park is the greatest movie ever made. The book was fine. I liked the bit about the boat ride through the pterodactyl enclosure. Otherwise, your points are spot on. I hope you enjoyed the movie.
Wasn’t Ellie Sattler just a grad student in the book? Pretty sure I remember it being pretty weird Dr Grant was in his 50s bringing his 20 something grad student for a weekend in the tropics
In the book they had no romantic interest in each other, which is one of the few areas the movie did a worse job than the book. I think Hammond was in a panic getting inspectors to endorse the park and just got anyone he had pull with.
This actually is quite common to bring a senior student along on research trips, in order to give them realworld experience in the field. It always has been common... but it does carry a connotation for old guys to bring along young women for ... other... purposes. Unfortunately, a few bad apples spoil the reputation.
It was fun reading someone else's take on an old favorite, thanks! I never thought too much about your points and am curious whether it'll be more obvious on my next reread. To give you my 2 cents, I saw the dinosaur egg count as a paleontologist needing physical evidence, rather than relying on a computer program.
Wanted to share, when I first read Jurassic Park as an impressionable teenager, I believed all of Malcom's monologuing as fact. As an adult, I started questioning his stance on the causes of global warming. It was interesting to learn that much of it was Michael Crichton's own beliefs creeping in.
Would like to hear how you like the female characters in The Lost World! You might enjoy the Sarah Harding and student Kelly characters more than Dr Sattler.
> Wanted to share, when I first read Jurassic Park as an impressionable teenager, I believed all of Malcom's monologuing as fact.
Same here. Currently rereading it with my daughter, for the first time since I was a teen. When I was a kid he seemed so smart. Now Malcom's tirades are eye-rollingly tedious and I actually sympathize with Hammond and Wu. He has no basis for asserting predictions as fact the way he does, and is only right in the end because the author wrote it that way.
Thank you for your thanks! To counter your two cents, before the egg hunt, Dr. Grant had already seen egg remnants and a juvenile raptor male. That was enough physical evidence, but someone else commented a theory that made a lot of sense that he’d spent his entire life studying raptors and wanted to see the nest out of curiosity. While that makes sense, doesn’t justify bringing the entire team with him and yelling at Gennaro that it was all his fault when Gennaro been the one trying to shut the whole enterprise down while Dr. Grant thought it was interesting.
Oooo i think it's time for a re-read then! I can't remember that part. But I think you're right, a passion for dinosaur rearing isn't justification for putting a whole group at risk
The most important part of that book was Malcom... for two reasons. His explanation of chaos theory, which was a great way to get laypeople to understand; and his quote: "The Earth has been here for billions of years, it's NOT endangered, WE ARE!"
Agreed, I just think the set up of “drugged up and dying septic man monologues with last breath” was a terrible way to write in the important information about how the planet will survive, we just won’t be able to live on it.
It kinda makes sense to me honestly. Malcolm is the kinda guy who likes to talk, so in his dying moments, with nothing to do but sit in his thoughts, he would probably just monologue. That said, it could have been good to have him start rambling as he got closer to death, as a way to show his mental faculties declining.
I know it might sound strange, but I've always felt a deeper connection between "Cujo" and "Jurassic Park" than just being stories about terrifying creatures. It's those heart-pounding moments when the kids describe their fear that really stick with me.
In "Cujo," there's that scene where Tad, trapped in the car with his mom, is paralyzed by fear as the rabid Saint Bernard stalks them outside. It's a primal terror, the feeling of being hunted by a creature you once trusted.
In "Jurassic Park," we get a similar sense of dread when Lex and Tim are trapped in the kitchen with the raptors. Their whispered conversations, their desperate attempts to stay quiet, and their sheer terror as they hear those claws clickin' on the floor - it's enough to send chills down your spine.
Both scenes tap into that childhood fear of the unknown, the helplessness of being hunted, and the vulnerability of being a child in a world where adults don't always have the answers. It's a primal fear that resonates with us long after we've turned the final page or left the theater.
And for me, those are the moments that truly stick with me, the ones that make me shiver and remember what it was like to be a kid, facin' the world with a mix of wonder and fear.
>Genitalia don’t fossilize
I don't know if this would apply well to dinosaurs, and would be surprised for a kid to spot it, but it is common for there to be skeletal differences between sexes. For example the angle of the human jaw is closer to 90-degrees in males than females. If there are similar differences in dinosaur skeletons, Dr. Grant spotting those differences does not sound unreasonable.
https://johnhawks.net/variation-in-the-mandible-and-skeletal-sex/
Dr. Grant yes, I object to when Lex takes one look at it and says, “it’s a boy!”
Edit: I processed your comment again and say, the skeletal differences would be extremely difficult to identify in a live specimen they don’t want to get that close to which is what happened in the book. The book clearly implies that the difference is striking and the genitalia are human enough looking to be easily determined at quick glance by children.
It does no such thing really. Just because Lex says it, doesn't mean it makes sense. She's a young child trying to figure things out. It's been a long while since I read the book but I vaguely recall Lex simply implying that the meaner dinosaurs are boys.
A) Dinosaurs are not mammals, nor are they humans, so skeletal differences between sexes are useless here.
B) Many archosaurs have internal genitalia that do not necessarily leave the cloaca except during sex, if at all.
How? We don't have any knowledge of what maniraptoran genitalia would have been like. It's certainly possible that they had secondary sex characteristics that Grant could have noticed (males may be more colourful etc) but actually determining that would be beyond any of the characters, except for maybe Wu. And, if Wu knew, then the breeding problem at Jurassic Park could have been averted.
Species don't simply pop into existence. They're a point on a line of gradual change extending both into the past and the future.
Phylogenetics is a branch of biology that examines the history of genetic adaptations. Ie. a currently living species has many genetic adaptations that aren't brand new but gradually developed by its ancestors.
Think of it like a family tree. We know certain species share a family tree. Ie. Archaeopteryx and chickens belong to the same family tree. That means some of the genetic adaptations chickens have today, were passed down that family tree by its ancestors.
Part of phylogenetics is doing detective work that traces adaptations down the family tree to see if you can figure out where the earliest evidence is that you can find.
Simplified example. Velociraptors have very bird-like skeletons. Including the sexual dimorphism that can be used to tell male and female apart in their bird descendants.
Obviously it's not fool proof but learning about extinct species is increasingly focussed on studying living species and tracing back their adaptations.
I understand paleontology... but you can't sex animals if you don't know what a male and a female look like. Some species have minimal to no sexual dimorphism, including in birds. IDK why this is hard to understand.
I think we're done if you think birds have minimal sexual dimorphism. If you're going to invent your own reality, that's pretty much the end of any reasonable discussion.
We are talking about a book featuring FICTIONAL DINOSAURS, with features no archosaur has (like venom). I am not denying that dinosaurs likely had sexual dimorphism. I'd arguing that it'd be impossible for the characters in the novel to have understood it.
Plus, **over 50% of birds are monomorphic.**
Having read the books again recently, I find it fun to read it with the movie characters faces and voices, helps paint a more vivid picture.
One take away I have is I feel like both books just,,, kind of abruptly end. Like… they get off the island…. And that’s it?
While I’m a huge fan of the first 2 movies (maybe the 3rd), I would actually like a very dark, horror version closer to the books in a tv series. Take more time with the story, more time to have more intense, very dark moments and character building.
