Jurassic Park: Rebirth roars near the top of the box office charts, amidst competition in the form of Superman, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and other franchises—at the time of this writing, it's sitting third on the domestic box office charts for the year so far. And, as of today, it's available on digital.
The titular rebirth of the franchise has inspired me to go back to its roots. Michael Crichton's 1990 book and Steven Spielberg's 1993 adaptation, both titled Jurassic Park, spawned an entertaining and lucrative series that's gone on for over three decades. Fortunately, I was able to revisit both in the form of a physical book and a VHS, the ultimate cozy and nostalgic experience.
The copy of Jurassic Park I’m reading was published as one batch for the first edition. It’s a little worse for wear, but the diagrams and tables Crichton put in his book really feel consistent with the format. It is a terrific way to read this book, and it enhances the feeling of being transported back to the '90s.
Jurassic Park is pretty clear about its themes. Although it is a science-fiction-action-adventure novel with nonstop tension and lovable characters, it starts with a pretty stark introduction about the dangers of unsupervised and uncontrolled science.
The introduction of the book, titled “The Ingen Incident,” is a holistic view of the dangers that biotechnology and genetic engineering pose to humankind. It doesn’t mention dinosaurs, it barely mentions the company Ingen, and it doesn’t mention any of our main characters.
But it does set forth the following warning: “But that is no longer true. There are very few molecular biologists and very few research institutions without commercial affiliations. The old days are gone. Genetic research continues, at a more furious pace than ever. But it is done in secret, and in haste, and for profit.”
It’s science with no ethics or ethos; science done for pure profit.
Overall, the book warns against unscrupulous scientists working for visionary but greedy and self-serving industrialists willing to go to any lengths for their own fame and fortune. Time and again, this book paints the corporate leaders of the world as egotists with tunnel vision, working to shape the world to their own ends by any means necessary and willing to harm basically anyone in the process.
The book introduces John Hammond, the creator of Jurassic Park and ersatz king of the dinosaurs, who looks down on the local Costa Rican laborers, uses his grandchildren as metaphorical shields to protect himself from legal recourse, and is dismissive of his chief scientist and science in general. This should be a character type we are all familiar with in modern day.
Ian Malcolm, the mathematician, with his chaos math and “life finds a way” theories, is a foil to John Hammond. Ian Malcolm espouses that man cannot hold dominion over nature and that it is folly to believe in pure control powered by force of will and money. This constantly stymies John Hammond, who unerringly believes he cannot be wrong and that his power is limitless because he is rich and powerful.
Of course, Jurassic Park unravels over the course of hours, due to the short-sighted decisions by men looking after their own interests and trying to line their own pockets. The tableau of Jurassic Park supporters a corporate stooge, an overworked park engineer, a drunk game warden, an ignored geneticist, an antagonistic lawyer, and a craven computer programmer.
Our trio of protagonists, thought-leaders in their field and experts, are our audience surrogates who are seeing the park for the first time. Crichton equally weights the time spent with dinosaurs with corporate power struggles. John Hammond is more concerned about the lawyer sent to his island, who might possibly shut him down, than the dangers of the dinosaurs he created.
Through the course of the book, as the park disintegrates around our human characters, nature returns to equilibrium as dinosaurs co-mingle again, but the human concept of the amusement park is completely reduced to ash and cinder. Nature will overcome any control that man tries to place upon it, and all that man creates is temporary.
It feels like a still very prescient theme, and this book is a delight to read. It has aged wonderfully. Crichton often wrote at the bleeding edge of technology and science. What science fiction writers envisioned as our future often holds no resemblance to our present. This is not true of Crichton, however. I think his vision and understanding of science and technology in this book are spot-on.
The state-of-the-art computer systems he described in 1990 are understandable and still of the present day. Modern-day cloning has progressed slowly, and this year has decreed the return of the dire wolf and the future of the woolly mammoth. Scientists have declared that they can bring these animals back, but really, should they?
You may have noticed I haven’t talked a lot about the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park as of yet. To be sure, they are a major part of the book and drive the constant tension for about 250 pages straight.
Interestingly, Crichton doesn’t play the dinosaurs as spectacle, though, and they are revealed in an anticlimactic way. The book starts with the mysterious sightings of the Compys on the mainland of Costa Rica; proof of life is eventually filtered through clinics and museums, with people disbelieving that they are looking at an actual dinosaur.
Certainly, there is a dinosaur on the cover of the book, making it obvious what the subject is, but Crichton plays it very coy. The reveal that Ingen is making dinosaurs on their island is finally revealed by way of corporate espionage in a competing company’s Board of Directors’ meeting, where they decide to steal dinosaur embryos. It's really not the magnificent reveal that you may have expected.
Even our trio of protagonists sees dinosaurs for the first time as a course of life. The grandchildren of John Hammond (Tim and Lex) are told by Grant in a scene that takes place off the page. In a way, I think Crichton wanted to undersell the dinosaurs and present them as rote and natural. It works to lull the reader and the characters into ease with their presence on the island.
Crichton goes so into depth on the day-to-day workings of the island to show that this isn’t science fiction but science fact—and in reality, there would be normal, daily operations which seem achievable and realistic that all culminate into the greatest amusement park/zoo ever created.
It is a perfect example of human brains being able to normalize and become bored with anything, without grasping the true nature of the situation around us. People can quickly become complacent about dangerous situations, especially in new environments where they have no expectations. Dinosaurs are shown to be controlled and relatively peaceful, exactly up to the point at which they aren’t. We want to believe we live in a world of safety and guardrails where the things we see cannot hurt us, but that is unequivocally untrue. Especially when the things on the other side of the fence are carnivorous dinosaurs.
