I have read the book! I have thoughts, and I would like to share them. Mostly relating to three characters.
Now, I don’t hate movie Hammond. I don’t think he’s a very good person, but I don’t hate him. He just strikes me as a bit of an idiot.
Movie Hammond is the kind of person who’s evil because he’s rich, but not rich because he’s evil. I think he really believes the bullshit he spouts, and he’s able to believe it because he’s rich.
When he says “I want to hear every viewpoint” I do truly believe he thinks that’s what he wants—but when he hears a viewpoint he disagrees with, he dismisses it immediately.
He thinks he’s doing something great. He thinks he’s creating something real for people. He thinks that’s a wonderful thing to do, so he’s genuinely surprised when people don’t agree with him. And he’s able to continue believing that because he is rich, because he can simply pay for everything he wants.
Movie Hammond’s story tells how power is blinding. He truly loves his grandchildren; he worries for them, he dotes on them. But his money makes him spoiled, and that is what makes him dangerous.
Book Hammond is not evil because he’s rich, he’s rich because he’s evil. He openly says, multiple times: the point of this park is to make money. He wants this park to be expensive, to be entertaining, and to make him richer than he already is.
Where movie Hammond deluded himself into believing he was doing something great, something good, book Hammond does not care about that. Book Hammond is greedy. Book Hammond says that creating medicine is a very poor use for new technology, because it will not make you money. Because trying to help people is not lucrative enough.
A real indicator of this difference is that he does not care about his grandchildren. In his final moments, he thinks about how annoying they are. He only invited them to make Gennaro think twice about destroying the park. His daughter is shown through Tim to be having financial troubles, which is interesting because Hammond is extremely wealthy. But he doesn’t care about his family. He only cares about his money.
I’m not fond of movie Hammond, but I don’t think he has bad intentions. He’s just an idiot.
To contrast this, I hate book Hammond. He does not care about anything but himself. He’s horrible and I’m glad he’s dead.
Movie Gennaro is bland, one note, and boring, and I don’t like him. He abandoned the children, he thinks only of profit, and he’s just generally annoying to be around. I have nothing interesting to say about him. He’s a dick.
Book Gennaro is not a dick! I would say he’s a decent person. Like movie Hammond, he’s not a very good one, but he’s not a bad one either.
To start, he’s nowhere near as taken with the park as movie Gennaro is. Movie Gennaro is enchanted by the idea of how much money can be made of the park, but book Gennaro is more subdued. He hears to the objections of the professionals, and he listens to them. They make him think twice.
More than that, my favorite thing he does is get into a screaming match with Hammond when the children arrive. Related to this, I think, is that we’re told at the very beginning that he has his own child at home.
This Gennaro has a family. This Gennaro cares about people. This Gennaro goes to bat for two random kids because their own grandfather apparently cannot be arsed about their safety. I like him. I think he’s great.
Alan Grant does not agree with me. He thinks Gennaro is irresponsible, shirking responsibility, and stupid for investing in this park and then never checking in on it. I’m not arguing with him, because he’s right. Again, this Gennaro is far superior to the movie version, but that doesn’t make him a good person overall. It just makes him more an idiot than an asshole.
But also, book Gennaro goes out of his way to help with the situation. He helps Muldoon on multiple occasions, and at one point goes with him to help with the raptors despite already saying he doesn’t want to because he thinks it’s the right thing to do. Alan’s right about him investing in the park, but it’s not like he was the only one making that decision.
Just for defending the kids and choosing to help Muldoon, I like this guy. He gets my stamp of approval.
Until this point I’ve been pretty levelheaded I think. Certainly not objective, but I’ve been actually comparing the book and the movie. I’m just going to gush now.
I fucking love Ian Malcolm. I love his morphine rants, I love how he knows this is a dumbass idea from the start, I love his Cassandra-esque predictions about how everything’s gonna go wrong.
Ian’s speech at lunch in the movie is kind of cobbled together from multiple of his rants in the books. It was fun piecing them together, getting to three quarters of the way through the book and seeing “rape of the natural world” and going aha! There it is.
When I first started reading the book I was a bit wary, because I read somewhere that his death was like Gennaro’s in the movie, cowardly rather than brave. I don’t think that’s a fair comparison, having read it myself. Ian ran away, but he didn’t abandon two children to fend for themselves. (Ed Regis did that, the bastard).
He also fucking DIED, fight me Michael Crichton—and yeah, I know he’s alive in the sequel, but he obviously wasn’t supposed to be and it was written after the first movie came out. Crichton probably saw Jeff Goldblum with his tits out and said “alright he can live” but that DOES NOT absolve him of killing Ian to begin with.
I just love reading whenever Ian starts talking. I think he’s great. He’s also very obviously a mouthpiece for Crichton to bash us over the head with the message of the book, and that’s not a criticism. Every other line he’s like “science in conjunction with capitalism is driving us to extinction” and everybody else is like “aha too much morphine.” He’s great. This is great. Love this book.