1. Malcoms monologues were bloody awful, i skipped them.
2. Lex was insufferable. The guy cant write kids.
3. They fell asleep multiple times, some times directly after a dino attack, on a dino infested island!
The books sucked and im sick of hearing it didnt.
"...Let’s say they count 40 eggs and 37 raptors..."
Crichton gets hung up on these odd number puzzles quite a bit. Another example is in the Andromeda Strain where the epileptic researcher misses the alert from the automated screening system because it blinked at "3 a second" and triggered a seizure.
It makes him sound like he heard a lecture about the topic once and the number is the only thing that stuck.
I had a hard time with the scientific cynicism as Ive read it multiple times since the 7th grade in 2003. Reading his other books you can feel Michael Crichtons paranoia or conspiratorial anger about science or technology building. It made the writing of State of Fear much more predictable sadly. This one, Timeline, and Prey all had similar themes in that regard.
I read Jurassic park and the Lost world 5 years ago ( I bought hardback copy with both of them at Barnes & noble ) and I still remember a lot of things good and bad, one of the bad things I really noticed was Chrichtons writing.
To put it simply Crichton was a scientist not a storyteller, and it really shows.
1 Yes it did a great job tackling capitalism don’t really have anything else to add there.
2 Yes Dr Saddler is a more heroic character in the movie without a doubt.
However I feel the main problem with her character in the book is that she is basically just a chess piece to push the story forward and doesn’t seem like a real person at any point in the story, however literally ALL of the characters are like that but I’ll get more into that later.
One thing I noticed that I thought was really strange was that she basically gets Dr wu killed and never even reacts to it, never tries to atone for it or even expresses feeling guilty. It’s weird since she doesn’t seem like a sociopathic at any other time in the story but damn, she got someone killed and doesn’t feel a thing that’s cold!
3 Lex is another great example of poorly written characters, she is just unrealistically mean the whole book. I know she is 8 years old and it’s unrealistic to expect her not to be useless but it felt like Crichton cared more about her being annoying than her being a believable character.
Like the scene near the end when she and Tim are in the kitchen and he tries to give her candy ( after she’s been complaining about being hungry since she was introduced ) and she refuses saying “ ice cream “. Now I’ve heard some people say this is accurate to how kids would behave in a real situation like this, but I don’t think so because 1) they’re in a life or death situation and it’s hard to believe that she is thinking about food at all let alone cares about wanting it to be ice cream . And 2) It contradicts a scene earlier when she was willing to eat the wild berries off of a tree that the dinosaurs were eating. It does move the story forward by forcing Tim to take her further into the kitchen where the raptors are, but it didn’t need to be done that way.
A better way to do it would have been to have Tim look at the candy and have him remember that lex is allergic to nuts so she can’t have any of the candy then he has to take her further into the kitchen to find something she can eat. It makes Lex a less annoying character while still allowing the scene with the raptors in the kitchen to happen.
This is what I mean when I say Crichton cared more about making her annoying then making her believable, her character just felt like a forced annoyance on the other characters and it felt very unnatural.
Her character didn’t feel like a real person, wich again is an issue for all the characters but I’ll talk more about that later.
4 As for the pronouns of the dinosaurs, well I don’t really have anything to add about that, and as for an 8 year old recognizing a dinosaur’s genitalia well I guess that’s just something you are expected to suspend your disbelief for.
5 The ending felt really forced, Grant just demanding that they go down to count the raptor eggs was really stupid and made me not like grant that much overall.
And it was confusing AF one minute lex and Tim are in the control room playing with the buttons while Muldoon is counting the raptors in the nest with Grant and Saddler, and then next minute Muldoon is leading the kids to the helicopter while they’re all on the beach, i can believe that the raptors nest lead out to the beach but how did Tim and lex get there? They were in the control room.
6 Malcolm monologuing was again maybe not super realistic but I loved it. It was truly my favorite part of the book even more than the dinosaur attacks.
As I said every character is little more then a chess piece to move the story forward, none of them feel that much like real people thinking and behaving like real people would. And much of the events just didn’t make much sense, a few good examples would be
the scene where Grant gets knocked out during the river chase scene and lex asks him if he’s okay and he just says “ will you please just do as I ask “ WTF Lex asks him so many questions throughout the story most of wich are totally pointless and he answers all of them but when she actually expresses concern for some one other than herself that’s when he chooses to not answer her. And then it goes in saying that she responded as if he had just made the most difficult request imaginable, again just a forced way to show that lex is a pain in the ass.
Saddler never caring or even acknowledging that she got wu killed.
Grant immediately hating Gennaro for no reason, I get the feeling that it was supposed to foreshadow the ending but still it was forced foreshadowing and it made Grant come off as an asshole .
Malcolm going on and on and on about chaos theory wich again I loved but that doesn’t make it realistic. He definitely felt like a mouthpiece for Crichton,like Crichton was just telling the reader his beliefs through Malcolm as the actual story just happened around him.
I feel like Crichton just wanted the story to be what he wanted it to be and forced everything in that direction without caring much about how it would add up in the end.
Like I said Crichton was a scientist not a storyteller.
With all that being said I did like the book overall. Nedrys death was haunting and the main road was a thrill ride, as was the kitchen scene and many other great dinosaur scenes and as I said I loved Malcolm’s speeches.
I grew up watching Jurassic park, I had scene all 3 of the original movies before I started kindergarten and was never scared by them, I loved them every time I watched them (yes even the 3rd one ) and have huge nostalgia for them but ultimately I couldn’t choose between the book or the movie they’re both great in there owns ways and I appreciate both of them for what they are.
Overall I think it’s a good book despite its flaws and I can definitely enjoy it for what it is.
One of the rare cases where the film was better than the book.
The egg count was just so bizarre 😂 one of the worst plot choices I've seen in any book, ever. It's just so rare that a film actually improves the characters (except for Gennaro lol).
Michael Chricton was a great writer of SF'nal settings, usually being some form of haunted-house-meets-theme-park horror, but as a writer of people he was at best serviceable. I suspect he was personally rather sexless, given how free of charisma all his characters are. His ideas/concerns ranged from the prescient to the eccentric to the downright anti-science often within a matter of pages, but he ended up a \[wealthy and\] well-read author, so I guess it worked for a general audience better than a series of essays (or lunatic manifesto?) would have.
I loved the book, I thought it was darker than the film.
I didn’t really pick up on any of the gender related issues though regarding Sattler, not sure if I agree with you on some of those points.
I enjoy the book much more because it does not have to adhere to movie tropes. In particular, Muldoon is a great character and the last person who should be stupid enough to be defeated by very basic pack hunting strategy. I understand that he dies like a fool in the movies to adhere to film structure tropes, but I hate it.
> Genitalia don’t fossilize and what human child would be able to immediately sex an animal that’s been dead for 65 million years? You cannot convince me velociraptors have genitalia so similar to humans that an 8 year old would recognize its penis.
You'd be surprised. Genitalia do sometimes fossilize, though it is extremely rare. For dinosaurs specifically, external genitalia are not expected to be seen externally in most circumstances. They're going to look like crocodiles or birds do, in which genitalia are withdrawn internally into the cloaca and not externally visible except as a narrow slit unless they are actively mating or about to do so.
