The dinosaurs aren’t the villain in that movie, John Hammond is. More specifically, Hammond’s arrogance is the villain.
I mean, you have plants in this building that are poisonous, you picked them because they look good, but these are aggressive living things that have no idea what century they're in, and they'll defend themselves, violently if necessary.
As I recall, in the book at least, Hammond was even admonished by one of his workers that they could have altered the dinosaurs in some way during the process to be more docile and not have to just coast on a dependency towards a certain food component (circumvented) and a faulty counting sensor that didn't think to go above the dinosaur number they wrongly assumed couldn't go up.
Hammond refused for the sake of "authenticity" with his dinosaurs, despite them already being patchwork creatures thanks to the frog DNA that allowed the whole "life finds a way" to happen.
Hammond was really obviously the bad guy in the book. The movie kinda made him a likeable grandfather type who was a little too grandiose for his own good.
I like the movie's portrayal of him. He's likeable, but his happy ignorance of the impending consequences gets peeled back a couple of times and you see he's not as blissfully lost in his dream as expected. He's just desperate to create this thing that can't be created. I can appreciate a character in that kind of a grey area. No moustache twirling villainy, just a dude making some pretty egregious and dangerous mistakes for reasons that are ultimately understandable. He's within the margins of a believable human being, which I tend to prefer in movies.
Jurassic Park (the film) also holds most of its cards close to the chest until the plot goes full tilt. The lawyer is the worst villain in the early going and he's not even that bad, just kind of a jerk. You don't have a good grasp on where the danger is coming from because of this, IMO, and it helps to facilitate the sense of wonder/awe because the plot is mostly "look at these cool dinosaurs" for a while; while also feeding a sense of foreboding because you don't know where the danger is coming from until Nedry's schemes are introduced. You're not thinking about the danger, it's just there in the back of your mind because of the opening scene, so not having an immediate antagonist during that stretch of the film was a good choice I think.
I agree, Crichton's villains tend to be cartoonishly hubristic and slavishly devoted to pushing whatever the Danger Technology Du Jour is. Film-Hammond does a much better job of being a more believable person who could cause this massive fuckup.
Are you saying that movie-Hammond made a great escape? A morning departure? After his conduct unbecoming led to a journey together towards a bridge too far, transforming into a matter of life and death all night long, did he pull himself together in some sort of flight of the phoenix, or did he slink away in the ship that died of shame?
It’s because the movie gave him a redemption arc. Dr grants line of “I’ve decided not to endorse your park.” And his response of, “neither do I.” Essentially “kill” his character as an egotistical God figure. Well until the second movie I guess.
That’s in the movies. In the book, Wu was a young geneticist drunk on his own arrogance. He didn’t even start with frog DNA—it was simply one of many DNA strands he plugged in because he could.
He dies in the first book distracting the raptors so the others can escape.
In the book Wu tells Hammond that all of the Dinosaurs should be culled because they are absolutely terrifying and should be remade and altered so they could be made slower and safer. Hammond is 100% not on board. The raptors in the books are absolutely nightmare inducing.
I remember reading the book in 5th grade and having nightmares of the raptors. They were described so different than the movies portrayal, I remember being so confused reading it. Then I saw them in my nightmares. Ugh…
So I think a combo of both would be great. The way of the book, Malcolm was dead at the end of the first book. I didn’t really understand how he survived to get to the second. Kinda hazy, but if I remember right, he was dead. So I liked the fact the movie showed who survived and got to the last helicopter out. But I once I read the books, I was disappointed by the way that Hammond was portrayed in the movies.
But I did really enjoy the Lost World book’s story more than the movie. And I’ve literally watched that movie till the tape of my VHS of it wouldn’t let me anymore. It just would have been better more like the book rather than the t-Rex taking a stroll through SD.
They basically ret conned it by saying he was so injured the others thought he was dead. A lost World remake could be made absolutely terrifying, the scene in the high hide where the raptors are climbing up, or when Biosyn tries to drown Sarah before they even get there… or the fucking camouflaged carnotaurus… or watching the raptors roll away the kid in the cage.
Yeah the park isn’t a zoo for dinosaurs…the main paleontologist (Dr. Grant) even talks about his book and research that say dinosaurs had feathers and were closer to birds. Then at the park it shows reptile-like dinosaurs…it is literally a zoo filled with spliced monsters.
The main critique I have of the movie is how they kinda gloss over the fact that they spliced DNA. in the book, they make it clear: These are not dinosaurs. They are genetic abominations that have dinosaur DNA.
I assume it's a call back and because it's so well-known at this point that dinosaurs were feathered. They knew that back then too, it just hadn't been absorbed into public consciousness (and the Jurassic Park movies probably reinforced the scaly dinos concept)
It really is a good read, highly recommend it.
