Jurassic Park
Michael Crichton
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers. Other reviews in this series can be found here.
I must say, I really did not remember the Costa Rican government bombing the island at the end of all things. In fairness, of course, I was somewhere in the 10-15 range when I first read Jurassic Park and I haven’t reread it since, and all I remembered a couple decades later was that Hammond dies cursing his grandchildren. This is a good thing, because after the pocket-sized elephant I was ready to string him up by his ankles and maybe burn him at the stake after he’d had some time to think about what he’d done. All the solitary reflection time in the world would not have fixed his little brain, but this is my fantasy, goddammit.
There’s a whole history that I won’t get into, but suffice it to say that genetic research dominates the ’80s, and scientific ambition has been rapidly spiraling out of control. One of the most prominent proponents of genetic engineering is the elderly Dr. John Hammond, CEO of International Genetic Technologies, Inc. (InGen), a little tantrum-prone man who self-identifies as a visionary. With the help of his lead geneticist, Dr. Henry Wu, Hammond spends the better part of a decade perfecting live dinosaurs cloned from preserved DNA; he also leases two islands from the Costa Rican government, the better to keep InGen’s work a secret, and hires a team to turn Isla Nublar into the dinosaur theme park of his dreams. The final product is, of course, far from perfect – the dinosaurs are both difficult to control and prone to illness, and there is abundant evidence that several of the animals have somehow made their way to Costa Rica, where they feed on human children. Unfortunately, their presence is barely noticed; their attacks are underreported for various reasons, and local experts assume that the dinosaurs are merely some kind of lizard. All the same, InGen’s investors begin to have severe doubts about the safety of the park after several accidents involving park workers, and they dispatch attorney Donald Gennaro to conduct a complete inspection of the island.
The half-completed park has all the problems of a major theme park and a major zoo, but Hammond insists that his security is flawless and tries to prove it by inviting paleontologists Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler on a tour of the park, along with chaos theoretician Ian Malcolm. He also invites his grandchildren, Tim and Alexis “Lex” Murphy, who are eleven and seven, respectively. The tour starts out badly as everyone begins to nitpick Hammond’s security and general attitude towards genetics, and goes completely belly-up when the park is expertly sabotaged by disgruntled computer programmer Dennis Nedry. Nedry was commissioned some time ago to create an automated digital system for Jurassic Park, but InGen later came back and demanded significant changes that ate up his profits from the original contract. He was therefore completely receptive when he was approached by rival company Biosyn and cultivated as an asset by their in-house geneticist, Lewis Dodgson. (A reference to Lewis Carroll [born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson], or just a coincidence?) Dismissed as a graduate student from Johns Hopkins, Dodgson has since made a dubious name for himself through his deeply unethical scientific studies and his habit of stealing other people’s research, and he has now set his sights on Hammond’s dinosaurs, which he intends to reverse-engineer.
Hiring Nedry to steal dinosaur embryos sounded good on paper, but in practice Nedry attempts to deliver the embryos during a tropical storm, which causes him to crash his car before he ever reaches the delivery point. He is then killed and eaten by a pack of venom-spitting Dilophosaurus, and his death is not detected for quite some time. Meanwhile, the people he screwed over are left to deal with the consequences of his betrayal: Grant gets stuck in the park with Tim and Lex during an extended power outage, and they are hunted by one of the park’s T-rexes, whose relentless assault only ends when it is tranquilized by game warden Robert Muldoon; Malcolm is badly injured while fleeing a rex, and almost dies before the others can call for medical help; InGen PR manager Ed Regis is eaten by the younger rex, and his severed leg is later found more or less without context; chief engineer John Arnold is eaten by a Velociraptor while trying to restore power to the park; Dr. Wu is ambushed by another raptor and also killed. As for the park’s resident visionary, he manages to fall down a hill after the main dangers (i.e., the rexes and the raptors) have been neutralized, and he is hunted and eaten by a pack of his own Procompsognathus because karma’s a compy. Basically, shit happens and a lot of people die, though Hammond continues to insist up to the very last minute that absolutely nothing is wrong with the park.
Following the violent death of both Hammond and his vision, Grant and Ellie take Gennaro with them to hunt down the surviving Velociraptors and their nests. They find the nests well enough, along with a worryingly large population of raptors, but they also observe some odd behavior that leads them to realize the raptors have an ingrained desire to migrate the way birds do. Their musings are cut short by the arrival of helicopters, and they are rescued from the island, along with Malcolm, Muldoon, and the kids, shortly before the Costa Rican government bombs it to smithereens. Later – when the dinosaurs are theoretically no more than a bad memory, and the survivors have made it back to safety – Grant is approached by researcher Marty Guitierrez, finder of the first known Procompsognathus specimen, who tells him that herds of unknown animals have been moving across Costa Rica in a pattern that looks suspiciously like migration.