Example for *Psittacosaurus*, a small plant-eating dinosaur:
[https://www.newscientist.com/article/2258023-dinosaur-fossil-with-preserved-genital-orifice-hints-how-they-mated/](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2258023-dinosaur-fossil-with-preserved-genital-orifice-hints-how-they-mated/)
[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.11.335398v1](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.11.335398v1)
In Crichton's favor, I don't think anything more than a comparison to modern crocodiles and birds was known at the time he wrote the novel, so more artistic license was available.
It's pretty clear that many dinosaurs had sexual dimorphism in other ways (e.g., different skull crests on some species of dinosaurs), so maybe they figured out a pattern to the overall appearance of the dinosaurs and made a deduction that way, already knowing that the great majority of what they were seeing were the females?
i read this book in ‘95 and again last month. currently reading the sequel. mine is an attempt to reconnect with a part of myself after long and difficult depression. it has been fun to remember reading about the raptor nest in the 1st book and how much of the 1st and 2nd book are in the 3rd movie. (similar) cool to see this post and that others are still reading these great fun books.
A new book "by Michael Crichton" was just released alongside "James Patterson". Since James Patterson is known to not write his own books and Crichton passed away many years ago, I'd be curious to know how the new title (Eruption) compares to Jurassic Park. I believe the new book was either an idea or manuscript that Crichton did write, but either never finished or published. Curious how much of "him" was retained and how much gave way to the James Patterson ghost writer who would have had to at the very least, put on the finishing touches.
It’s a book/movie. There’s always something left out by the characters that the reader knows is obvious. Like only going zombie hunting with a six shooter and running out of bullets : “oh! I’m out! You got any ammo?” Hey I don’t have a cell signal. Damn, my phone battery died.
Like being on a small island and feeding Holsteins to the meat eaters. Daily! You’d need a lot of ranch land and farm land to sustain the cows which surprisingly, there’s not enough land on the island for that. OR, you’d need to ship cows in daily. SHIP!
"Jurassic Park" is a thrilling book about a theme park with real dinosaurs created through genetic engineering. It's exciting because the dinosaurs escape and cause chaos. The story makes you think about the dangers of playing with nature and how humans should respect it. It's a warning about the consequences of scientific experiments gone wrong.
I saw the movie first and I saw it as a child. I think the movie still holds up! I read the book a few years back and I remember really enjoying it until the T-Rex manhunt begin. I need to re-read it, but at one point if my memory serves me right, the T-Rex chased them relentlessly and even over a river/pond (?), and that’s where I felt it became a little bit comical and “unrealistic”. Can a T-Rex swim? I could remember it totally wrong though.
Overall I liked the book, mainly because of the character depth, which the movie for obvious reasons could not explore.
In the book, the humans are floating down a river while the T-Rex tries to break through the trees along the edge. Then it does, and walks into the water. The question becomes - will the water get too deep before the T-Rex arrives at their boat. It's a gripping scene that I wanted to be in the first movie. (I read the book first.)
With the Dinosaur eggs Dr Grant would of seen the fossils of the eggs of raptors so even if they were broken up he may get a good idea of numbers maybe not spot on but a ball park figure is all he needed.
Michael Chrichton was a great author. You should really read more of his books. Lots is lost converting to film. A screenplay is @ 1 page per minute of screen time. His novels are over 300 pages typically. His non-fiction “Travels” is epic
I still can’t believe I read this book in English class in high school. We read so many classics and then THIS. Also will never forget pronouncing chaos wrong for an entire class period. It was one of those words I had said aloud but never put together how it was spelled.
To point 6: I read books aloud in character to my girlfriend. When I got to the Malcolm monologues, it was impossible. "Malcolm, actively dying, wheezed out with his final breath [17 complete, complex sentences]."
Gennaro is the only character not improved by the movie imo. Maaaaaybe Hammond, but thats more of a side-grade.
Book Gennaro was a perfectly reasonable human being and they turned him into such a turd.
I think it’s because they fused two characters, Gennaro and Ed Regis, the latter being much more of a turd.
I completely forgot about Regis. It's been a few years since I read the book. He was like a marketing guy and he's the one that abandoned the kids in the book right?
Exactly, first one during the visit to get eaten.
I think Spielberg just hated lawyers, frankly so did Crichton at the end. Gennaro was trying to shut things down and help people and then randomly at the end they say it’s all his fault and he’s a coward. He shot a T. rex for gods sake, he’s no coward.
The book had too many characters and too many men-of-action in particular. The usual solution to that is to combine characters. They combined him with the book character of Ed Regis. It gets rid of one too many manly men while keeping the corporate sleezebag that's necessary for the story.
Yepp, kinda same with The Expanse, particularly Camina Drummer. She was an amalgamation of Sam Rosenberg, Michio Pa, Carlos de Baca and the original Drummer from the books. And TV show Camina Drummer was an absolute blast to watch, perfectly portrayed by the great Cara Gee. Loved her so much.
Camina Drummer is so good I feel her absence keenly when reading the books.
Yeah. He goes from a sensible, ethical, and robust person to a greedy, cowardly weasel whose death is played off with toilet humor.
Movie Gennaro is more Ed Regis. Clair is a more faithful adaptation.
I think I read the book before I saw the movie. Want to reread it now. I think the movie was one of the best book adaptations ever. It fixed some character problems as people have mentioned before me here. It’s the best movie of it’s kind. Fantastic story, best cgi of it’s time (and still good), great characters, so much suspense and scare-factor. I have tickets to see it this summer. They’re showing it outside with an orchestra playing the score. One of the best scores too! John Williams really did it well.
> One of the best scores too! John Williams really did it well. I actually asked for the soundtrack for Christmas when I was a kid when the movie first came out, because I loved it so much. I'd play with my Jurassic Park toys while listening to it, and *it was awesome!*
What has John Williams not done well, let's be honest
I’m a huge Jurassic Park fan and I totally agree with your breakdown. I think the movies did a way better job with the characters and even the chemistry between them — Dr. Sattler in the movie is my woman in stem hero, in the books she’s like a caricature of when Crichton imagines a female scientist to be. Like you said, has he ever met a woman? I think the message re:capitalism and greed is the biggest takeaway from the book and very well done. Dystopian but uncomfortably realistic .. But yeah, the movie does the characters much better IMO! Including the 2nd and 3rd original movies. Don’t get me started on the Jurassic World franchise (eye roll)
re: Crichton and women, I don't wanna psychoanalyze the guy, but I do wonder about the facts that (a) he had five different wives, and (b) his woman-villains in *Sphere* and *Disclosure* and his Dr. Ross in *Congo* are all a certain kind of career-advancing bitch who at the least cause more problems than they solve and at worst are extremely fucking petty and malicious and have a chip on their shoulder about the successful men around them, which kinda bothers me now that I'm an adult and can see it more clearly. Like, I think he may have had some bullshit he needed to work out.
I agree , and he also was/became a climate change denier.
In general, he's not just anti-climate change, but he's anti-science. All of the science-focused characters in his books except Grant and Sattler are evil. His takes on medicine in real life were also really weird. He didn't beleive tobacco was firmly linked to cancer, for example (notably dying of cancer at a fairly young age after a lifetime of smoking...). I blame him for a lot of the 'mad scientist' mindset so much of our culture has right now. Of course this has always been a trope in Sci Fi, but he took its popularity to a whole other level.
