I am so sorry that trashy, nubert and the pink ball got the freedom (battat?) motif before ramb
You have no idea the utter disbelief I felt when I heard it in some fucking boss in castle town. With Mario paint sounds
God damnit😔. Trashy trio????????? We're giving anyone the freedom motif now huh
It might be that we've given it a little too much significance. Unless we consider the name of the track "inappropriate recycling" to mean that we've been reusing leitmotifs too much in places they don't belong, which would be very funny
However, the pain I felt hearing the freedom motif being used in this fight is nothing compared to what I feel when someone calls it "the battat motif" now. I swear when I saw that budget peridot call MY freedom leitmotif that. i just about snowgraved him right then and there
Hold on, back up, how did i manage to follow people who like aftg for andreil but hate the plot?? Like? Back tf up thats my comfort sports mafia fiction book that i consider WELL WRITTEN with GOOD PLOT and DIVERSE CHARACTERS and FUCK YOU for thinking anything with “you know? I get it” could ever miss
I just finished the first Jurassic Park book and while comparing the plot to the movie was interesting, I think the book itself is kind of... meh?
Tension-Building
At first the tension build was pretty amazing and the technical ideas it brings in, especially regarding chaos theory through the character of Ian Malcolm, are intriguing.
However, the book takes a long time to finally get to any culmination of tension with the actual park sabotage and dinosaur attack beginning past the halfway point. Despite that late arrival, the rest of the book seems to drag on as the characters get into one dangerous situation that they miraculously escape from (if they’re Grant and the kids) into another and another.
Seriously, they’re saved by:
an oddly apathetic T-Rex that tosses them around but doesn’t try to eat them
a baby T-Rex showing up and challenging the big one for it’s previous kill when it’s about to catch them in the water
pterosaurs mistaking a baseball glove for food and stopping their dive-bombing to fight over it
the T-Rex not being able to break through some dense forest to get to them while they’re on the river
the T-Rex distracting the poison-spitting dinosaurs
a completely uncoordinated tranquilization of the T-Rex while it had its tongue wrapped around Tim through a waterfall and was inches from eating him
Those are only the saves that don’t rely on the characters taking any action at all. There were several times that they did rather clever (maybe unbelievably clever?) things to save themselves.
Weird Humans
These repeating scenarios made my suspension of disbelief dwindle fairly quickly, but it also didn’t help that the characters don’t seem to feel proper fear of the dinosaurs. The children give lip-service to being scared, and at least Lex is pretty believably useless (the younger sister in this, I don’t know why they reversed the ages in the movie), but Tim certainly seems like the type of wise and composed beyond his years trooper you could only dream of in such a FUBAR situation.
The adults take their lack of fear so far that they happily go trouping out into the park when it should be obvious that there’s danger and/or they definitely know that there’s danger. They go looking for raptor nests after the immediate danger is over simply to count the eggs, information which they make no use of afterwards.
While I’m at it, the characters are kind of dumb? They don’t seem alarmed by Tim seeing a raptor out of its area despite knowing how dangerous and vicious the raptors are. They also don’t seem alarmed when they verify that YES, the dinosaurs have been breeding secretly and that there are more dinosaurs than there are supposed to be, including at least 30 more raptors that are clearly not in their cage. Not even the power being out and the potential of the electric fences being out while they have cars stuck in the park seems to cause them to worry overly.
Patchy Plot Consistency
They, in fact, seem to forget the raptors exist for most of the middle chunk of the book. They get set up early on, then it’s the T-Rex show for most of the book, and the raptors only show up again and take the spotlight towards the end (when, incidentally, the T-Rex seems to disappear).
They also seem to forget Grant and the kids exist despite the fact that they’ve been missing and haven’t shown up on the motion sensors in the park for 12 hours. At that point you’d assume they were dead or at least be extremely concerned, but their status as missing tends to get brought up as “oh, that’s another thing that should get fixed at some point” instead of “oh my god, my professor/my grandchildren haven’t been seen since a huge carnivore attacked their cars, are they alive or in danger or?”.
Bad Guys and Good Guys
Hammond is a much more interesting (and much less sympathetic) character in the book simply because he’s extremely deluded. Every time a problem comes up, he effectively deludes himself that it’s not a big deal and that it’s someone else’s fault. He’s obsessed with opening his park to the point that he ignores the fact that people are getting killed left and right by the dinosaurs. It’s no wonder he doesn’t seem particularly concerned about his grandchildren.
