Jurassic Park Shouldn't Work

 Hallo! Happy Fourth of July weekend, I hope that the fireworks don’t scare your pets too much, and that you can have a good celebration doing… I dunno, something. Dressing up in Revolutionary clothes, maybe. Those guys were snazzy dressers.

…I need to put up pictures from my day trip last weekend.

I’m thinking about this because I recently saw Jurassic World: Dominion, and no worries, a review of that is coming to the movie review blog, but this isn’t exactly about that. It’s more about Jurassic Park in its first installment.

Jurassic Park Shouldn’t Work

The original film Jurassic Park is a classic, and it should be. It’s a fantastic film, and overall it’s a very good adaptation of the book. However, there’s a thing that kind of bugs me about it? I understand that this was a decision to streamline the story a bit, as there’s only so much you can fit into it and have the audience understand what these characters are talking about. But it boils down to this:

If you were only watching the movie Jurassic Park, you would be forgiven that the titular park would have worked just fine if it hadn’t been for Dennis Nedry sabotaging the computer system to make a buck off of selling dinosaur embryos to Biosyn. If you look deeper, you can see one other glaring problem with the management of the park: that the dinosaurs were breeding without the knowledge of the people running the park. But that doesn’t come across as a completely insurmountable obstacle.

This pales in comparison to the problems in the book. In the original novel, it becomes clear that the dinosaurs have been breeding for months outside of their enclosures, that there are over a hundred more animals than the park has accounted for, and that dinosaurs have made it off of the island onto the mainland, finding a way around their lysine deficiency. And there aren’t really any contingencies to deal with any of these problems.

The moral of the story isn’t just “Life finds a way” or “Corruption ruins good things.” The moral of the story is “If you try to control the natural world by cutting as many corners as you can, you’re going to end up dead.”

In the movie adaptation, John Hammond, the head of InGen and the founder of Jurassic Park, is a kindly old man who wants to bring wonder to the world by creating things no one’s ever seen before in his park. He’s a bit out of his depth, but he’s got a good heart and had the best of intentions, using his money to fund what he hopes is a good cause–and going by Jurassic World, if the park hadn’t been betrayed he would have been right.

That’s not the Hammond of the book. The Hammond of the book is, above all, a charismatic hustler who knows how to make money by charming people. He only plans to market his park towards the extremely wealthy, and every single time he makes a decision about the park, he cuts corners to try to make it easier and refuses to listen to the advice of the advisors he himself hired. The reason Dennis Nedry betrays Hammond and the park isn’t because he’s a greedy fat guy, it’s because Hammond and InGen didn’t tell him what the computer system he was working on was even for when he tried to figure out how to do certain specifications, and had him blacklisted from other potential employers. At the end of the story, he’s learned nothing, he fully intends to try again, he blames his staff members that he didn’t listen to (most of whom have just died horribly) for not predicting the disaster, and expresses nothing but contempt for his own grandchildren. Kindly old English gentleman, Hammond is not.

[If it makes you feel any better, he soon after gets eaten by tiny dinosaur scavengers.]

I don’t mind the change made in the movie, because again, movies need to streamline the content they’re adapting, but it’s more than a little weird to me that the given reason Spielberg decided to change Hammond’s role in the adaptation because “he saw himself in Hammond.”

And by “saw himself,” we mean, apparently, “projected himself, an entirely different person, onto the person on the page.”

I joked earlier this week on Tumblr that you could easily (and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone already has) make a stupid academic paper about how Jurassic Park is a Marxist/anti-capitalist text. It’s a gimme. Because it’s about a project that messes with deadly forces for the sole purpose of making money, with little regards to safety or countermeasures. The park’s failure isn’t due to the power of Mother Earth, or because “Life finds a way,” it’s due to being made by a greedy douchebag from its inception.

[I also joked about reading Jurassic Park (movie and/or book series) as a Catholic text, which to be clear I know is a BS argument, but I think would make pretty amusing academic reading.]

I find myself more than a little frustrated that none of the movies really deal with this. Sure, they handle greed, and people trying to capitalize or use the dinosaurs, but ultimately they spread this message of “Man can’t control nature!” as if what we’re seeing in Jurassic Park is at all natural. I’m flummoxed that the last two movies have our protagonists joining up with dinosaur rights activism groups, trying to save dinosaurs from being killed off by volcano or whatever.

And again, it’s reinforced that Jurassic Park would work just fine if it hadn’t been for some douchebags throwing things out of whack. Jurassic World shows the park functioning fantastically until the Indominous Rex–which itself only exists because some contractors thought that if you can train dinosaurs, you should be able to make a custom killer dinosaur for military applications. 

Basically: yeah, Jurassic Park works just fine, it’s just the military swooping in and screwing things up. The people running the park don’t know that’s what the dinosaur is for. Again, it absolves the actual people in power of their responsibility in the crisis–or at least, some of it. They meant well, but they didn’t foresee the power being abused! 

The latest movie has the villains be Biosyn, who are collecting the escaped dinosaurs into their sanctuary, and also still making new dinosaur species, and their villainous Plot is so cartoonishly evil it’s laughable–I half suspected for most of the movie that it’d be revealed the antagonist was going senile. He certainly acts like it. It’s not that he’s trying to exploit people that’s the problem, it’s that he’s a bumbling supervillain causing the apocalypse.

None of this is what the first book is about! It’s not about villains taking over and screwing things up–although they do that sometimes. It’s about a single douchebag in charge of a massive corporation who has no interest at all in anything not shaped like a dollar sign. He doesn’t care about the wonder of children and he certainly doesn’t care about the safety of dinosaurs outside of the money they can make him. I do not think that Michael Crichton was a particularly progressive man, especially by today’s standards, but he makes it abundantly clear that Jurassic Park is the result of a greedy twit with more money than sense exploiting the people around him without listening to any advice or common sense so he can build a giant vault like Scrooge McDuck.

The park should not work to any degree at any level.

Also the island gets bombed by the Costa Rican government at the end. I get why they didn’t do that in the movie (for sequels), but still.

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