From: Stephen Date stephend999@yahoo.co.uk
--- Natasa wrote:
Yes, I had quite a different impression while watching Jurassic Park (I haven't read the book). There is, for instance, the curious fact that practically everybody ends up with a leg injury - starting with the grandad who uses a walking stick from the start. What does it suggest, the warning that the society is moving in a wrong direction? Is it the same in the novel?
In spades ! In the novel, there is a kind of running commentary from Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum in the film) explaining the shortcomings of technological and scientific society, shortcomings which threaten humanity, as exemplified by the park. Science is equated with the will to dominate/ destroy.
That's not quite the impression I got. Malcolm (as Crichton's mouthpiece) is very critical of modern society as a whole, but for it's short-sighted, impulsive, recklessly goal-orientated mentality. Not so much a will to dominate or destroy as an oblivious disregard for the collateral damage. Nor does Malcolm ever advocate, IIRC, going back to some mythical halcyon Golden Age. He spends most of the latter half of the book (in which he dies, unlike in the film) being persistently misunderstood.
There's an enthralling conversation in the book (omitted in the film) between the park's director (forget his name) and Wu the geneticist. Wu argues that the public will reject the park because the dinosaurs move too fast, so he wants to reconfigure their genetic code to slow them down, make them the kind of dinosaurs that people want. The director, on the other hand, insists that the public will want 'real' dinosaurs. It's one of several ego clashes in the story in which domination and manipulation of nature are a by-product rather than a primary goal. Though it's a good five years since I got it out of the library and my memory's hazy on most of it. The one thing I do remember is that all the really good bits never made it to the film.
Neil
Oh yeah, obB7: If the B7 crew were all dinosaurs, what ones would they be?