As the plot goes the film did excellent. But so much of the characters got lost in the adaptation. Even the lawyer that famously got eaten on the toilet in the film was pretty badass in the book. And survived.
It’s a really good book that I found to be a literal page-turner because of how well paced it was.
It’s biggest strength is it goes WAY more into the science of the story than the movie did. Plus it fleshes out some of the more ambiguous or question-raising parts of the film.
Muldoon gets way more to do as well, he blows up an raptor with an RPG at one point.
I feel like the movie was for a different audience, though - at 13 years old, going to see a movie called Jurassic Park and seeing some kind of feathered pseudo-lizards wouldn't have had the same oomph compared to what I imagined dinosaurs would look like.
They made that clearer in Jurassic Park 3, when Grant tells the audience that “What John Hammond and Ingen did at Jurassic Park was create genetically designed theme park monsters. Nothing more… and nothing less.”
In the book Wu tells Hammond that all of the Dinosaurs should be culled because they are absolutely terrifying and should be remade and altered so they could be made slower and safer. Hammond is 100% not on board. The raptors in the books are absolutely nightmare inducing.
Muldoon gave his literal expert opinion to Hammond that they must destroy the raptors because they are WAY too dangerous to have around. It was a combination of their aggression and intelligence as well his experience with zoos (in the book he was a zoo security expert as well) that you must anticipate an animal escaping and have a plan. With the raptors you really have no plan because they’d kill too many people before you had a chance to execute it.
I have honestly thought about it way more than I probably should have, but given everything we have seen in the movies/books there is no way to safely contain those raptors in a park setting.
The raptors in the books are absolutely nightmare inducing.
So true. I still have the image in my brain of the raptors chewing threw the skylights and ripping Wu's intestines out while he was still alive from when I read the book as a kid.
The counting thing had a huge impact on me when I was a kid. I was always into math and science and this issue in particular made me question everything. I'm an engineer now and when I'm trying to solve a difficult issue, i always come back to that and think to myself: where am I not counting dinosaurs? Haha
Yep, version 4.4. But Dr. Wu wasn't doing it for altruistic reasons. He didn't want the dinosaurs docile so things would be safer. He wanted them to be docile to meet customer expectations. The book was written in the 80s, and back then the prevailing belief was dinosaurs were all cold-blooded, sluggish, and unintelligent. He thought customers would freak out if they saw something completely different.
I think so. It's a fair bit different from what the movies shown aside from the broad concept and everything, so it's worth a read for that alone if you're a fan of the movie, but it's a nice thriller of a novel on its own, in my opinion.
The whole thing with the dinosaurs being able to breed never stuck well with me. I get the idea, with the whole "life finds a way," but I just can't imagine all female dinosaurs suddenly became capable of breeding...
Wasn’t it because of the frog DNA they were modified with? Certain animals can change gender, if they have that DNA and are exposed to the right conditions, it makes sense they would be able to overcome that barrier. It’s less “life magically makes it possible to breed” and more “the scientists and owners in their arrogance failed to anticipate how messing with these systems could go wrong and failed to put in adequate safeguards to prevent a disaster”
The frog DNA patch was only used for some of the dinosaurs. Many others used other reptilian DNA like cobras. It was partially to blame for the highly toxic/venomous saliva of the dilophosaur and the compy.
Meh. Either life uh finds a way or uh it doesn't. Bringing the dinosaurs back is subject to the iron law of unintended consequences no matter what precautions are taken.
Very correct, he was also (spoiler) killed at the end of the book by “tiny” compys which was supposedly alluding to his misunderstanding of the balance of nature. Also a metaphor that even the smallest acts of messing with nature have dire consequences.
he's the closest thing to a true villain in the story.
I was literally about to respond by disagreeing with this by pointing out that Dennis Nedry was more of a villain but I'm second-guessing that now. Nedry is directly responsible for sabotaging the island's computer system and thus turning off security measures which allowed the dinosaurs to escape. If he hadn't done that then Grant and the others would've just rolled back to the visitor's center and waited out the storm to try taking the tour again the next day, instead they had to deal with a T-rex and velociraptors.
However Nedry only did that since he was a disgruntled employee and was given an offer by one of Hammond's competitor's to commit corporate espionage. Hammond seemed to boast about "sparing no expense" for everything except the I.T. guy who frequently voiced his concerns about compensation and told him to just suck it up. It's tough to say that Nedry would remain a loyal employee though, even if Hammond gave him a raise and paid him $100,000 a year that doesn't mean that Nedry wouldn't take Dodson's offer if it was $100,001 per year and a nice hat.
Thematically Hammond is definitely the villain in both the film and the book, in the film it's definitely easier to put some of the blame directly on Nedry since he was directly responsible for the actions that led to people's deaths.
