In another very convenient coincidence — I just finished reading Jurassic Park for the first time this weekend. (I’m working on my movie review of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom for my movie blog as we speak…)
Of course, reading the book, after watching the movie for 25 or so years, one can’t help compare it to the movie.
The plot of the book is less concise, and several things are treated as though they are great mysteries, when (even if I hadn’t seen the movie) a reader would pretty much figure it out immediately. The beginning of the book spends a long time on the mystery of what this mysterious John Hammond is doing out on that island… and give like five clues before revealing that he’s created baby dinosaurs… when we doubtlessly already know this based on the fact that the book is called JURASSIC PARK.
The book features scenes much more gruesome and graphic than the movie. (Nedry gets his guts eaten while he’s still alive. Wu, the Asian scientist who is responsible for the cloned dinosaurs, also gets his guts eaten while he’s still alive.) Alternatively, several characters who die relatively early on in the movie survive the entire book. Our protagonist, Alan Grant, likes kids in the book (unlike in the movie, where not liking children is one of his major personality traits) and he and Ellie Statler are never a couple. Ian Malcolm (famous for his extensive monologues in the movie) has even more extensive monologues, going on for pages and pages with nary an interruption. (Incidentally, some of those monologues were mined for his brief appearances in Jurassic World: The Fallen Kingdom). The two kids from the movie were in the book, but their positions were reversed — Tim was the older kid and the computer nerd, and Lex… complained the whole time. Ultimately, of course, all these character things are neither good things nor bad things, really. Just different.
The book also spent pages and pages explaining the computer system at Jurassic Park, and what they were having to do to get it back on line… and it gets a little dull. I know that the issue here is that I’m reading this book twenty-five years later, in a world where people can use their phones to turn on the AC before they get home — and Michael Crichton was writing for an audience who had literally never used a computer. (Not to mention that the high-tech system he’s describing sounds rather quaint.) But, again, I can’t really fault the book for these things.
But I can fault it for overall affect. Initially, reading the book, I was really engrossed and felt as though the book was a huge improvement on the movie. But by the end, I felt like the movie was a huge improvement on the book. The book meanders, goes off on tangents, dwells too long on mysteries that aren’t mysterious — and ultimately, the movie tightened it up in just the right places. Not that the movie is a flawless experience, but it’s pretty good for what it is.
P.S. I’d like to make one additional complaint on the 25th anniversary edition of the book (which is what I read). Namely, this edition is FULL OF TYPOS. For a 25th anniversary edition, that is pretty shameful.
40 Books This Year 