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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

It’s also a great story that brings up a lot of philosophical questions, especially as we started getting into cloning and bioethics. Michael Criton was a genius and had a good handle on the future.

Jurassic Park was more than dinosaurs — it was a fable of caution in a rapidly evolving world.

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No argument from me. It was timely and visually exciting. But it was also just a good movie on a lot of other dimensions--the script, the actors, etc.

Criton -> Crichton BTW. Though I have to say that the book never grabbed me the way the movie did. Or that a couple of other Crichton books did. His novels seemed to be starting to turn into something more akin to movie treatments by then.

   I have to say that the book never grabbed me the way the movie did.

Really? I read the book first. I was profoundly disappointed in the movie. I was angered by how artificial and contrived the deviations from the book were.

Book was Crichton's, movie was Spielsberg's

Chrichton wrote the screenplay.

Unfortunately, there are very few movie adaptations of books where this isn't the case. You gotta let it go. I eventually did over the Jason Bourne series. How can they make a whole series of movies based on a series of books where the main antagonist doesn't even exist in the movies and the girlfriend dies at the beginning of the second movie instead of becoming the wife that keeps him human and gripped on reality?

Eventually... Just gotta let it go. :(

Films are always always going to depart from books. The media are a lot different. They're probably targeted at different audiences. I don't remember many of the details of the Bourne books; it's literally been decades since I read them. But Ludlum's books were cut from the shadowy conspiracy/spy/etc. cloth whereas the Bourne movies are primarily big budget modern Hollywood action adventure. (Which I don't much care for and probably wouldn't have loved even if they kept characters and other relationships between the books and the films.)

Directors are also just going to have their own visions. In many cases, they're just not going to like some of the creative choices the original author made--and there are a lot of fingers in Hollywood development projects in any case.

Hehe. Apparently, for Ender's Game, there were actors who actually refused to read the book because they feared it would affect their work.

The biggest differences I remember are that there were more species of dinosaurs, the kids were slightly younger and basically had their personalities reversed, Nedry's hack was more sophisticated, and Genero turns all macho and becomes Muldoon's assistant instead of getting eaten. None of those seemed particularly artificial to me. What changes made you angry?

I liked the movie, but if there was a moral it was no more than the standard-issue Frankenstein fearmongering: "if you meddle in God's domain, or study that which man was not meant to know, awful things will happen." It certainly makes for fun adventures, but I'm not sure it's praiseworthy on its own.

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