The person who IS most concerned about the children being at the park is Gennaro, who I feel has a bad rap. Sure, he helped Hammond get his initial funding without asking too many questions or examining things too deeply, but at least he became seriously concerned as soon as he started hearing about things going wrong on the island. At least he was concerned enough to check it out and was determined enough to shut it down if he had to.
He also did a heck of a lot more to fight the dinosaurs than a lawyer has any right doing, accompanying the game warden while he drove around the park with the fences out, trying to tranq the dinosaurs. He was much more useful than he had any right to be, but he still gets coerced and threatened with potentially deadly force to go into a raptor nest that no one really needs to go into at that point. The rationale for this is given as “you helped fund this, so it’s you’re responsibility, you haven’t taken responsibility this whole trip and now you can’t just let the Costa Rican government destroy this island without counting the raptor eggs”. How is voluntarily teaming up with the game warden and going out from a relatively safe space time and again to help other people not taking responsibility?
The guy also had to miss his daughter’s 2nd birthday party to do the emergency inspection of the island, but no one seems to care about that. I’m just glad he survived because I wasn’t sure he would.
Why Can’t Authors Write Women?
There’s also the matter of Ellie Sattler’s over-sexualization. I would have had no idea based on the movie that Ellie was only 24 while Grant was in his 40′s. That age gap didn’t come across. Her being his student makes it make sense, but she’s still introduced early on as a visitor to their dig stares at her through as she drinks beer. The pre-pubescent boy in the book also stares at her legs and seems oddly preoccupied by the idea that Grant and Ellie should be a couple.
The only reasons it doesn’t bother me more are because she disappears for half the book while she babysits a wounded Malcolm (and so there are no further chances to view her through the male gaze in the text) and because Grant himself doesn’t seem overly concerned with thinking about Ellie.
Random
He apparently lost his wife long ago and has no intentions of getting into another relationship, which is actually an interesting bit of information about his character I wouldn’t have expected. Grant also likes children explicitly according to the book which caught me off guard because in the movie he’s presented as generally disliking them until he’s forced to take responsibility for their safety.
Going back to the topics of Ellie and also the characters in this book acting incomprehensibly, Ellie notices when they first arrive that some of the plants in public places would kill a child if they mouthed at/chewed on it at all, but she never actually brings this up to anyone outside her own head. Was she planning on saying something or ????
Human Connections
The characters are just lacking emotions and reactions that make them seem human. Their fear is dialed way back, their courage and curiosity is dialed way up, and they’re far more clever and better at working together without fighting than they ought to be. Heck, every single person volunteers to be raptor bait and there’s no way I or any other reasonable person would ever agree to that.
The characters also seem to care about each other based on the text, but that sense of real connection between the characters is missing. Tim occasionally gets upset when Lex is in danger, but it seems really disconnected and out of nowhere when that happens since you wouldn’t even know she was his sister otherwise. That’s pretty par for the course.
Adaptation Score
In terms of book to movie adaptation, I think the movie did a wonderful job. It streamlined the book and some of the characters, it gave Lex more to do than whine incessantly and fuck everyone’s survival plans up (I’m assuming that’s why she ended up being the older sibling in the movie), it properly conveyed the awe and terror of dinosaurs mixing with the human world, and it stuck admirably close to the basic characters and plot points. The order of some of the plot is slightly changed and they cut off some bits that ended up showing up in Jurassic Park 3 and Jurassic World instead, but the basic blueprint is still startlingly familiar.
Conclusion
Maybe I would have been more impressed by the book if I hadn’t watched the movie first and I had read the book in the time when it came out. I don’t know, but I suspect its lack of realistic human characters would never have sat well with me.
It will never cease to baffle me that it's twenty-fucking-fourteen and people still don't get that feminist/LGBTQIA rights/rights for POC/rights for Indigenous Peoples/rights for disabled people etc. groups are basically looking for equality, for a playing field where you don't automatically have hella advantages just cos you're a dude/straight/cis/white/able-bodied & neuro-typical/what-have-you. People are all: Buuuttt...can't you just say you're for EQUALITY? Why do you have to put a LABEL on yourself?
All I can figure is that straight cis abled white dudes are just hella freaked out cos they don't actually get the concept of equality. They only understand the concept of Some People In Power Over Others, so they assume that the rest of us are gonna gain control and subjugate them the way they've been subjugating us for fucking centuries.
oh my god i straggled on saving my old URL so that people who went to it would be redirected to my new URL cause I didn't think anyone was gonna fuckin take it but some porn site took it already jfc