Okay, first off: If Hammond had stuck with herbivores, the park probably would’ve been fine. I mean, they still would’ve struggled with disease and in-fighting among the animals, but nobody would’ve gotten eaten by a rex. This does seem like a better outcome, yes? I feel like Hammond would still disagree with me. This leads neatly into my primary irritant, which is that Hammond is a fucking idiot. He probably would’ve fed the people to the dinosaurs himself if he’d thought it would make for a better visitor experience. He stubbornly insists that everything is fine in the face of physical evidence, he ignores and berates everyone who tries to tell him otherwise, his arrogance costs several people their lives and traumatizes a handful of others, he convinces himself that all of the problems with the park are other people’s fault and makes himself the victim, he purposely tries to use his grandkids as a shield against Gennaro’s inspection, etc, etc, etc. He is the absolute worst character, which is a stunning achievement in a book that also includes Lewis Dodgson and Dennis Nedry (whose motives are actually far more sympathetic than they are in the movie), and I could’ve cheered when he died because, like, #TeamCompys.
Second off, and in line with my antipathy towards Hammond: I sincerely was not expecting Dr. Wu to die, and I don’t feel good about it. On the one hand, yes, he shares in some of Hammond’s towering hubris. He treats his work like a playground and mixes and matches all kinds of different DNAs just because he can, with little to no understanding of his own creations, which are created to fit Hammond’s specs. He bears partial responsibility for everything that happens just through sheer complicity. On the other hand, is this really his fault? He was recruited into InGen fresh out of grad school and handed an irresistible project with lots of money attached, but then the cloning process got automated to the point that Hammond had no further use for him. Frankly, I’m surprised Hammond didn’t shove him into the raptor paddock just to make sure he couldn’t start working for their competitors. Even if his death could maybe sort of qualify as punishment for his role in creating an ecological disaster, I honestly just feel bad for him. He gives off such Gifted Child energy that I can’t hate him the way I hate Hammond.
The rest of the cast is fine. I would call them mostly unobjectionable, though I could have done with fewer of Malcolm’s morphine-fueled rants; it would also have been nice if fewer characters had gone out of their way to describe Nedry as a fat pig. Grant and Ellie are, of course, the standouts. I like both Book Grant and Movie Grant, but I loooooooove Ellie and I would follow that woman into battle, no questions asked. (I’m not sure why Movie Grant was given such an entrenched dislike of kids, but the movie did make some strange choices.) I particularly loved Book Ellie’s rooftop escape from the raptors. I did not have Ellie Jumping Off The Roof And Landing Flawlessly In A Pool on my Jurassic Park bingo card, but I am so here for it. While I wish we could have spent more time with her, her character is never dwarfed by the men. She is a kickass paleobotanist and a doctor, kind without being stupid or weak, smart and strong-willed without being obnoxious, and I love her. I’ve gotta say, the movie really does her justice, though I’m questioning their decision to pair her with the forty-year-old Grant when the book makes it clear they are not romantically involved and probably never have been.
It’s strange revisiting the book after watching the movie on an endless loop – partly because I was expecting Gennaro and Muldoon to die and then they didn’t, but also because the tone of the book is so much more subtly disturbing. The violence is not as flashy as it is in the movie; there are plenty of warning signs and no real jump scares, and certainly no “Clever girl” moments. But the book is far deeper and more nuanced, more frightening because it describes a level of ignorance, assumption, and oversight that could easily happen and very certainly has happened, albeit not in the context of cloned dinosaurs. My first real job was with a federal regulatory agency. I do not underestimate the consequences of details overlooked either by accident or on purpose. The train of events that leads to Jurassic Park is logical, credible, and utterly chilling. More to the point, Jurassic Park is a wholly man-made disaster that could have been prevented, but I also understand the circumstances that ultimately nurtured Hammond’s monstrous creation. It is easy to judge in retrospect. The kind of park he envisioned was completely unprecedented and could not have been predicted without intimate knowledge of InGen’s activities, not even by the scientists who personally examined the compy carcass sourced by Guitierrez.
One quibble I had with the movie, which was cleared up by the book: I appreciate that the book points out the difference between actual dinosaurs and Henry Wu’s Frankensteined bird-lizards. The dinosaurs from 65 million years ago cannot be completely recreated without help from other DNA sources, meaning that the Jurassic Park dinosaurs are not dinosaurs exactly as they were; they are, at best, partial clones who are also partly cloned from frogs, birds, and whatever other DNA Dr. Wu felt like playing with. (Yes, this is plainly stated in the third movie, but the first doesn’t make the distinction.) As they spread across the globe – thanks, Hammond – they will no doubt adapt to their surroundings and begin to evolve in ways that the original dinosaurs most likely would not have, if we remove the possibility of their extinction. They are a new kind of creature in a very different environment, and the opportunity to rein them in is long gone.
With all of that said, and even acknowledging that Hammond’s monsters are genetic nightmares that were never meant to exist, there is something so intrinsically sad about the ending. I am troubled by this vision of an island full of creatures who didn’t ask to be stitched together, but who are nevertheless unceremoniously destroyed just for existing. I cannot shake the image of the raptors lined up on the beach, gazing longingly at the beckoning horizon shortly before they are wiped out by a man-made meteor. The juvenile T-rex crouching over a kill, looking up at its death. The stampeding herbivores frantically trying to escape and having nowhere to run. There is nothing natural about any of this. Maybe I’m taking the wrong message from the book and the humans were supposed to be more important than a bunch of weird lizards, but somehow I don’t think so. Crichton strikes me as a man who knew what he was doing. My one consolation is that life finds a way, or at least it finds a way long enough to last through a second book. And, thank heavens, Hammond won’t be a part of that life.