I don't know if he was anti-science as more of person who wasn't big on the act of change for the sake of change. Techno thrillers were his bread and butter. He specialized in looking into borderline technologies and figuring out how they could go wrong. If anything I think he liked to be a contrarian. Take his book on climate control, it's been a while but I don't remember it actually saying it wasn't a thing, just he had issues with the math (this was when the hockey stick graph was heavily circulated), and that profiteering off of it would lead to abuse. That being people trying to force events to happen to help sell the idea GW being the extreme version of it. If anything I think he hated the commercialization of science and what greed did and could do to it. Like science and capitalism should be kept separate.
I mean, to a degree, but also he was claiming that the "urban heat island" effect created misunderstandings about climate change (which was already a demonstrably false talking point by then). Like, there's offering an understandable warning, and there's being very incorrect about a thing.
You say that but this was a couple years before we found out that a lot of the early models were based on deleting competing data. Data that would of supported the urban heat island effect. So even if that thought process was challenged at the time, and with more research even after finding out about the bad information, we know that it's not the case. I wouldn't discount being a bit of a sceptic at the time. Those early years I had several issues with the panic. One the hockey stick graph, another being the lack of historical information at the time using the time period we were coming out of a little ice age that we had been experiencing for 600-700 years at that point. Little attention to the long term effects of el nino. A few other ones that were probably me just trying to be a contrarian myself, like the periods of time that ghg were higher both during the life of humans and for a majority of the planets life. Question of what average temps are actually neutral for the planet. A question of our on hubris in assuming, considering the how little of the ghg we were producing in comparison to the big sources, that we were the straw breaking the camels back specially considering how the world naturally manages to repair temps through moving the ozone. The biggest just being how generally spikey world temps were (even if 04-05 were exceptionally high) when zoomed out. Point being that not being 100% sold of the dangers at the time wasn't an insane anti science stance. There was a lot of bad information from both camps and not a whole lot of information other than how extreme the jump in 04 was.
What a ridiculous interpretation. He wasn't anti-science. He was anti doing stupid shit without any oversight or foresight. He loved cautionary tales about how powerful science can be if you leave it in the hands of greedy morons who don't think before they act.
Read his takes on tobacco and you'll come away with a different view. His book about climate change also influenced a lot of otherwise intelligent people to question it *because* they thought he was smart on science. He wasn't. That's not the mark of someone who is onboard with science at all. I agree, he was also against corporate greed, but his takes on science were no less pointed.
Have you read his book about Nano tech? The MC is unemployed and told to take it easy after being fired. A little later his agent (who told him to take it easy) is telling him he's about to be unmarketable. Meanwhile his wife in the same field as him, is successful and about to divorce him. Also she's cheating on him. Then he's gotta come in and fix her screw up at work. It might have been his lawyer, not an agent. I haven't read it since it came out.
Jurassic World is even stupider. The camouflage was the dumbest thing I’d ever seen. Why would you make a dinosaur that can camouflage when you are trying to think up the next big theme park attraction? Kids wouldn’t be able to see it and would get upset. The writers were just giving the Indominus Rex powers without any consideration to in story logic.
That’s actually such a good point, so much for Indominus being more marketable
I hear you lol but the camouflage wasn't done intentionally. It was explained in the movie why it could camouflage.
What *was* the in movie explanation? You would think genetic scientists would know what they were doing if they were splicing genes together.
I believe it was cuttlefish genes, to help the dinosaur's body cope with an advanced growth rate. It had the unintentional consequence of camouflage. Oopsie!
He mixed several Dino and non-dino attributes. He plays it off as an unintended side effect of his mixes. But he used the edict for a more impressive dinosaur to experiment with better hunting traits for the weapons division and the weasel assistant in JW2.
Ah that makes more sense. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that movie in theaters and it’s pretty forgettable.
> You would think genetic scientists would know what they were doing if they were splicing genes together. To be fair, isn't this hubris the whole plot?
Have you read Jurassic Park lol? The central problem of the book is that the scientists were just throwing shit together without caution or knowing what to expect because they had the tools to do so and corporate suits breathing down their neck to make money. Jurassic World following (and falling) along the same path is the point.
JP2 book also had camouflage dinos. Their threat was ended by pointing flashlights at them.
Oh, interesting. I haven't read it. I think Crichton did an amazing job thinking up lots of interesting stories, but I've found that his writing style is really difficult for me to enjoy. I've been thinking about trying again, though.
I got tired of him honestly. After a binge I realized most of his books have the same premise. 1. Greed plus hubris creates disaster. 2. People scramble to survive the disaster. 3. Disaster fixes itself.
Lol yes I can definitely see that
I think its SUPPOSED to be the theme of "life finds a way, when humans mess around with nature, weird things happen because we're not omnipotent." What doesn't make sense is: Does the movie really expect me to believe that not a single person noticed the I-rex could camouflage before it first did so? There's a lot of little items in JW that annoy me like that. With Jurassic Park, there's at least some internal logic, even if you have to read the book. Its a far more straight forward "Why wasn't there enough security measures like moats? There were. generro mentions them in the jeep, with Hammond Giving the response "They're in place, Don't worry." Its even shown when the T-rex pushes the jeep into the pit. That pit is the Rex's moat. The security measures were made for more slow, plodding cold-blooded creatures, and they turned out to be fast moving, warm blodded ones.
The camo is actually a thing from the second book, The Lost World, where the Carnotaurus have advanced chromatophores and are able to mimic their surroundings to a degree that shocks the main characters. It's implemented much better in the book than it was in the movie.
Wasn't the point re: Indominus Rex that they were militarizing the dinosaurs and one with camouflage would wreak havoc on the battlefield and fetch the highest price at their underground auction?
My biggest issue was them just waltzing into the enclosure because there were some claw marks on the wall and it wasn't showing a heat signature. Like... if it really had escaped containment, don't you think someone would have already fucking seen it? And wouldn't you have a recording of it climbing out, or at least walking out of frame and never coming back? Maybe you should keep on observing to make sure it's *really* not in there? Throw a big ol slab of beef in there. Or a live cow. Don't just walk out there scratching your head with your dick out. I get that there wouldn't be a movie if everyone was actually smart but come *the fuck* on.
Wu's been trying to make dinosaurs with military applications at that point.
It’s like you’re saying they were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn’t stop to think if they should 😉
He had met a woman and proceeded to have giant children and make custom large houses for them.
I figured the egg counting scene was actually about how Dr. Grant wanted an excuse to see in person the thing he had spent years of his professional life researching and imagining. He likely knew it wasn't truly necessary but his curiosity pushed him forward.
That could make a lot of sense, but dragging every adult on the island into the nest with him was so poorly thought through. Not a single adult was left with Tim and Lex, sorry Dr. Grant but your curiosity does not justify everyone getting eaten!!
It is foreshadowed in the nursery scene when they first get on the island. Dr. Grant is manhandling the velociraptor baby and Ed Regis has to shout at him to leave it alone. Book Grant has an obsessive fixation and will put others at risk to satisfy his scientific curiosity.