Human resilience, ingenuity, courage, and extraordinary effort save the lives of some of the people on the island. No one is a hero, but our protagonists act with more wisdom and selfless motivation. They are also driven by grim determination to stop the dinosaurs from leaving the island. John Hammond is all intelligence and money and no wisdom or consideration. In the end, Hammond is killed by his own creation, having learned no lesson.
It didn't take long for the story rights to be purchased. The movie is iconic for a reason: it absolutely rules. The visuals, storytelling, music, and characters make it a masterpiece. Spielberg was able to take the rich text of the book and use it to create a parallel but superior experience. If you haven’t seen this movie, you should go watch it tonight. And maybe again tomorrow night.
My viewing was on my 1993 VHS tape. The quality of the picture and sound was actually still good, and it brought an additional layer of nostalgia watching it on tape. Some of the dinosaur CGI is distracting, but overall, you feel enveloped in the narrative of the movie. So few dinosaur movies have been made that make me feel that way. Jurassic Park is a wonder of suspension of disbelief and total immersion in the imagined world.
The movie has a lot more spectacle than the book. Scientific discussion and philosophy are excised in favor of the visceral interactions between men and dinosaurs. The movie starts with a mysterious but frightening scene consisting of workers in SWAT-type gear trying to transfer a mysterious animal from one cage into another. One worker gets grabbed by the mysterious but violent animal, and the visual language makes it clear that he will not survive the experience.
We finally get to see the eye of the animal at the end of the scene, and it is the perfect encapsulation of the quote that Crichton puts at the beginning of his novel:
“Reptiles are abhorrent because of their cold body, pale color, cartilaginous skeleton, filthy skin, fierce aspect, calculating eye, offensive smell, harsh voice, squalid habitation, and terrible venom; wherefore their Creator has not exerted his power to make many of them.”
This scene also sets audience expectations for the barely contained violence of the dinosaurs and the failures of the park. I think most people put it in the back of their minds that when they get to experience a safe time in an amusement park or safari, it is because of the hard work of the laborers who made it all happen. There is a fine line between danger and safety, and we can stand on one side of it because other people stood on the other.
The movie has a surprising amount of exposition in the early scenes that I had forgotten about. Alan Grant establishes his dislike of children and computers. We see amber discovery in the Dominican. Nedry, the computer geek, meets up with his contact for their corporate espionage plan. Finally, we meet Ian Malcolm on the way to the island, then Spielberg shows off his skills as a director and reveals the majesty of the dinosaurs on the island.
Once the basis of the island is established, the stakes are quickly put in place. Raptors are again introduced as being intelligent and extremely malicious towards humans. Their final meal in the park also serves as a warning from Ian Malcolm about the inevitable failure of the control systems on the island. The park is magnificent but also supremely dangerous.
From there, it’s nearly a straight sprint to the end. Nedry’s sabotage and death lead to a cascade of failures in the park, which leads to mayhem for all of our characters.
They run around the island either to escape from dinosaurs, restore park systems, or both. Scenes of tension are interspersed with scenes of wonderment. Truly, the Jurassic Park theme from the score is one of the great movie themes for a reason. It carries so many of these scenes to even greater heights. The end credits play it twice because it’s so good.
There are still underlying themes to the story played out through John Hammond. While the movie version isn’t quite so craven and cold-hearted as his book counterpart, he is still a stubborn, self-centered industrialist. He is so sure in his complete control that he says, “Creation is an act of sheer will. Next time it’ll be flawless,” and it shows his inability to engage with the reality around him. While Ian Malcolm is the ultimate rational and scientific thinker, John Hammond is just as irrational.
This is an all too common modern archetype of money fixing problems. When you have enough money to essentially form whatever is in your mind, it warps your perception of the world around you.
The antagonists of the movie, the raptors, are portrayed almost like the Xenomorphs in the Alien series. A perfect hunter, intelligent but ruthless, their only job is to menace our characters and spell their imminent doom. In all honesty, I’m not sure which one I would rather have to face. Raptors are the epitome of Hammond’s folly. Hammond created something that should not have been allowed to walk the Earth again, and eventually, they escape the control of their creator and wreak havoc.
To that end, it’s almost hard not to sympathize with the T-Rex in the final scene. As the T-Rex enters the scene, she distracts the remaining raptors and allows the human characters to finally escape the island. The “When dinosaurs ruled the Earth” banner seems like a fitting reward for the heroics of facing off against the raptors. It is also a reminder that, in the end, it was nature that was in control, and our heroes, while alive, were mostly lucky and tenacious. The humans do not emerge victorious over the dinosaurs. In the end, they exhibited no control; they were just prey that managed to escape.
The end of the movie sees Alan Grant with the two kids asleep on him, and the final images are of a bird flying over the water. It makes me think that nature is freedom, and violence, and chaos, and wonder. It’s hard to synthesize all the feelings Jurassic Park gives me, but I know those feelings are pretty universal.
The set design and environment they are in give so much life to the story. One thing you can say about Jurassic Park movies is that they shoot on location, and you know those characters are interacting in a real place. It adds so much to the experience and makes the audience feel the size and weight of nature and our relative smallness to it.
Even with over 30 years passing, the Jurassic World book and first movie are cultural touchstones that live up to the hype.
More sci-fi from Winter is Coming:
To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and Twitter account, sign up for our exclusive newsletter, and check out our YouTube channel.