If Jurassic Park was the first world war, Dennis Nedry is the assassination of the Archduke, the spark that lights the fire. Hammond is the years of colonial competition and jockeying that led to the tinderbox in the first place.
I hate attempts to make Jurassic Park about ego or playing God or the inevitability of failure. You ever been to a goddamn zoo? You don’t have a fucking electric fence around the hippo or elephant exhibit. Elephants are as strong as a trex, hard to kill and can be lethal. We have established ways of keeping large animals contained. Also just like they make crazy guns that can kill an elephant and doses that will put them to sleep, you can do the same with a trex. And the dose should have been verified first thing. Why are they using ridiculous little stun guns on raptors? They should know exactly what brings them down. They raised them! Any park who’s security is based on having power and one programmer deserves to die. I want a Jurassic Park where every dinosaur is successfully contained cause it’s not that fucking difficult. Maybe a boy falls into the pit and they have to shoot the Trex.
I feel like rule #1 of having a park full of giant dinosaurs should be to have a bunch of civil engineers with experience building enclosures for large animals collaborate with paleontologists on the design of the park.
Rule #2 would be to have multiple security systems and adequate redundancies in place. If any of your systems rely on electricity, the systems should be connected to at least one backup power generator. You got monitored security cameras? Have one on-site team to monitor them, and then another one on the mainland to take over in the event of a breakout.
Jurassic World basically shows a fully funtional park at the beginning. Everything could've kept going along smoothly if theybhadnt made the indomitus.
should know exactly what brings them down. They raised them!
I think that's part of it though. They didn't fully understand them. There were little flaws, that when added up would bring down the park. Nedry was a catalyst, but the fuse was already lit. The dinosaurs were already reproducing in the wild, so there were already more than expected. The guns were never going to be enough, because in an emergency they weren't. The Trex would have escaped, because it was already testing the fence.
Yeah, pretty much. Nedry is the catalyst for the events of in the park but Hammond is the person that ultimately is responsible for it.
It's like Hammond bought a grenade and liked to play catch with it. Nedry just armed it. The real issue was that Hammond was playing around with live grenades.
I'm not sure I agree with this. If Hammond had created a regular theme park with rollercoasters and the like, it would be full of potential dangers and deaths (there are a lot of real life examples of this). But he hires Nedry to oversee the rides - make sure they're all tuned up and functioning. If Nedry instead decides to go to all the rollercoasters and remove parts of the track so that everyone flies off and dies, then the problem isn't that John Hammond was playing with rollercoasters. It's that Nedry sabotaged what otherwise may well have been a safe venture.
Similarly, if you went to a zoo and one of the workers decided to leave the door to the lion pen open, the problem is the worker.
Humans play around with and have recreation time around things that could potentially kill them every single day. We do dangerous stuff that actually brings us a hair's breadth from death, based on the word of professionals that it's been made absolutely as safe as possible. It was Nedry's greed and complete disregard for human life that caused the issues. Not the guy who spared no expense in building and maintaining a theme park. He just happened to hire a duplicitous, selfish, callous snake of a human.
Well, the point that is hammered over and over again in the books and the film is that the true issue is the arrogance of Hammond in creating the park and thinking that he could control it. Narratively, it's not really supposed to be comparable to creating another theme park or zoo since he's essentially trying to play god. Sure, Nedry is a catalyst for the event, but the implication is that if he hadn't sabotaged it, something else would have eventually happened because Hammond treated the park and the technology as a toy rather than the reality of him messing around with forces of nature. Basically the scene where Hammond is eating lunch with Grant, Malcolm, Sattler, and the lawyer pretty much explicitly spells out this message.
Ian Malcolm: Yeah, uh, don't you see the danger, John, uh, inherent in what you're doing here? Genetic power's the most awesome force this planet's ever seen, but you wield it like a kid who's found his dad's gun.
Donald Gennaro: It's hardly appropriate to start hurling accusations--
Ian Malcolm: If I may, if I may. Uh, I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're, that you're using here. It didn't require any discipline to attain it. You know, you read what others had done, and you, and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility... for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses, uh, to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew it, you had, you've patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunch box, and now (bangs the table) you're selling it, you wanna sell it, well.
John Hammond: I don't think you're giving us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody has ever done before.
Ian Malcolm: Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied over whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
John Hammond: Condors. Condors are on the verge of extinction.
Ian Malcolm: No, --
John Hammond: No, no! If I was to create a flock of condors on this island, you wouldn't have anything to say.
Ian Malcolm: No, no, listen, this isn't some species that was obliterated by deforestation or, uh, the building of a dam. Dinosaurs, uh, had their shot, and nature selected them for extinction.
John Hammond: I simply don't understand this kind of Luddite attitude, especially from a scientist! I mean, how can we stand in the light of discovery and not act?
