Comment by jerf
7 days ago
Yes, the book got this and did a much better job with it. I'm not even necessarily upset with the first movie dropping that as part of the adaptation per se. Crap like that happens in the real world all the time, and even if the movie didn't call it out very well it still at least fits the characters. HN knows all about SV startups trying to move into this or that space thinking they're the smart young hotshots who are going to revolutionize some space with technology only to get ROFLstomped by the reality in the field and the people who have been doing it for decades and could have told them for free why what they were trying to do isn't going to work if they'd bothered to do the slightest research first.
However, the repeated errors are just silly.
Most particularly the repeated error of not bringing big enough guns [1]. Guns big enough to bother a T-Rex are certainly inconvenient, but they're readily available to anyone who already breaking international laws about not visiting these islands in the first place. Of course simply bringing big enough guns doesn't guarantee a solution to all the problems and it would not be hard to still tell stories about people getting eaten, but without that as a foundation the characters just read as suicidally-stupid bozos to me from the get-go. (Where's that alleged infatuation Hollywood has with guns?)
But the second park really has no reason in my eyes to have collapsed the way it did either. It wasn't really that well designed and they still had to contrive some really, really stupid stuff to get it to fail, like crashing a helicopter into the pteradactyl pen.
It's funny, but I actually kind of like the helicopter crash because it's caused entirely because the CEO is too smug about being the cool hero, without any obvious moments that any average person doing their job might have counteracted it. It really gets at the whole 'greed and arrogance' theme in a very punchy way without requiring any of the normal people on the ground to be really dumb.