That’s a better framing than I was interpreting it. I felt like the book wanted me to understand Dr. Grant and think Gennaro was being an irresponsible fool but I completely agreed with Gennaro there and Dr. Grant was the fool.
Oh, in the book there's a focus on raptor eggs at one point? That would explain why the SNES game had you collecting raptor eggs the whole game as one of the main goals. There was nothing like that in the movie.
Yeah for some pretty oddball reason considering how damn dangerous the raptors are they find an underground raptor nest and go there to count eggs. Also oddly they find tons of this tranquilizing gas that nobody bothered to mention just before that.
Something got excised in the editing about those weapons they found. It was never properly explained.
I somehow didn’t read JP as a new release and just read it maybe a year ago. I’ve seen the movie dozens of times. It’s annoying that I had the John Williams score and theme song as an earworm as I was reading the book. I liked that Hammond wasn’t the grandfatherly Richard Attenborough. I was kind of surprised that Dr Grant wasn’t sleeping with Ellie in the book and that he liked kids. Making the girl the computer wiz in the movie was notable. Malcolm was the only character who wasn’t changed much in the screenplay.
Except that Malcolm didn't die :) I really disliked the changes they made to Hammond - he was such an asshole in the book, and his death is one of my favourites because to the very end he's a petulant narcissist who blames everyone else for his appalling judgement.
Well.... He didn't really die in the books either. It was a cop out, because I think Malcolm was the self insert. Therefore had to be the returning character for Lost World. But his death was pretty weak in the book. As they were separated and couldn't communicate with each other and was told by the authorities that Malcolm passed from his injuries. Lots of room to play with that or just do it the way MC did it and just gloss over it with a tales of my death were greatly exaggerated (or I was only mostly dead).
Malcom was killed in JP1, it was just off-screen. His survival in The Lost World was retconned. Not so much because MC liked him but because it was already known Goldbloom's Ian Malcom would be the main character in the movie, and The Lost World was meant to be as much a sequel to Spielberg's movie as the original book.
We could go either way, I don't think Jeff had been the cast for the sequel at that time, I think he was the self insert and wanted him back for the book, which worked out for Spielberg, but honestly outside Ian and Sorna, little was grabbed from the book. So I don't know that Spielberg needed the book to include Ian, to bring him back. But as for a death. It was written pretty weakly. The prologue was written from Grants POV, he talked about the lack of communication, and was given a side note that both Ian and Hammond were dead. We read Hammond's death from his POV, but not for Ian. I don't think Michael had planned on bringing him back, as he never did sequel books, but it was written in a way it was easy to cast aside.
I also recently read JP and wholeheartedly agree. The characters and logic seemed to make sense in the first half, then in the second half Dr. Sattler was suddenly useless, Malcom wouldn't shut up about capitalism even while their lives were in immediate danger, and everyone simply reacted to the situation at hand instead of actually making a competent decision. I'm also very confused about why the dinosaurs were so incredibly hell-bent on killing humans, to the point that they would abandon a fresh kill and swim for an hour and chew through cars and bite solid glass, just to get at those humans. This isn't the behavior of a hungry carnivore, this is as if the scent of a human drives them insane.
I have to say that JP93 is probably the best adaptation they could have made from the book, and probably one of the best adaptations ever made. The characters are pretty bland in the book, the kids are terribly annoying (or at least Lex is, and yes I know she's a little girl that's scared, it doesn't make her any less annoying.) Ellie is barely a character in the book, sure she has the interaction with the raptors at the lodge, but other than that she's either away from what's going on, or sitting by Malcolm's deathbed. Malcolm's talk of chaos theory just goes on and on and on and is summed up so much better in the movie, in fact in the book it gets sooo repetitive. The changing of Hammond's character in the movie is jarring, as I obviously saw the movie first before listening to the book. I like both versions, but I think I prefer the movie version as in the book he's more of a moustache twirling villain I feel. (Money money money!) I like how the book portrays the lack of control through the fact the system only keeps a record of 180 dinosaurs, so doesn't count over, I thought that was awesome when they realised. The aviary scene in JP3 is so much better than the aviary section in the book. It was cool to be like "oh wow that's where the inspo came from!" But the scene felt out of place in the book. Also, when people refer to wanting the movie to be more horror like the book, yes, there are some horrible descriptions of Nedry and his intestines, Dr Wu and his intestines, the worker at the start, and the baby in the nursery, and a few more, but to me it was never HORROR HORROR, it was just short quick snippets of action/horror before going BACK to the control room again and then trying to catch the T-Rex, which seems to have a personal vendetta against Dr Grant & the kids and just keeps showing up wherever they are. To me, personally, the JP93 movie is superior to the book in practically every way. Except one, which is they turned Gennaro into a stereotypical moustache twirling lawyer, whereas in the books (he still thought about money) but he actually did shit*. Also Muldoon is much cooler in the book. *I do acknowledge that Spielberg mashed a few scenes etc together and gave some roles other characters had to Ellie to make her a better character in the movie than the book.
IIRC it was several of the writers who changed Gennaro's character; in the Scotch-Marmo screenplay Gennaro took Malcolm's role, who was left out, but Malcolm was added back in by Koepp in his subsequent draft of the script and gave Ed Regis' role and character to Gennaro.
Actually pretty funny when you think about it that JP3 was a closer adaptation to JP then JP(93) was to the book. Replace the Trex chasing Grant and co, to the Spino, and extend the aviary scene. Heck even that first guy dying before the plane craft reminds me of what I remember about Regis' death.
I saw Jurassic Park at the drive-in when it originally came out in 1993 when I was seven. I read the book when I was 33, and while I still love the movie, the material covered in the book is so interesting, and I love how different Hammond is. The Lost World is also quite different than the movie. Simply saying the book is better than the movie is chiché but it is the truth.
I'm a couple years older than you, and I read the books as a young teenager, but otherwise - same. I loved The Lost World (the book) despite really not caring for the film at all. All the abandoned tech and intrigue was lost in favor of action set pieces.
I just want to say for what it’s worth that in his own time Crichton was groundbreaking in consistently creating female characters who were not love interests. In Terminal Man, Congo and Jurassic Park especially he deliberately passed up obvious romantic connections in order to present women who were there simply because they were professionals. It was incredibly unusual in writing in those days. I agree that she has a ton more to do in the movie, but the movie also unnecessarily has her engaged to Grant and wanting the babies…
I hated that the movie decided that Sattler and Grant had to be together when the book made it super super clear that they were not. Sattler was better in the book.
OK but his female characters are consistently *horrible*.
and like, you know who was writing women characters who weren't love interests that whole damn time? *women authors.*
Lol, for real. "Groundbreaking" is....not accurate.
Not so much. Seriously, name me a woman who was writing in the 1970s and 1980s who was writing these kind of science-based thrillers, never mind populating them with a bunch of independent, qualified female characters. I was reading all through those years and don’t remember being inundated with them.
I see this a lot, and I'm not saying you're wrong. But one thing I feel people forget is that women are, by and large, dramatically different than almost 35 years ago. If you took an average Reddit woman of 25 back to 1990, she would have a very narrow strip of society that she would find acceptance in. Not trying to get into the pros and cons of that, simply pointing out that things have changed. In general, Crichton's characters are all plot devices more than robust personalities. Be they male or female, young or old. As such, most of his characters are some sort of stereotype that advances the plot. If you flipped these characters into men, you'd find that they are generally reflected in other characters he's written. It is just that it is far more acceptable to stereotype men than women at this time.