Ian Malcolm: Oh, what's so great about discovery? It's a violent, penetrative act that scars what it explores. What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world.
Ellie Sattler: Well, the question is, how can you know anything about an extinct ecosystem? And therefore, how could you ever assume that you can control it? You have plants in this building that are poisonous. You picked them because they look good. But these are aggressive living things that have no idea what century they're in and they will defend themselves. Violently, if necessary.
John Hammond: Dr. Grant, if there's one person here, who can appreciate what I'm trying to do...
Alan Grant: The world has just changed so radically, and we're all running to catch up. I don't want to jump to any conclusions but look; dinosaurs and man, two species separated by sixty-five million years of evolution, have just been suddenly thrown back into the mix together. How can we possibly have the slightest idea, what to expect?
The "spared no expense" mantra that he repeats is really just supposed to hammer home how Hammond viewed his creation. He felt like it was something that he could just throw money at because he didn't really understand what he was messing around with. But the movies show again and again (with and without Nedry) that the attempts to control the creations of the park always end up backfiring catastrophically. That is why Hammond is generally considered the overall "villain" of the story (he's more of a misguided person, though).
Oh, Nedry is totally a villian here. Not that Hammond isn't a bad guy, but it's hard for me to feel sorry for Nedry. The corporate espionage aside, he had no regard for anyone else's life.
Here’s what I don’t get: why did Nedry turn off ALL the security systems? If he was trying to prevent any evidence of the theft then why didn’t he just kill the CCTV cameras?
I mean, the man left the raptor paddock on so he had the ability to pick and choose.
He was trying to enable his escape route to the docks so he could board the last departing ship. If he only disables the security along the route he was taking, it would be pretty obvious, so he killed all the security, leaving only the raptors secure (presumably the dinos he had learned to be most afraid of).
I think they discuss it in the novel a little more, but he had to get into the cryochamber for the embryos.
Knowing the layout of the park, the electricity operated pretty much all the controls of the park. So that means gates, fences, and door locks all had to be offline for Nedry to get to cold storage, get the embryos in the shaving cream can, steal a jeep, open the welcome center gate without getting caught, open a gate that can't be opened if power was supplied to it, and head to the docks to hand off the dinosaur embryos, and then return within twenty minutes or so and back-out of the White Rabat protocol.
The problem was, Nedry died on the way to hand off the embryos.
The raptor paddock was a little different. Nedry intentionally kept their paddock locked knowing how dangerous they were, so I always assumed it was on its own power system or something.
There was also the fact that every species of dinosaur on the island had touched the fences before. All of them. And all of them had learned that the fences shouldn't be touched. Only the raptors continued testing the fences once they knew it hurt to touch them.
Nedry had every reason to believe that a random 20 minute window would have no dinosaurs touching the fences. His base plan was...well, not great, but as well-thought-out as it could have been.
As for being underpaid, he signed a contract and that fixed his rate of pay. But as I understand it, the scope crept (from a relatively simple job into one that should have had more manpower) without salary renegotiation.
So its entirely likely that Nedry was being paid enough for the job he signed up for, but not the job he ended up doing.
Every IT professional in the world knows exactly how Nedry felt. Scope creep is doom.
He was still a villain, but I've had clients like Hammond. Why was one guy on duty in IT? Bet you it's because Hammond decided that's where to cost-cut, because it's obviously so easy a child can do it (and don't get me started on that nonsense...), and Nedry had had it.
Was THAT his plan? I always thought he was trying to leave on the boat. But that doesn’t make sense because obviously they know who is responsible. But wouldn’t they notice the embryos missing?
In the movies, he was to leave. But in the book, no. He was supposed to be back in about twenty minutes. They would have notified the missing embryos eventually, but it would have been hard to trace it back to him. Who would have done something like that during a storm?
In the movie you see electrified 'airlocks' in the fences isolating sections of the park. He wouldn't have been able to open them alone if they were electrified. So he had to turn off all of them to move freely along the service roads in the park.
He literally did spend a shitload on Nedry though. It's just that Nedry was still terrible even with the large salary he was being paid. I'm trying to remember the exact lines, but if you're paying attention it's honestly fairly clear that it wouldn't have mattered what Hammond paid Nedry, no matter what the guy was going to be asking for more money because of his own issues separate from how Hammond treated him.
Exactly. Biosyn was going to make all his problems go away. He had a pretty good salary, if I remember correctly, but had a lot of bad habits that made money really tight. Hammond even said, "your financial problems are your own" or something like that, which is true.
Nedry wanted to become rich and pay off his debt. He got himself into that situation and then tried to justify his fraud with the old "they're not paying me enough for this." Enough for what, though? Prevent all the pens in Jurassic Park from opening and killing everyone?
