Lol I was being pedantic about the T-Rex scene but I agree.
Would love your thoughts or response to what I said about the end raptor nest scene. Maybe tomorrow. I need to sleep too.
I get what you're saying in the OP, and additionally pacing-wise it's kind of an odd beat, but I still love the scene because of how incredibly
creepy the whole thing is. It's one of those moments that could have been an amazing film scene (and still can be, should they choose to bring it back! The movies keep coming back to unused elements in the books) because of the eerie tone and how tense it could be on screen.
Jurassic Park is a classic hubris story (and a bit of warning). Hammond dying is definitely moral because he was convinced he could play God as well as put profit above everything and got punished for it. Malcolm dying was ironic. He was the only one that foresaw the inevitable chaos yet still got consumed by it.
I really like the film but it neutered much of the underlying message and edge by turning it into a monster movie.
I don't really agree with the reading that Jurassic Park the movie is "monster movie", at least in the sense you mean here. I think the same messages carry across, just in a different way. While Hammond isn't punished with
death, we do see him watch his dreams and visions fall apart in real time, and by the end, the man we see hesitantly boarding the helicopter seems quite broken.
I like film Hammond since he's a bit more interesting of a character (novel Hammond has a few counterparts, particularly among Crichton works), with his more earnest showmanship and boisterousness, and I think fate that falls upon the film version works better with that particularly incarnation than the novel version does.
It's certainly better than the ending we could have gotten, where instead of the T. Rex, Hammond comes in and saves the day by blowing away the final raptor (the first gets crushed by the scissor lift) with a shotgun.
Thankfully that all got torn up when Spielberg decided the Rex needed to come back in a big hero moment and realized the CGI would let him do it.
I think a straight adaptation of the novel would have been an R-rated film.
It just has the little touches that make it a scifi horror rather than the adventure with elements of horror in the movie.
The 12 inch tall suicidal wooly mammoth.
The raptors are so smart that not having grownups to learn from have made them sociopaths who eat their own kids.
Great movie and great book though.
It isn't until the sequel that the novel absolutely shits on the film.
Was it a mammoth? I remember it being an elephant but it's been ages.
And yeah, I really love that part about the raptor intelligence creating a "dysfunctional" pack. I think that was more a part of Lost World though? Not sure, been a while.
While I prefer the version of the movie we got, I do think it would be interesting to see Cameron's decidedly R-rated version that likely would have been more novel-accurate (and which he described as Aliens with dinosaurs).
(I mention that very movie at the end of the OP)
