Book Report - Jurassic Park

Crichton, Michael. Jurassic Park. New York, NY. Ballantine Books: 1991.

I chose this book because I just fund out my mom had it and I wanted to read it. Movies that are based on books are usually always different. This is a sci-fi book.

Instead of just recapping briefly on the main idea of the plot, I'll describe the parts in the book that are not in the movie, just so I don't have to describe the movie every one has seen too many times. The book starts out in Costa Rica and Isla Numblar (an island of the Costa Rican coast) and there are numerous incidents with people presumably getting attacked by dinosaurs. One of the scenes is actually one that was put into the second Jurassic Park movie, where there is a family on a beach and their daughter wanders off to get attacked. Also unlike the movie, there is an intense river scene that involves Dr. Alan Grant and the two kids, Tim and Lex, use an inflatable raft to go down a river in Jurassic Park and pass through an aviary with pterodactyls and later go over a waterfall where they have to escape from the T-rex again. Hammond (the founder of the park and the company InGEN) breaks his leg and is eaten by little dinosaurs called compys. At the end, the Costa Rican Air Force picks up the survivors and then bombs the island. They tell the survivors Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum's character in the movie) died from his injuries caused by the T-rex earlier in the story. (In the movie he lives and is in the second one). The survivors are then taken away by the Costa Rican and U.S. governments.

I chose the funniest character of the story, Dennis Nedry. Seeing the movie before reading the book already put a picture in my mind of what he looks like, which is fat and goofy. He has somewhat of a loser status and seems immature at times but the he is a diabolical genius. He breaks in to the park's DNA bank and steals one of each of the specimens in the park to give them to a guy whow will pay him great money. Unfortuantely, when trying to deliver the package the storm gets takes its toll on his jeep and he gets stuck. While trying to fix this problem, he runs into that pesky acid spitting dinosaur and gets eaten. The novel even mentions how Dennis, while blinded and paralyzed by the goop that was spat upon him, could feel the warmth of his intestines that he was holding in his hands due the fact that he was sliced open by that same dinosaur. Poor Dennis.

I liked the novel better than the movie. It went into greater depth about how they made the dinosaurs and how the park worked and just made everything more realistic. It also added in more action sequences which is always a plus.

Michael Crichton wrote other science fiction books that apparently were good, like the Andromeda Strain. I definitely will read one of them sometime. I am also might read The Lost World, which is the sequel to Jurassic Park because I am sue it will be very different from the crappy movie, like this book was, except the first Jurassic Park movie was actually pretty good but the book was still cooler.