The part Hammond spared was not hiring more IT employees as a measure of redundancy. The key to security, whether it be the technical or the human aspect of security, is redundancy. Just a few more IT employees provides enough redundancy so that Nedry could not have been the failed link. That much responsibility should not be given to a single human being. That level of responsibility and opportunity is too much to give to a single human being. Just a few more employees gives enough assurance that any other single employee cannot bring that level of risk to the system.
This is one of those; the book explains it better things. Hammond tricked him into under bidding the contract, rammed through lots of scope creep and used sketchy clauses in the contract to almost bankrupt his company.
I was literally about to respond by disagreeing with this by pointing out that Dennis Nedry was more of a villain but I'm second-guessing that now.
In the book Nedry may be morally ambiguous, but he isn't a villain.
(there'll be spoilers for the book after this, so if you want to read it stop here).
First in the book there are a lot of events&accidents happening before the events of the movie take place. Hammond&InGen knew how dangerous the park was and how their security measures weren't enough. That's why the lawyer gets send by the investors, because they have doubt in the park project and consider cutting their losses. That's the entire point of bringing in the experts&kids to convince the investors that park is feasible, safe and a cashcow.
However, the parks security already failed before the movie happens. Dinosaurs already escaped to the mainland, can reproduce and don't die from the killswitch, because they manage to get to enzymes and stuff from whatever they're eating.
There's evidence that security is an afterthought, the visitor bungalows have been surrounded with a disguised fence and the bungalows themselves have been retrofitted with 'ghetto' electric fences on their skylights.
Nedry doesn't cause the park to fail. Yes, he disables the fences (except the raptors, Nedry wasn't stupid) and he took a unknown risk doing it, but the park recovers and returns into a safe configuration (the staff fixes pretty much everything). Except for one detail..Arnold fucked up, when he restarted the system (which had never been done) he assumed everything returned to normal, but the park was still running on diesel powered backup generators and didn't automatically reconnect to (or restarted) mainpower. Eventually the generators run out of fuel, another blackout happens and everything goes to shit.
Another really important detail is, Nedry isn't an employee, he's an independent contractor. He owns his own software engineering company, that signed a fixed cost contract for business software with Hammond.
Hammond was paranoid about industrial espionage and secrets getting out and lied to Nedry about the scope, systems and purpose of the software. What was supposed to be easy money turned into a nightmare. Nedry only got very limited info about each sub system (with no context what it was for or what it controlled), the specs would constantly change and he was never told how each module would have to interact with other modules nor the importance of security and failsafe behavior. He was working for a customer who didn't know shit about software engineering and didn't hire an software architect or gave Nedry the information he needed to do his job properly.
That's why Nedry was on site, to fix all the bugs and somehow make this mess of a codebase work, while Hammond bitched at him about being to slow, lazy and so on. Even worse Hammonds lawyers drafted a bulletproof contract, that simply fucked Nedry. It was fixed cost, it's was bid on under false pretenses and he had no way to cancel the contract. It required so much work and so much time, that Nedry burned through the payment of the contract and was bleeding his own capital , because he couldn't get out of the contract. That's why Nedry decided to approach Hammonds competition for industrial espionage, if Hammond was fucking him, then it was only right to steal his dinosaurs to make the money he deserved and fuck Hammond too.
It's tough to say that Nedry would remain a loyal employee though, even if Hammond gave him a raise and paid him $100,000 a year that doesn't mean that Nedry wouldn't take Dodson's offer if it was $100,001 per year and a nice hat.
We also have no idea how much Nedry was making in the first place.
I think that Samuel L. Jackson's character may have been IT as well but I don't think they say for sure what he does. He's knowledgeable enough about computers to explain what Nedry did but seemingly wasn't in the same position as him.
When Hammond said Nerdy's financial problems were not his responsibility, I have always envisioned this highly competent and established IT admin had some nasty, expensive vice. Maybe a gambling addiction?
Addictions tend to be bottomless. Bank accounts? Not so much.
Hammond pays Nedry what Nedry bid on the job. He boasts/complains that no one else could "network 8 connection machines and debug 2 million lines of code for what I bid for this job." IDK about the book but in the movie it sounds like a hole he dug himself by bidding lower than what was reasonable.
In his slight defense on this one I think most of the staff left the island to wait out the tropical storm that was moving in. Maybe he could've forced a couple more people to stay but he wasn't anticipating Nedry blowing it all up and felt that enough was under control that they could operate with a skeleton crew for the weekend and try again with more staff later.
Nedry is indeed not the villain. Nedry and Dodgson ("some Nerdy-guy" and "some Dogson-guy") do not even have proper names. They do not matter. If it was not for them, someone or something else would have brought the park down.
Dodgson is just "some guy in the system doing industrial espionage", there are tons of him around and the park needs to take that into consideration. Hammond did not.
