Log Entry #8: 10/11/10

We just finished Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, and it made me truly think "how different the movie is from the book". With being quite the skeptic of the Jurassic Park movies back in the day, I thought it would be interesting to really see how the movie and the book are different.A few days after concluding Micheal Crichton's Jurassic Park, we began to watch the Spielberg film, which different right from the start( the movie starts with the park workers trying to calm a Velcoraptor and in the book, it starts with a girl being attacked by little dinosaurs).It was differently awesome to see revisit the movie I haven't seen in multiple years, but with reading the book, the story line lacked all of the book’s outstanding/ chilling details.


With watching the movie, we also received a Stephen Jay Gould article in class this week, “Dinomania”, explaining his thoughts on how he thought the movie were different. I completely with Gould's argument  that Spielberg did “dumb down” the book’s scientific elements so that the average American would understand (For example, in the movie they made the Velcoraptors 10 feet tall instead of the actual 6. This was just to demonstrate to the average american that dinosaurs dinosaurs were really scary) Moreover, Gould finds Malcolm’s to still be a believer in the chaos theory in the movie, but says that nature selected dinosaurs for extinction, rather than it was all due to chaos theory and explaining that in the movie.