Book Versus Movie: Jurassic Park!
What Spielberg changed in Crichton's most celebrated novel.
To describe Michael Crichton as “larger than life” is almost underselling it. He was a novelist, a screenwriter, a doctor, and an adventurer. He measured as tall in real life as Harry Dresden does on the page (six-foot-nine.) He was married five times. At one point in the 1990s, he had the #1 best-selling book, the #1 theatrical film release, and the #1 most-watched primetime TV show (ER).
Did I mention that he paid for school by writing throwaway thriller novels in between all of his classwork? We indie writers like to pride ourselves on the number of chainsaws we juggle, but here’s a guy who was juggling venomous dinosaurs with machine guns and making it look easy. And he was mainstream.
In 2020, the novel JURASSIC PARK turned 30 years old. Last year, so did the movie. 2023 was also the 15th anniversary of Crichton’s death. If all of the above wasn’t impressive enough, he lived a shockingly full life without even turning 70 years old.
Since most of the world is familiar with this franchise, I figured it was worth putting the incredible novel up against the blockbuster movie and seeing how this story looked different based on the medium.
The Plot
A billionaire wants to resurrect dinosaurs and stick them in a zoo to make money off of loaded tourists. It’s not all going according to plan and the dinosaurs have attacked a few people. He hires a handful of outside observers to check out the park and endorse it for the general public, yet an act of corporate espionage throws the park into chaos and several people are killed.
While this describes the book and the movie, the execution is a little different for both. In print you’re treated to a far more in-depth explanation of how the genetics work, how nature defies man’s planning, and how hubris can lead to oversights that result in our downfall.
This is perhaps the most important lesson of JURASSIC PARK, and while the film sets it out there for your own understanding, the book does it with no ambiguity.
The Characters
Alan Grant (Sam Neill) is a paleontologist with a hippie beard and Hawaiian shirts aplenty. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) is one of his grad students, rather than being a couple as they were on screen.
Tim (Joseph Mazzello) and Lex (Ariana Richards) Murphy were also in the book, but their ages were flipped and Tim was the older sibling. Spielberg had worked with Mazzello before and really liked him for the role, but couldn’t have him be older without making Lex five or six years old, adding huge difficulties to shooting. So they cast a teen to play the sister.
There’s also a character named Ed Regis who works for Hammond, but he wasn’t in the film. He gets eaten by a juvenile T-Rex.
Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) is still a highly practical mathematician but is a lot more cynical and far less charming than his actor makes him out to be. By the end of the book most of the characters (incorrectly) think he died, but his survival is clarified in the sequel. Speaking of deaths…
The Casualties
As is often the case, not all of the characters from the book were in the movie, and of those who were, the roster of casualties isn’t a match.
Robert Muldoon (Bob Peck) was the game warden on the island. He famously got “Clever girl” as his sendoff line, before being ambushed by a raptor. However he survived in the book and was instrumental in getting the survivors off the island.
On the flipside, John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) was not in the exit party. In the novel, he gets swarmed by a pack of “compies” and meets his demise. He’s a very typical Crichton antagonist—rich, sociopathic, and ambitious. The character is much more likeable in the films, just misguided.
Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) has largely the same role and is killed in the same way, by a dilophosaurus. John Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson, whose character was named ‘Ray’ in the movie) was killed by a raptor while trying to restore power, in both versions.
Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero) doesn’t get eaten by a T-Rex while sitting on a toilet. He survives, but his character dies of dysentery in the epilogue. So the bowel issue persists.
Henry Wu (BD Wong) is killed by raptors in the novel, but he survives in the movie and gets an expanded role for the World trilogy.
The Larger Issue
Any half-decent writer can throw together an action story with humans running away from dangerous monsters; what separates the pulp from the bestsellers is when you convey something larger in your work. Crichton opens JURASSIC PARK with commentary on Oppenheimer, and how splitting the atom changed everything from science to warfare to geopolitics. Once that knowledge was out there you couldn’t put it back in the dark.