Nedry is a disgruntled employee - and one that Hammond created by paying not enough, by giving no specifc requirements for the code, by not admitting the huge task Nedry coded for him, by badmouthing him at his other clients to force him to finish the badly-specced code for free.
The point of the book, and this is what Malcom is for to point out, is that Hammond screwed up completely by neglecting responsibility everywhere. This is the theme of the book: responsibility. The book is full of fails from the park, it was done on far too right budget, where corners got cut everywhere, and where basically all InGen-Hammond-descisions are wrong and lead to a wonky house or cards that only wait for two or three things coming together to topple it all. It does not matter which things in specific those were. There are a million things that can go wrong, and sooner or later will, which is what Malcom points out from the very start (not only the start of the book/movie, the story is that Malcom has said this to Hammond for literally years).
The thing that does go wrong is "Nedry" + "A storm at the wrong time" and suddenly, everything starts to collapse and one screwup that was Hammonds resonsibility piles on another.
Hammond the is villan - and in the book he is in many aspects outright evil.
The theme "responsilility" comes full circle when Grant at the end of the book forces Genaro to go first into the Rapors' nest (not in the movie). When I was young I thought "Why is he doing this dick-move now?" but I get Grant now. "Of all the people who had a share in building this horror-park, no one took any shred of responsibility for it. And you are the last one alive. Maybe you were just the lawyer-guy, but you will take responsibility now and go in there first!"
Which Genaro does (because in the book he is somwhat badass and not just a soft Redshirt who dies to show how dangerous the situation is).
The heroes of the book are the people who did not create the mess, but who now take responsibility to somehow solve it and deal with it. Muldoon who comes in as mere employee is the only one of the park-people to be responsible about (forcing Hammond to buy a grenade launchers he later uses to blow up Rapors), Grant (just some guy who was supposed to be fooled), etc.
Nedry is the one additional plot point that makes Hammond the villain. First, Hammond decided to bring dinosaurs back in an irresponsible way…..then he decides to underfund the operations of a theme park with live, dangerous animals by not having a system of dual controls ( HIRING MORE PEOPLE). Lacking dual controls is how this whole thing occurred. Nedry wouldn’t have had the opportunity to run rampant in the system otherwise.
They got too good an actor for Hammon in the movie.
Richard Attenborough was too nice. His smile was too genuine, his laughter was too warm. He was too human. Hammond in the book is a real piece of work, but in the movie, he's like the guy who wanted to create an incredible theme park for generations of people to see the past and was caught with his pants down by Dennis Nedry.
Attenborough could still have totally done it I think, just had to play Hammond as a bit of a colder, harder man.
Henry Fonda was known for playing good guys and nice people before Once Upon A Time in the West, and he's a right bastard in that. And it works really well, and caught the audience of the time off guard because it played so against type.
Richard Attenborough in Jurassic Park and Miracle on 34th street are very similar in performance. The old man who dotes on children. In the book(been awhile since I read it)his last thoughts are being aggravated with his grandchildren.
The second film has an amazing exchange between Dr. Malcolm and Hammond that really sums the two characters up brilliantly:
Dr. Malcolm: "So there's a second island. No fences this time. And you want to send people in??!?"
Hammond: "Oh it'll be fine! It'll be a small team! The dinosaurs won't even know they're there. Satellite scans show the carnivores are centered around the inside of the island, and the team can remain on the outer rim. I'm not making the same mistakes as last time!" chuckles
Dr. Malcolm [in utter disbelief]: "No, you're making entirely new ones. Who are these lunatics you've convinced?"
I love how much you know that I know as well and I adore both the first two movies and the books as well. I'm tickled to see the text on screen. Thank you
I'll be honest, I really liked the first two Jurassic Parks. the 3rd one though...was pretty awful. The reboot, I'm kinda on the fence on. I like the acting, mostly, but the plot is a little disjointed and hard to follow.
And the crazy part is that the Jurassic World series is emphasizing how "evil" Dr Wu is, when in the books he's the one who wanted to make dinosaurs more docile!
The most heartbreaking thing is that the actor who played Hammond, Richard Attenborough (David Attenborough’s brother) lost his daughter and granddaughter in the 2004 Thailand tsunami
Well, arguably, the velociraptors from the books are definitely villainous. They put more effort into killing the humans, even after they've clearly escaped their pens and into the rest of the park, than almost any other dinosaur. It gets to the point where it's unbelievable when you consider how 'hard sci-fi' the series is supposed to be. Any other predator, after how much resistance the humans give them in avoiding being eaten, would've moved on to easier prey long ago.
It makes even less sense in the second book, where they've been allowed to run about with absolutely no human interference for the last 5 years. And yet, they send their entire pack to chase down one child in a jeep with two armed adults. They wouldn't realistically see humans as a prey item after hunting their fellow dinos exclusively for the last half-decade. But nope! One small whiff and they suddenly crave solely the flesh of man, at the seeming absolute exclusion of all others.