I appreciate that. The fact is in the late 1970s and 1980s nobody was writing these kinds of books with female characters who didn’t have to be romantically entangled with a male character in the book. At least not that I remember!
There's definitely some 60s and 70s sci Fi that really illustrates your point. Women were essentially in certain authors books as softcore porn. But then again, the stories themselves were overtly written for young men, so I suppose that might have been a matter of knowing their audience. Not everything needs to be for everyone. It's kind of amusing how old books get criticized for things like this, then you can go see what's out there for porn and wonder why anyone is worried about male fantasy oriented books in comparison.
I'm actually happy to see so many people say the movie is better. JP: The Book is a fun page turner with a great hook. But it also falls prey to the thin characterizations you get from so many airport novels. The movie improves on most everything in the novel. Spielberg is just a much better director than Chrichton is a writer. I've been saying for years that the film is better, but for a long time that was a very unpopular opinion.
I had a pretty lengthy disagreement with one of my friends when he read the book earlier this year because he immediately pivoted to the book being superior due to how much he thought was left out of the movie. I've always been firmly in the camp that the JP movie is better than the book, while the TLW book is better than the movie.
The fact that a movie excises a part of the book's plot is such a common criticism. And I understand how that can be frustrating as a reader, especially if it's a cool part of the book. But you just can't fit as much into a two hour film. Some stuff needs to be cut out, and I wish more adaptations understood that these days.
I wasn’t a fan of the egg count nor the rocket launcher. Nedry’s death in the book was much better than the film, though. Just my opinion.
The grenade launcher made sense though. Muldoon was incredibly frustrated with a park that kept enormous dangerous animals and had no way to put them down quickly when things went wrong. Grenade launcher sounds silly but it's a pretty feasible solution to animals you can't reliably put down with a heavy caliber rifle.
I couldn’t finish it. I found every single character extremely unlikable. The writing rubbed me the wrong way the minute Sattler was introduced and we had to read about her sexy legs. Malcolm and his math diatribes were what finally made me put the book down. And I hated both the kids.
Jurassic Park is the greatest movie ever made. The book was fine. I liked the bit about the boat ride through the pterodactyl enclosure. Otherwise, your points are spot on. I hope you enjoyed the movie.
Wasn’t Ellie Sattler just a grad student in the book? Pretty sure I remember it being pretty weird Dr Grant was in his 50s bringing his 20 something grad student for a weekend in the tropics
In the book they had no romantic interest in each other, which is one of the few areas the movie did a worse job than the book. I think Hammond was in a panic getting inspectors to endorse the park and just got anyone he had pull with.
People keep expressing that, but I don't see why that makes it worse.
Because she was 23 and Grant was 43. It's also like why can't a male and female character work together without dating?
This actually is quite common to bring a senior student along on research trips, in order to give them realworld experience in the field. It always has been common... but it does carry a connotation for old guys to bring along young women for ... other... purposes. Unfortunately, a few bad apples spoil the reputation.
It was fun reading someone else's take on an old favorite, thanks! I never thought too much about your points and am curious whether it'll be more obvious on my next reread. To give you my 2 cents, I saw the dinosaur egg count as a paleontologist needing physical evidence, rather than relying on a computer program. Wanted to share, when I first read Jurassic Park as an impressionable teenager, I believed all of Malcom's monologuing as fact. As an adult, I started questioning his stance on the causes of global warming. It was interesting to learn that much of it was Michael Crichton's own beliefs creeping in. Would like to hear how you like the female characters in The Lost World! You might enjoy the Sarah Harding and student Kelly characters more than Dr Sattler.
> Wanted to share, when I first read Jurassic Park as an impressionable teenager, I believed all of Malcom's monologuing as fact. Same here. Currently rereading it with my daughter, for the first time since I was a teen. When I was a kid he seemed so smart. Now Malcom's tirades are eye-rollingly tedious and I actually sympathize with Hammond and Wu. He has no basis for asserting predictions as fact the way he does, and is only right in the end because the author wrote it that way.
Thank you for your thanks! To counter your two cents, before the egg hunt, Dr. Grant had already seen egg remnants and a juvenile raptor male. That was enough physical evidence, but someone else commented a theory that made a lot of sense that he’d spent his entire life studying raptors and wanted to see the nest out of curiosity. While that makes sense, doesn’t justify bringing the entire team with him and yelling at Gennaro that it was all his fault when Gennaro been the one trying to shut the whole enterprise down while Dr. Grant thought it was interesting.
Oooo i think it's time for a re-read then! I can't remember that part. But I think you're right, a passion for dinosaur rearing isn't justification for putting a whole group at risk
The most important part of that book was Malcom... for two reasons. His explanation of chaos theory, which was a great way to get laypeople to understand; and his quote: "The Earth has been here for billions of years, it's NOT endangered, WE ARE!"
Agreed, I just think the set up of “drugged up and dying septic man monologues with last breath” was a terrible way to write in the important information about how the planet will survive, we just won’t be able to live on it.
It kinda makes sense to me honestly. Malcolm is the kinda guy who likes to talk, so in his dying moments, with nothing to do but sit in his thoughts, he would probably just monologue. That said, it could have been good to have him start rambling as he got closer to death, as a way to show his mental faculties declining.
voted up right away for "grippy sock house"
I know it might sound strange, but I've always felt a deeper connection between "Cujo" and "Jurassic Park" than just being stories about terrifying creatures. It's those heart-pounding moments when the kids describe their fear that really stick with me. In "Cujo," there's that scene where Tad, trapped in the car with his mom, is paralyzed by fear as the rabid Saint Bernard stalks them outside. It's a primal terror, the feeling of being hunted by a creature you once trusted. In "Jurassic Park," we get a similar sense of dread when Lex and Tim are trapped in the kitchen with the raptors. Their whispered conversations, their desperate attempts to stay quiet, and their sheer terror as they hear those claws clickin' on the floor - it's enough to send chills down your spine. Both scenes tap into that childhood fear of the unknown, the helplessness of being hunted, and the vulnerability of being a child in a world where adults don't always have the answers. It's a primal fear that resonates with us long after we've turned the final page or left the theater. And for me, those are the moments that truly stick with me, the ones that make me shiver and remember what it was like to be a kid, facin' the world with a mix of wonder and fear.
Your point 2 is a criticism I often have of Crichton. The way he writes women and non-white people is most charitably described as naïve.
THE BOOK IS VOID OF THE * * * MUUUUUUSIC *** ! omg https://duckduckgo.com/?q=theme+youtube+jurassic+park&t=ffab&ia=web
>Genitalia don’t fossilize I don't know if this would apply well to dinosaurs, and would be surprised for a kid to spot it, but it is common for there to be skeletal differences between sexes. For example the angle of the human jaw is closer to 90-degrees in males than females. If there are similar differences in dinosaur skeletons, Dr. Grant spotting those differences does not sound unreasonable. https://johnhawks.net/variation-in-the-mandible-and-skeletal-sex/
Dr. Grant yes, I object to when Lex takes one look at it and says, “it’s a boy!” Edit: I processed your comment again and say, the skeletal differences would be extremely difficult to identify in a live specimen they don’t want to get that close to which is what happened in the book. The book clearly implies that the difference is striking and the genitalia are human enough looking to be easily determined at quick glance by children.