He believed humanity was on the cusp of a similar dramatic change when it came to unlocking genetic power: the ability to create, clone, or modify life as we saw fit. The full ramifications couldn’t be seen by mankind, and we were once again on the verge of creating something we could easily regret.
But scientists put all of their attribute points into knowledge and research and discovery, often without the context of the humanities, of how the world might apply this thing that they refine. Back in 1993 people showed up to the theaters in droves to watch dinosaurs throw Ford Explorers around, yet we were treated to something just a little bit deeper than that: a cautionary tale.
While it didn’t end up in the screenplay in the same fashion, audiences got a taste of it throughout the movie with Ian Malcom’s monologues.
The Content
Crichton tended to go harder on the content in his books, so the novel has more profanity and violence than the film. Many of the dinosaur attacks read like scenes in a horror movie.
Recurring Themes in Crichton’s Work
Clearly Crichton had an interest in dinosaurs and fossils for a long time; JURASSIC PARK wasn’t his first fictional foray into this field. In the 1970s he wrote an historical novel about The Bone Wars, condensing the entire decade-long conflict between two paleontologists into a single summer. Though he completed it, the book wasn’t released until 2017, almost ten years after his death.
Likewise he wrote the screenplay for WESTWORLD (1973) starring Yul Brynner. Like the HBO remake, the story centers on a theme park full of robots dressed as cowboys in a western setting, and rich patrons get to act out their immersive fantasies with as much authenticity as they desire. JURASSIC PARK plays right alongside this idea, swapping out cowboys for dinosaurs. Something goes wrong in the park, and the attractions turn against the guests.
Crichton was prolific enough—and had a long enough career—that few people noticed these things until long after he was gone, especially since the Internet didn’t enjoy widespread usage in those days.
The Future of his Legacy
Crichton’s widow Sherri has been very active with his archives since his passing. Cynical takes abound—and with good reason, as not all of his posthumous works are winners—but the impact of Crichton’s work on entertainment is significant enough that he deserves to be remembered for how he changed the game.
According to Crichton’s website, the next posthumous book to release is from an unfinished piece about a volcano in Hawaii that destroys a cache of stored chemical weapons—the kind that can end the world. It’s a properly high-stakes concept with cinematic potential, just the kind of thing Crichton was known for. While I, a lifelong fanboy, will probably gobble it up, I do have some apprehension.
First, it’s a posthumous Crichton book, and he didn’t write it all. Other books like this (looking at you, MICRO) didn’t land well for me. Second, the finishing author is James Patterson, and I’ll be the first to tell you this guy isn’t a writer nearly as much as he is a brand. Nobody actually enjoys his work, they just buy it, and I can’t figure that out.
Fortunately for those of us who enjoy Crichton’s unique blend of hard science and bonkers action, he’s got a lengthy bibliography from the time he was alive, and it stands up well to multiple readings. So while Sherri Crichton continues to brush the dust off of Michael’s archives, there is still plenty of stuff from this contemporary master to keep us all reading.
I like it that you mentioned the book being effectively a higher rating - even thirty years' ago I thought what a missed opportunity to make the most scary monster movie ever - I mean an 18/R certificate movie - the 'raptors, after all, are a seriously cool monster. Deinonychus, that is - although showing them naked in the movie without any feathers and stuff is amusing.
But yes, if only a different director had done the movie. Spielberg always goes for the 'I have to sell it to kids' crap.
Other interesting change he made was in Jaws vs. the book - for what could be an obvious autobiographically psychological reason he leaves out the fact that the Dreyfuss character is having an affair with Brodie's wife, and ends up getting eaten in the shark cage... Hubris.
Plus, for some reason, there aren't any 'evil Germans' in Jurassic Park, which is somewhat atypical for Spielberg. Unlike, of course, the classic land that time forgot. or is it the people ttf? Oh how we miss Doug McClure...
Michael Crichton introduced me to the concept of Gell-Mann amnesia:
“You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”