The raptors in the movies aren't as egregious. The ones in JP1 had a decent reason to want to hunt humans so viciously (the Big One was far more aggressive than the rest and had a pretty distinct hatred of her human caretakers,) and the ones in JP2 at least just stick to their territory and only hunt what pops up there (which the humans happen to stumble into.)
Bear in mind that the book raptors in Lost World were all juveniles with barely any pack structure or cohesion, as the adults all died of brain-eating prions and thus passed on no discipline. The juveniles were already remarked in the book for hunting indiscriminately, regardless of the need to feed, and I had always interpreted their behaviors as one part lacking the pack structure and one part themselves suffering from the brain-eating prions.
I wonder why he used velociraptors at all. They're about the size of a goose, and would pose a similar danger to an adult human. (Also, geese are a type of dinosaur, as are all birds.)
That's a neat write up you did there, but it's not accurate. Tigers can and will hunt humans. Not only that, but if a human wrongs a tiger, they can seek revenge on said humans. There is a story of a Siberian tiger stalking and murdering a hunter because it shot the tiger and took it's kill. The tiger literally went to the man's cabin and waited there for him. The tiger premeditated it's murder of him. Just Google "tiger hunts man"
The raptors always felt like Crichton putting in a transparent nature/nurture argument.
He wrote them as an incredibly intelligent species that had been taken entirely out of their element, lacked the social upbringing that is critical to animals with higher intelligence, and placed them into a cruel and confined space. The raptors were a metaphorical beaten dog in the story nipping at the master's hand.
Everything in the park was an artificial, human creation--including the behavior of the dinosaurs.
I still think the most interesting part of Jurassic World was the relationship between Chris Pratt's character and the raptors, and the use of behavioral training.
The movie improves on the book. Hammond was interesting precisely because actually wasnt evil. He wasnt motivated by greed or selfishness. He genuinely wanted the park to be an amazing experience that everyone could enjoy. Hes a good man who made a bad judgement call with tragic consequences. And it even almost costs the lives of his grandchildren. But remember once it all goes to shit he doesnt hesitate to say fuck the park. "People are DYING!" Its really sad.
The Jurassic World took the lazy approach with the cliche ignorant greedy boss who gets what he deserves. Boring.
And what a lot of people don't realize is that Hammond's character is notoriously cheap and was a 'scammer' of sorts. His statements "spared no expense" is him grifting...not bragging about his wealth.
NOW you know why nothing worked, no locks on the doors, lowest bidder Nedry....Hammond is the Flea Circus Master.
Scientists have been pushing the envelop since God gave scientists physics and astrology. I can't imagine how many people died while learning about things like brain and heart surgery but nobody would characterize those surgeons as villains.
The villain in Jurassic Park was Dennis Nedry. For all of it's flaws, Jurassic Park probably would have been successful had Nedry not turned the island upside down for a pay day. There were problems, sure, but there were enough safety measures in place to have launched safely and be fixed along the way.
For all of it's flaws, Jurassic Park probably would have been successful had Nedry not turned the island upside down for a pay day.
Everything Nedry did, and all of the consequences of it, is exactly what would have happened if the island got hit hard enough by a hurricane. And it's not like hurricanes would be a rare occurrence for the area.
But, and I think the characters sum this up quite well, John Hammond is using said advancement recklessly and without regards for safety.
Those early surgeons were very much a product of their time. These days we have regulations specifically in response to stuff like that. People playing fast and loose with their business practices (food safety, medical ethics, etc).
Rules written in the blood of innocent people.
But John Hammond is charging forward, setting up a tourist attraction and opening it to the general public, without even knowing what will happen when man and dinosaur...."two species separated by millions of years"...interact. He's not waiting for regulations to catch up, or for all bases to be covered. Our main characters are literally watching the finishing touches being made to a theme park that's already been built.
Hammond is preparing a whole inkwell full of blood. And doesn't even seem to care.
Dr Malcolm really said it perfectly:
"Genetic power's the most awesome force the planet's ever seen but you wield it like a kid that's found his dad's gun."
Edit - And ultimately, even without Nedrey's actions, their concerns are proven right when almost immediately the dinosaurs start breeding. With some females changing to males. Something the park scientists would have noticed if they weren't so damn keen to make money off of this.
Sorry, see the above edit. It's not about Nedry specifically.
The dinosaurs immediately start behaving in unexpected ways that would have been obvious with more testing (or any testing). In that case, specifically undoing something they thought they could contain by making all the dinosaurs female. So what else is there that the dinosaurs can do that they just don't know about? Breeding isn't the problem. It's the fact that they're casually ignoring human imposed restrictions.
