Jurassic Park (Novel)

It's a pretty fast read and the definition of a page-turner. When I reviewed the movie a couple of months ago I noted that I was a little disappointed upon rewatching it. Was I disappointed rereading the novel it was based on?

A little. I remembered some of the problems I had with the book, but they were a lot worse than I remembered. I always hated the little girl Lex, but she was not outside of obnoxious little girl characters at the time. I grew up with Nellie Olsen and had dealt with worse. From a modern lens, Lex is absolutely unacceptable on every level. She's loud, stupid, and a huge hindrance. Because she's a girl. Her brother Tim is knowledgeable, likable, and handy. Because he's a boy. She is extremely problematic. The kids are definitely a step up in the movie.

I also misremembered Genarro and that bums me out a bit. While he isn't as loathsome as he was in the movie (his role of the coward in the film, is that of Ed Regis' in the book, and Regis was omitted from the film, and it's clear the movie combined the two characters) but Genarro is a lot less cool than I remembered. He did survive, and he did do some helpful things, but he had to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing them.

The end of the book is a lot darker than that of the movie, although as far as we know Grant and Ellie could have been placed in Costa Rican custody after the movie too. Malcolm supposedly dies at the end of this book, but we never see the body, and the sequel The Lost World retconned this.

Malcolm is a lot less annoying in the book simply because he's allowed to explain himself better. I like John Arnold because he's able to push up against the chaos theory arguments. Ultimately, Arnold is wrong, but I like the character because he can argue against what Malcolm is saying far better than Hammond, who is actually a fool. I actually would have liked to have seen Samuel Jackson be allowed to make some of these counterarguments in the film. C'mon, Goldblum versus Sam Jack in loud monologues about moral righteousness? I know this was before Pulp Fiction, and everybody knew Jackson was great at that, but it seems like a missed opportunity considering Arnold's contrary yet logical role in the book.

The version of Hammond in the book is far more sinister than the gentle grandfather in the movie. It could be argued he's the most villainous human present, even more-so than Dennis Nedry. He's stupid and always blames other people for his own mistakes and refuses to accept any responsibility for them. He is also one of the few characters who learns absolutely nothing from what happens to him. The movie version did, so he survived. Because book Hammond is so damn stupid and intractable, he gets eaten by Compies instead.

Nedry is about as gross in the book as he is the movie, except in the book he's portrayed as much younger.

The book doesn't have as many quotable or memorable lines as the movie does, although the bit about scientists being so focused on whether or not they could do a thing, they never thought about whether or not they should, is still there.

Henry Wu dies in the book, and I found his character benign here and relatively well-intentioned. He has sort of gained a reputation as somewhat sinister from the Jurassic World movies and recent spin-offs, but the book version is nowhere near as dark.

Muldoon survives the book. But he never gets to say "Clever girl," and frankly I think that's an unfair trade-off.

The global scope of the first few chapters, and the scholarly tone of the prologue and the unnamed narrator giving the reader solid "facts" that may or not be fictionalized b.s. Crichton entirely made up, makes the science of the book seem realistic and credible. Which is not something I often felt about the movie franchise.

The velociraptors are a bit more dangerous and unpredictable in the book than they are in the movies. They also strike me as less intelligent judging by the fact that they ate a baby raptor. Arnold also notes here that before things go sideways that that entire species should have been destroyed. He wasn't right in believing Malcolm's theories were wrong, but he was right about that.

The T-Rex is a far bigger thorn in the book than he wound up being in a movie. He was a constant enemy against Grant and the kids. In fact, the only relatable thing for me about Lex is how much she hated the T-Rex. Both Grant and Tim made excuses that it was a carnivore and just doing what it was supposed to do, but I hated it just as much as Lex did. It didn't have the hero moment in the book against the raptors it did in the movie either so I can't even say it had ANY selling points.

It was a pretty solid book that made a solid movie, but it wasn't actually great and I had problems with it. ****.