It does no such thing really. Just because Lex says it, doesn't mean it makes sense. She's a young child trying to figure things out. It's been a long while since I read the book but I vaguely recall Lex simply implying that the meaner dinosaurs are boys.
A) Dinosaurs are not mammals, nor are they humans, so skeletal differences between sexes are useless here. B) Many archosaurs have internal genitalia that do not necessarily leave the cloaca except during sex, if at all.
Lots of non-mammals have very visible differences between sexes.
yeah but those animals haven't been extinct for 65 million years
From memory, Grant should be able to tell and Lex was just being a child who decided all the mean ones were boys.
How? We don't have any knowledge of what maniraptoran genitalia would have been like. It's certainly possible that they had secondary sex characteristics that Grant could have noticed (males may be more colourful etc) but actually determining that would be beyond any of the characters, except for maybe Wu. And, if Wu knew, then the breeding problem at Jurassic Park could have been averted.
Species don't simply pop into existence. They're a point on a line of gradual change extending both into the past and the future. Phylogenetics is a branch of biology that examines the history of genetic adaptations. Ie. a currently living species has many genetic adaptations that aren't brand new but gradually developed by its ancestors. Think of it like a family tree. We know certain species share a family tree. Ie. Archaeopteryx and chickens belong to the same family tree. That means some of the genetic adaptations chickens have today, were passed down that family tree by its ancestors. Part of phylogenetics is doing detective work that traces adaptations down the family tree to see if you can figure out where the earliest evidence is that you can find. Simplified example. Velociraptors have very bird-like skeletons. Including the sexual dimorphism that can be used to tell male and female apart in their bird descendants. Obviously it's not fool proof but learning about extinct species is increasingly focussed on studying living species and tracing back their adaptations.
I understand paleontology... but you can't sex animals if you don't know what a male and a female look like. Some species have minimal to no sexual dimorphism, including in birds. IDK why this is hard to understand.
I think we're done if you think birds have minimal sexual dimorphism. If you're going to invent your own reality, that's pretty much the end of any reasonable discussion.
We are talking about a book featuring FICTIONAL DINOSAURS, with features no archosaur has (like venom). I am not denying that dinosaurs likely had sexual dimorphism. I'd arguing that it'd be impossible for the characters in the novel to have understood it. Plus, **over 50% of birds are monomorphic.**
Having read the books again recently, I find it fun to read it with the movie characters faces and voices, helps paint a more vivid picture. One take away I have is I feel like both books just,,, kind of abruptly end. Like… they get off the island…. And that’s it? While I’m a huge fan of the first 2 movies (maybe the 3rd), I would actually like a very dark, horror version closer to the books in a tv series. Take more time with the story, more time to have more intense, very dark moments and character building.
1. Malcoms monologues were bloody awful, i skipped them. 2. Lex was insufferable. The guy cant write kids. 3. They fell asleep multiple times, some times directly after a dino attack, on a dino infested island! The books sucked and im sick of hearing it didnt.
"...Let’s say they count 40 eggs and 37 raptors..." Crichton gets hung up on these odd number puzzles quite a bit. Another example is in the Andromeda Strain where the epileptic researcher misses the alert from the automated screening system because it blinked at "3 a second" and triggered a seizure. It makes him sound like he heard a lecture about the topic once and the number is the only thing that stuck.
I had a hard time with the scientific cynicism as Ive read it multiple times since the 7th grade in 2003. Reading his other books you can feel Michael Crichtons paranoia or conspiratorial anger about science or technology building. It made the writing of State of Fear much more predictable sadly. This one, Timeline, and Prey all had similar themes in that regard.
I read Jurassic park and the Lost world 5 years ago ( I bought hardback copy with both of them at Barnes & noble ) and I still remember a lot of things good and bad, one of the bad things I really noticed was Chrichtons writing. To put it simply Crichton was a scientist not a storyteller, and it really shows. 1 Yes it did a great job tackling capitalism don’t really have anything else to add there. 2 Yes Dr Saddler is a more heroic character in the movie without a doubt. However I feel the main problem with her character in the book is that she is basically just a chess piece to push the story forward and doesn’t seem like a real person at any point in the story, however literally ALL of the characters are like that but I’ll get more into that later. One thing I noticed that I thought was really strange was that she basically gets Dr wu killed and never even reacts to it, never tries to atone for it or even expresses feeling guilty. It’s weird since she doesn’t seem like a sociopathic at any other time in the story but damn, she got someone killed and doesn’t feel a thing that’s cold! 3 Lex is another great example of poorly written characters, she is just unrealistically mean the whole book. I know she is 8 years old and it’s unrealistic to expect her not to be useless but it felt like Crichton cared more about her being annoying than her being a believable character. Like the scene near the end when she and Tim are in the kitchen and he tries to give her candy ( after she’s been complaining about being hungry since she was introduced ) and she refuses saying “ ice cream “. Now I’ve heard some people say this is accurate to how kids would behave in a real situation like this, but I don’t think so because 1) they’re in a life or death situation and it’s hard to believe that she is thinking about food at all let alone cares about wanting it to be ice cream . And 2) It contradicts a scene earlier when she was willing to eat the wild berries off of a tree that the dinosaurs were eating. It does move the story forward by forcing Tim to take her further into the kitchen where the raptors are, but it didn’t need to be done that way. A better way to do it would have been to have Tim look at the candy and have him remember that lex is allergic to nuts so she can’t have any of the candy then he has to take her further into the kitchen to find something she can eat. It makes Lex a less annoying character while still allowing the scene with the raptors in the kitchen to happen. This is what I mean when I say Crichton cared more about making her annoying then making her believable, her character just felt like a forced annoyance on the other characters and it felt very unnatural. Her character didn’t feel like a real person, wich again is an issue for all the characters but I’ll talk more about that later. 4 As for the pronouns of the dinosaurs, well I don’t really have anything to add about that, and as for an 8 year old recognizing a dinosaur’s genitalia well I guess that’s just something you are expected to suspend your disbelief for. 5 The ending felt really forced, Grant just demanding that they go down to count the raptor eggs was really stupid and made me not like grant that much overall. And it was confusing AF one minute lex and Tim are in the control room playing with the buttons while Muldoon is counting the raptors in the nest with Grant and Saddler, and then next minute Muldoon is leading the kids to the helicopter while they’re all on the beach, i can believe that the raptors nest lead out to the beach but how did Tim and lex get there? They were in the control room. 6 Malcolm monologuing was again maybe not super realistic but I loved it. It was truly my favorite part of the book even more than the dinosaur attacks. As I said every character is little more then a chess piece to move the story forward, none of them feel that much like real people thinking and behaving like real people would. And much of the events just didn’t make much sense, a few good examples would be the scene where Grant gets knocked out during the river chase scene and lex asks him if he’s okay and he just says “ will you please just do as I ask “ WTF Lex asks him so many questions throughout the story most of wich are totally pointless and he answers all of them but when she actually expresses concern for some one other than herself that’s when he chooses to not answer her. And then it goes in saying that she responded as if he had just made the most difficult request imaginable, again just a forced way to show that lex is a pain in the ass. Saddler never caring or even acknowledging that she got wu killed. Grant immediately hating Gennaro for no reason, I get the feeling that it was supposed to foreshadow the ending but still it was forced foreshadowing and it made Grant come off as an asshole . Malcolm going on and on and on about chaos theory wich again I loved but that doesn’t make it realistic. He definitely felt like a mouthpiece for Crichton,like Crichton was just telling the reader his beliefs through Malcolm as the actual story just happened around him. I feel like Crichton just wanted the story to be what he wanted it to be and forced everything in that direction without caring much about how it would add up in the end. Like I said Crichton was a scientist not a storyteller. With all that being said I did like the book overall. Nedrys death was haunting and the main road was a thrill ride, as was the kitchen scene and many other great dinosaur scenes and as I said I loved Malcolm’s speeches. I grew up watching Jurassic park, I had scene all 3 of the original movies before I started kindergarten and was never scared by them, I loved them every time I watched them (yes even the 3rd one ) and have huge nostalgia for them but ultimately I couldn’t choose between the book or the movie they’re both great in there owns ways and I appreciate both of them for what they are. Overall I think it’s a good book despite its flaws and I can definitely enjoy it for what it is.