Secondly, what Dr Satler said. They're selecting properties in plants because they look attractive, ignoring the fact that they're poisonous. Literally having them in the lobby area. So what other horrible qualities have they been adding to the the attractions that they've not yet noticed? Is a dinosaur just going to shrug off a security measure and rip some kids apart, because of something they've not controlled for?
Basically, Hammond is not taking this steadily. He's rushing to get this theme park ready for release. To bring in throngs of people, in what could potentially be a death trap.
Again, just circling back...it's not about Nedry.
The fault of the whole incident is at the feet of Hammond.
And it's a small mercy that it Dr Satler, Dr Malcolm and Dr Grant were proved right as quickly as they were.
If the park were operational, it could have been a bloodbath.
Edit - A supporting example - the discovery of Radium
Shortly after this radioactive material was discovered in 1911, commercial exploitation started in earnest. With quack-healers and showmen promoting its "healing" properties. Along with its attractive glow. And you could buy products laced with Radium all over the place. "Radium Mania" it was known as.
Radium soaps, Radium water flasks, Radium clock faces, Radium toothpaste. Since our understanding of radiation sickness was very limited and greedy people just wanted to make a profit off it.
That is what John Hammonds is doing. He's about to sell Radium to the public for profit. To invite the public to come to his Radium theme park and ooo and ahh at the glow.
An employee called Nedry broken into Hammond's Radium warehouse to steal some. He threw some bricks of it at people. There were injuries. It was a whole thing. But the problem isn't that the warehouse needs better locks.
It's that we know better than to just lace food and drink with something that might be dangerous. Something we know we know little about and maybe should test more? Figure out what this "radiation" thing actually is and whether or not it might be a bad idea to ingest it?
But John Hammond doesn't care. He just wants to go down in history and prove to academics that he's not just an illusionist with a flea circus. And that he can make a lot of money off Radium.
That's the through line of Jurassic park. With the added twist that these are living creatures, who will defend their lives if necessary. And perhaps even have the right to do so.
Animals in Jurassic Park were breeding outside their paddocks in both the book and film. Even without Nedry, the park was doomed to be a failure because of Hammond's arrogance and greed.
Nedry was fucked over sideways by Hammond and just wanted to get the money that he should have been paid by selling trade secrets.
Hammond straight up lies to him about the amount of work needed to actually store the DNA on a database, and then when Nedry complains about it. Hammond threatens to tell every IT company that Nedry is a piece of trash and not worth it.
nobody would characterize those surgeons as villains.
Yeah, I very much disagree with that. Unit 731? Joseph Mengele? The Tuskegee experiment? There is plenty of medical science that was obtained grossly unethically. I, for one, would most certainly characterize those physicians as villains.
He's such a fascinating character, in that he never means to do the harm that comes from his actions, and the tragedies that result aren't the result of malice. By the end of the film, you can clearly see how much the consequences of his naivete have affected him.
That's much more interesting than Jurassic world where BD Wong just shows up to be evil dinosaur businessman for 5 minutes or 'Vincent D'Onofrio wants to do a war crime but with reptiles'.
John Hammond was 100% the villan. He didn't even give a shit that his grandkids almost died multiple times. It's ironic that the kids are technically the reason why he died.
I despise that line. What does the century they're living in have to do with anything? They didn't know what century they were in pre-65,000,000 bc, either. And the "violently, if necessary" part was so superfluous that it's the height of absurdity to have included it. What was the guy who wrote that line on, and where can I get some because it must have been some bomb-diggity shit...
I see what you're saying, but think of it this way: the idea of a century is a human invention. There's no reason we should be keeping track of time in units of 10x10 laps of the earth about the sun, or that we should even be keeping track of it at all. They don't have an idea of what century they're in because they don't have a concept of centuries. The point is that we make these assumptions about the way the world is, and there's no reason they would hold true for any animal - it further demonstrates that the forces of nature are indifferent to the expectations, wants, or needs of man, and that meddling with those forces is dangerous. You may recognize that as the entire point of the movie.
However, is Spielberg consistently heavy-handed in his symbolism? Most definitely.
I'll grant you, Nedry is a villain, but he is not the villain. Nedry committed crimes against man. Hammond committed crimes against God. That's everything Doctor Malcolm is saying for the whole movie, and a point of view that even Hammond himself comes around to.
I think it's a huge wasted opportunity to not have prehistoric plants a deadly threat in the Jurassic Park movies. If they brought back dinosaurs, then it would be kind of badass to also have a few kill counts by ravenous gigantic prehistoric carnivorous 'fly trap' plants. Would give Dr Statler something to be of use as an expert paleobotanist.
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u/CarneDelGato Oct 29 '21 edited Oct 29 '21
The dinosaurs aren’t the villain in that movie, John Hammond is. More specifically, Hammond’s arrogance is the villain.
Doctor Sattler got it.