Comment by adrian_b
7 days ago
That's because Spielberg's movie has summarized Crichton's book, so it had plenty of material from which to draw details.
While I have greatly enjoyed the visual effects of Jurassic Park, seeing it for the first time has also greatly disappointed me, because in my opinion the movie script has been much, much worse than the book that I had read some years before that.
In the book, the catastrophe that happened at Jurassic Park had been convincingly presented as an unavoidable consequence of the complexity of the project, arguing thus that there are limits for what humans can create and control.
On the other hand, in the movie the main idea of the book has vanished. There was some mumbo jumbo about "chaos theory", but that was just ridiculous. Instead of that, the catastrophe of Jurassic Park was presented as a consequence of stupidity, incompetence and bad luck.
Perhaps those are more realistic reasons for causing the failure of something like Jurassic Park, but this change has separated completely the movie from the book that inspired it, because it has made the catastrophe look like an accident that should have been easy to avoid, dismissing silently the intended warning message of the book.
It's a result of greed and arrogance in the book. It's even called out with the framing that has Hammond claiming he's 'spared no expense' to the investors, even as Nedry's whole subplot kicks off because Nedry's already the low bidder and Hammond's threatened to sue him into bankruptcy if he doesn't do extra work for free.
Sadly, that is often a consequence of trying to turn a novel into a three hour (or less) film.
Since then we're seeing a lot more studios willing to take a chance on a TV series of perhaps a dozen hours, which seems to map better into a novel. Roughly that's a chapter or two per hour.
Perhaps a Jurassic Park TV show reboot would do better than an increasingly hokey set of sequels.
We also have the mix of both where they make an amazing show based on novels then ruin the entire world with terrible writing when the source material runs dry.
Glares at Game of Thrones
GoT still blows me away. You had about as close to an infinite budget as you can get in television, access to some of the best writers on the planet, as well as general guidance from Martin, and yet somehow you end up with season 8 (and 7, and to a lesser extent 6). It wouldn’t surprise me if Winds of Winter never gets published due in part to the TV series’ writing, which is to me the biggest loss.
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Still the best ending that's ever going to be written
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