At the Crime Nerd's suggestion we re-watched Jurassic Park. I forgot how much I despise some of Spielberg's changes from the novel.

Warning: I learned to read with the novel as my only possession while homeless at age 7... I actually think it's the best novel ever written.

Spielberg's popcorn flick tends to overwrite people's memory and experience of the Crichton novel in a cheapening way, but the novel actually has serious artistic and philosophical merit.

Also... It's a DEEPLY anticiv novel. Like very explicit exposition about that at points.

Beyond the rants about civ and huntergatherers there are SO MANY aspects of the novel that people overlook because of the film, from the math paper structure of the story to the centrality of the trans + breeding issue.

But Spielberg's changes re the ending are inexcusable.

The place the film just completely derails is when the t-rex attacks the raptors, freeing the main characters to run away. It's abysmal comic book nonsense, pure Spielberg. And much of the rest of the story is re-worked to enable that final scene.

The way the book ends is: 1) the kids get control over the computers saving the trapped adults and stopping the raptors from reaching the mainland, 2) Hammond dies randomly and gruesomely, 3) Grant takes a team into the raptor den to study them, 4) the military bombs the island.

This is not really a classic action climax, because it's EXPLICITLY trying not to be. There is no single magical triumphant resolution. The adults learn to give up on hungering for control and instead try to understand ecosystems. The government destroys & covers everything up.

The narrative climax and thematic resolution of the story happens not so much with the kids saving everyone's lives but when Grant hauls the lawyer up by the collar and browbeats him about taking responsibility -- which means going out and tracking the raptors to learn about them

The lawyer (his name is Genarro but no one who watched the film remembers him as anything else) has spent the novel bouncing back and forth between the competing ideologies of Malcolm (anticiv) and Arnold (civ).

Grant shows up and forces the dialectic to a sideways synthesis.

Yes social and infrastructural control is impossible and dangerous to pursue, but that doesn't mean that one gets to abandon personal responsibility/agency. One has a moral imperative to seek understanding and learn to live within the chaos rather than trying to dominate it.

This is deeply anti-climatic. The crisis is resolved and Grant goes off with Ellie and Genarro on a very risky mission to investigate what's up with the raptors. They don't need to fight the raptors. And then the state randomly destroys everything anyway.

This is the perfect resolution of all the themes and tensions of the novel. But Spielberg trashed it all to make a cinematic ending.

So Hammond is turned into friendly grandpa rather than a nasty VC. Genarro gets unceremoniously offed. Malcolm's critique is reduced to a slogan.

With deus t-rex machina and the run to the jeep Jurassic Park becomes "nice old grandpa loves dinosaurs too much, learns that dinosaurs are dangerous and life finds a way" which is a fucking obscene bastardization of the novel's interrogation of control, science, & civilization.