The Big Picture
- In the Jurassic Park movie franchise, the dinosaurs remain on Isla Nublar and Isla Sorna up until the events of
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.
In the novel, however, some dinosaurs have escaped from the islands and are headed to the mainland at the start of the book. - While many of the same characters from the book are in the movie, there are some major differences. For instance, the roles of Tim and Lex are swapped, and there is no romance between Ellie Sattler and Alan Grant.
- John Hammond is portrayed differently in the film as a naive billionaire, while the book depicts him as strictly evil and reckless.
With talk of a Jurassic World 4 en route and the possible involvement of Scarlett Johansson (unconfirmed) and director Gareth Edwards (confirmed) recently, it has returned focus to the franchise that began way back in 1993 with Jurassic Park. Steven Spielberg‘s film was a critical and box-office smash, and a touchstone moment in the history of special effects. Jurassic Park itself would be followed by two sequels before seeing the franchise rebooted in 2015 as Jurassic World, giving moviegoers a look at a completed, and functional, dinosaur park. Until all hell — and an Indominus rex — broke loose. That film spawned Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom before bringing back the original Jurassic Park cast to star alongside the Jurassic World crew in Jurassic World Dominion. Now the franchise continues to expand with this latest announcement (whether it should or not is a different question — see here). What gets lost is how the Jurassic Park films started on the page, not on the screen, with Michael Crichton‘s 1990 novel of the same name. Let’s take a look at how the film evolved on its journey to the silver screen.
Jurassic Park
In Steven Spielberg’s massive blockbuster, paleontologists Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) are among a select group chosen to tour an island theme park populated by dinosaurs created from prehistoric DNA. While the park’s mastermind, billionaire John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), assures everyone that the facility is safe, they find out otherwise when various ferocious predators break free and go on the hunt.
- Release Date
- June 11, 1993
- Runtime
- 127
- Writers
- Michael Crichton , David Koepp
- Studio
- Universal Pictures
Dinosaurs Make It Out of the Park Earlier in the ‘Jurassic Park’ Novel
At least up until the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the dinosaurs remained on two islands off the coast of Costa Rica: Isla Nublar, the location of the first film and Jurassic World, and Isla Sorna, where InGen cloned the company’s dinosaurs, where The Lost World: Jurassic Park was largely staged. It was a small comfort in the film, knowing that the killer dinosaurs weren’t a threat here in our world, and once our heroes escaped, they could rest easy. While the novel does take place on Isla Nublar as well, a number of small dinosaurs have evaded the security protocols in place and have stowed away on supply ships to the mainland prior to the book’s events.
‘Jurassic Park’s T-Rex Almost Killed a Crew Member — For Real
When art (almost) imitates life.
The opening of the book details a scene in which a young girl is attacked by a group of small Procompsognathus on a Costa Rican beach. It’s a scene that actually opens The Lost World: Jurassic Park, only the attack occurs on Isla Sorna, not on the mainland. The book also details the efforts to contact the supply ship that has a group of young Velociraptor stowaways before it reaches the mainland. Good news: the power turns back on just in time and the raptors are killed by the crew of the ship. Bad news: the epilogue makes it clear that raptors have made Costa Rica their new home — only no one knows where they are. Comforting. They’re probably feeling pretty good about it too, especially after hearing that their former island location has been napalmed by the Costa Rican government.
The ‘Jurassic Park’ Film Makes Some Big Changes to the Book’s Characters
One of Jurassic Park‘s strong suits is its cast, a collection of actors that held their own against its impressive visual effects while playing characters with disparate personalities, ideas, and motives. For the most part, the characters themselves have all made the transition from paper to film, but who they are differs, and in some cases significantly. Take Tim and Lex, for example. In the film, Ariana Richards plays the older, computer-savvy sibling Lex, while Joseph Mazzello plays Tim, the younger sibling with a fascination with dinosaurs (maybe not anymore, though). In the book, the roles are reversed. Lex is the youngest, a baseball fanatic who spends a good portion of the novel being all whiny and daft about the peril they’re in, taking on the role of a naive small child. Tim, on the other hand, is more level-headed, and it’s him who is the computer whiz.
Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and Alan Grant (Sam Neill) enjoy a little romantic subtext in the film, but in the novel it’s strictly professional, with Sattler as a younger graduate paleobotany student and Grant in the role of a mentor who, incidentally, isn’t as child-averse as his Hollywood counterpart. As for what’s up with the other doc, B.D. Wong‘s Dr. Henry Wu has a much larger part in the novel, at least until he’s killed. Given how Wu is pivotal to the storyline of Jurassic World Dominion, the film franchise didn’t kill him. This leads to one of the biggest differences between the book and the novel: who survives. Game warden Robert Muldoon makes it to the end of the novel, but isn’t so lucky in the film, with a “clever girl” Velociraptor making short work of Muldoon (Bob Peck) in the film. Ian Malcolm, given life by a pitch-perfect Jeff Goldblum, is killed off in the novel, or so it would seem, as in both film and print the character returns for The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
One of the most blackly comic parts of the film sees lawyer Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero) rewarded for his cowardice by the T. Rex picking him up off the toilet as a light snack. In the novel, however, Gennaro not only survives, but is one of the protagonists, one who does what he can to keep everyone safe when things go wrong, and goes so far as to risk his own life by jumping into a Velociraptor nest to do so. The greedy coward of the novel is actually a character that doesn’t appear in the film at all, Jurassic Park’s head of public relations, Ed Regis. Regis is a sycophantic yes-man to John Hammond, who bolts at the first sign of trouble and meets his end in the novel as Gennaro did in the film. Spielberg simply melded the two characters into one.
‘Jurassic Park’s Biggest Book-to-Film Difference Is John Hammond
But what of the man behind it all, John Hammond? In the film, Hammond, as played by Richard Attenborough, is a charming billionaire, a lovable old man with good intentions. He isn’t evil, just naive, imagining a park for everyone to enjoy, but not considering the bigger picture of what his scientists are doing (the whole “whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should” argument). And when things go wrong, he shows great concern for everyone, especially his grandchildren, and agrees in the end that he can not “endorse the park.” While his character can be argued as the villain of the film, it’s still hard to watch as his dream of something grand is shattered.
It stands in direct contrast to the John Hammond of the novel, an evil and reckless man right from his introduction on. He knows all that’s gone wrong in the past, like the dinosaurs on the mainland, and the red flags of danger around him, but chooses to ignore it all. And when things really start to go downhill, so much so that he can no longer ignore it, Hammond refuses to take any culpability for his part in it, blaming it all on security systems and others. With dollar signs in his eyes, Hammond has only his own interests in mind, as evidenced by his cold-blooded decision to carry on with his plans for the park even after all the lives lost, having learned nothing. And when he dies — and he dies in the book, by the way — it’s a karmic righting, not a tragedy.
As an aside, all of those deaths, had they been faithfully reproduced in the film, would have easily earned Jurassic Park a well-earned R rating. Now that would be one hell of a great director’s cut.
Jurassic Park is available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.