Jurassic Park, page to screen
Jurassic Park's differences are differences of character almost from end to end. Michael Crichton's 1990 novel and Steven Spielberg's 1993 film share an island, a fence failure and most of the set pieces, and they disagree about nearly everyone standing inside them. The book is a technological disaster novel in which the people responsible are punished; the film is an adventure in which the people responsible are forgiven or spared. Change who lives, who dies and who is likeable, and a warning becomes a wonder story without a single new dinosaur.
Jurassic Park: the book and movie differences, in short
The book and movie differences in Jurassic Park are differences of casting rather than of incident. The book is Michael Crichton's novel of 1990, a technological disaster narrative framed as a corporate case study, divided into iterations and headed with remarks on chaos theory. The film is Steven Spielberg's of 1993, 127 minutes, from a screenplay finished by David Koepp out of Crichton's own early drafts. The island, the fence failure and most of the set pieces are shared. The central difference is who walks off the island: Crichton kills John Hammond, Henry Wu and Ian Malcolm and spares the lawyer and the game warden, and the film does the exact opposite, which turns a verdict into an adventure.
What the novel does with its people
Crichton's people exist to be judged. John Hammond in the novel is not a grandfather with a dream but a promoter who cut corners, blames his staff and never accepts that the park has failed, and Crichton kills him on his own island in a small, undignified way. Henry Wu, the geneticist who built the animals, does not survive either. Ian Malcolm, the mathematician brought in to explain why the system will collapse, is mauled and dies of his injuries, after several long lectures on the limits of control. Crichton later returned him to life for the 1995 sequel, The Lost World, which tells you how useful the character had turned out to be.
The apparatus around them reinforces the verdict. The novel opens with material framed as an account of a corporate incident, divides itself into iterations named for stages of a fractal, and heads them with Malcolm's remarks on chaos theory, so the reader is told from the first pages that they are reading a case study of a failure. It ends with the Costa Rican authorities destroying the island and detaining the survivors. Nobody flies home.
What the film does instead: the same island, different inhabitants
The same island with different inhabitants is the whole of the film's method, and the reassignments are systematic rather than incidental. David Koepp finished the screenplay from Crichton's own early drafts, and the pattern is consistent: the sympathetic are protected and the guilty are pardoned.
| Character | In the novel | In the 1993 film |
|---|---|---|
| John Hammond | Ruthless, unrepentant, dies on the island | Warm and deluded, survives, played by Richard Attenborough |
| Ian Malcolm | Dies of his injuries | Injured, survives, played by Jeff Goldblum |
| Henry Wu | Killed during the breakout | Survives in a single early scene, played by BD Wong |
| Donald Gennaro | The lawyer survives | The lawyer is killed by the tyrannosaur |
| Robert Muldoon | The game warden survives | Killed by the raptors he warned everyone about |
| Lex and Tim | Tim is the elder and the computer expert | Lex is the elder and the computer expert, Tim the dinosaur enthusiast |
| Alan Grant | Comfortable with children | Wary of children, which gives him the film's only arc |
| Ellie Sattler | A graduate student working under Grant | A colleague and equal, played by Laura Dern |
Two of those rows do most of the work. Swapping the children's ages hands the climactic computer sequence to a girl and gives the younger boy the fandom, which converts a pair of encumbrances into 2 characters who each save themselves once. Reversing Grant's feelings about children builds an arc out of nothing in the source, so that the man who cannot stand them ends the film asleep with both of them against him.
The change that mattered most: John Hammond
John Hammond is the change that decides everything else. Crichton's Hammond is the novel's villain, a man who sold an unfinished system as a finished one and who dies still insisting he was right. Attenborough's Hammond is an enthusiast who overreached, who is allowed a quiet scene of self-knowledge over melting ice cream, and who walks off the island having learned something.
Crichton puts a culpable man on the island and kills him there, so the collapse reads as a judgment on the person who caused it.
Spielberg puts a hopeful man on the island and lets him leave, so the collapse reads as an accident that happened to a dream.
Follow the consequence out. If the man who built the park is forgivable, the park itself is forgivable, and the film is free to spend its first hour on awe: the brachiosaur on the plain, John Williams's score playing without irony, a palaeontologist in tears. Crichton's novel never allows that shot. Its awe is always immediately qualified by the sound of a system failing in the next room.
How faithful is the 1993 film to Crichton's novel?
The 1993 film is faithful on plot and unfaithful on theme, and the same set of changes produces both verdicts. Read the axes in order. On plot the collapse happens as Crichton staged it, with sequences cut rather than invented, and the distance is short. On character the distance is the longest on this page, because 5 named people swap fates and 2 more swap attributes, Lex and Tim exchanging ages and Alan Grant acquiring a dislike of children he does not have in the book. On voice the case-study framing, the fractal iterations and the chaos-theory epigraphs are gone and nothing replaces them. On theme the film ends with a survivable mistake where the novel ends with the Costa Rican authorities destroying the island and detaining the survivors. Faithfulness to events and faithfulness to judgment pull in opposite directions here, and no single figure reports both.
Where the film lands on plot, character, voice and theme
The film lands close to the novel on plot and a long way from it on theme, and the distance on theme is produced almost entirely by the distance on character.
| Axis | The novel, 1990 | The film, 1993 | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plot | Sabotage, breakout, raptors, island destroyed by the authorities | The same collapse, several sequences cut, escape by helicopter | |
| Character | Hammond, Wu and Malcolm die, the lawyer and the warden live | Hammond, Wu and Malcolm live, the lawyer and the warden die | |
| Voice | Case-study framing, fractal iterations, chaos-theory epigraphs | No framing device, the mathematics reduced to 2 conversations | |
| Theme | Commercial science outrunning its own competence, and paying for it | Wonder first, caution second, and a survivable mistake |
The answer flips for a reader who wants the argument rather than the animals. Crichton's novel is the more coherent piece of thinking, it kills the people whose decisions it condemns, and it refuses the consolation of an escape. The film, at 127 minutes and with 3 Academy Awards for its craft departments, is the better-built object, and it is honest about what it has done: it keeps Malcolm's warning in the dialogue and then shows you exactly why nobody would listen.