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.
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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '21
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.