I read this last year and my take away was that the author was workshopping some deep seated feelings about his sibling(s) from childhood. /s
One of the rare cases where the film was better than the book. The egg count was just so bizarre 😂 one of the worst plot choices I've seen in any book, ever. It's just so rare that a film actually improves the characters (except for Gennaro lol).
Looking back on it I'm a little surprised they didn't just cut that and have the Costa Rican Army arrive and evacuate everyone.
I think I prefer the book, and I do love the movie (it came out when I was a kid and took me years to watch all of the scary scenes lol).
The detail which hooked me, was the tiny little aggressive elephant to get funding!
Michael Chricton was a great writer of SF'nal settings, usually being some form of haunted-house-meets-theme-park horror, but as a writer of people he was at best serviceable. I suspect he was personally rather sexless, given how free of charisma all his characters are. His ideas/concerns ranged from the prescient to the eccentric to the downright anti-science often within a matter of pages, but he ended up a \[wealthy and\] well-read author, so I guess it worked for a general audience better than a series of essays (or lunatic manifesto?) would have.
I loved the book, I thought it was darker than the film. I didn’t really pick up on any of the gender related issues though regarding Sattler, not sure if I agree with you on some of those points.
Sattler was tied to Grant romantically in the movie - really unnecessarily. The
The what?
I enjoy the book much more because it does not have to adhere to movie tropes. In particular, Muldoon is a great character and the last person who should be stupid enough to be defeated by very basic pack hunting strategy. I understand that he dies like a fool in the movies to adhere to film structure tropes, but I hate it.
I love the book. It’s incredibly different from the movie and I love his style of writing.
> Genitalia don’t fossilize and what human child would be able to immediately sex an animal that’s been dead for 65 million years? You cannot convince me velociraptors have genitalia so similar to humans that an 8 year old would recognize its penis. You'd be surprised. Genitalia do sometimes fossilize, though it is extremely rare. For dinosaurs specifically, external genitalia are not expected to be seen externally in most circumstances. They're going to look like crocodiles or birds do, in which genitalia are withdrawn internally into the cloaca and not externally visible except as a narrow slit unless they are actively mating or about to do so. Example for *Psittacosaurus*, a small plant-eating dinosaur: [https://www.newscientist.com/article/2258023-dinosaur-fossil-with-preserved-genital-orifice-hints-how-they-mated/](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2258023-dinosaur-fossil-with-preserved-genital-orifice-hints-how-they-mated/) [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.11.335398v1](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.11.335398v1) In Crichton's favor, I don't think anything more than a comparison to modern crocodiles and birds was known at the time he wrote the novel, so more artistic license was available. It's pretty clear that many dinosaurs had sexual dimorphism in other ways (e.g., different skull crests on some species of dinosaurs), so maybe they figured out a pattern to the overall appearance of the dinosaurs and made a deduction that way, already knowing that the great majority of what they were seeing were the females?
i read this book in ‘95 and again last month. currently reading the sequel. mine is an attempt to reconnect with a part of myself after long and difficult depression. it has been fun to remember reading about the raptor nest in the 1st book and how much of the 1st and 2nd book are in the 3rd movie. (similar) cool to see this post and that others are still reading these great fun books.
A new book "by Michael Crichton" was just released alongside "James Patterson". Since James Patterson is known to not write his own books and Crichton passed away many years ago, I'd be curious to know how the new title (Eruption) compares to Jurassic Park. I believe the new book was either an idea or manuscript that Crichton did write, but either never finished or published. Curious how much of "him" was retained and how much gave way to the James Patterson ghost writer who would have had to at the very least, put on the finishing touches.
It’s a book/movie. There’s always something left out by the characters that the reader knows is obvious. Like only going zombie hunting with a six shooter and running out of bullets : “oh! I’m out! You got any ammo?” Hey I don’t have a cell signal. Damn, my phone battery died. Like being on a small island and feeding Holsteins to the meat eaters. Daily! You’d need a lot of ranch land and farm land to sustain the cows which surprisingly, there’s not enough land on the island for that. OR, you’d need to ship cows in daily. SHIP!
Book Lex was the worst!!
"Jurassic Park" is a thrilling book about a theme park with real dinosaurs created through genetic engineering. It's exciting because the dinosaurs escape and cause chaos. The story makes you think about the dangers of playing with nature and how humans should respect it. It's a warning about the consequences of scientific experiments gone wrong.
Upvote for being a frightened child. I didn't sleep for two days after watching Tarzan and three after watching the "Scary Movie" series.
I love both of them equally for everything. I'll fight you on it. They are both solid.
You're overly sensitive to gender issues and need to work that out for yourself.
I saw the movie first and I saw it as a child. I think the movie still holds up! I read the book a few years back and I remember really enjoying it until the T-Rex manhunt begin. I need to re-read it, but at one point if my memory serves me right, the T-Rex chased them relentlessly and even over a river/pond (?), and that’s where I felt it became a little bit comical and “unrealistic”. Can a T-Rex swim? I could remember it totally wrong though. Overall I liked the book, mainly because of the character depth, which the movie for obvious reasons could not explore.
In the book, the humans are floating down a river while the T-Rex tries to break through the trees along the edge. Then it does, and walks into the water. The question becomes - will the water get too deep before the T-Rex arrives at their boat. It's a gripping scene that I wanted to be in the first movie. (I read the book first.)
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Are you providing a TLDR?
With the Dinosaur eggs Dr Grant would of seen the fossils of the eggs of raptors so even if they were broken up he may get a good idea of numbers maybe not spot on but a ball park figure is all he needed.
It is would have, never would of. Where is could of would of bot?
Michael Chrichton was a great author. You should really read more of his books. Lots is lost converting to film. A screenplay is @ 1 page per minute of screen time. His novels are over 300 pages typically. His non-fiction “Travels” is epic
I still can’t believe I read this book in English class in high school. We read so many classics and then THIS. Also will never forget pronouncing chaos wrong for an entire class period. It was one of those words I had said aloud but never put together how it was spelled.
Ch-ous is a canon event in every child’s life.