Journal 3

My favorite movie and novel of all time is Jurassic Park. Originally written by Michael Crichton it was adapted into a movie by Steven Spielberg in 1992. For those of you who don't know, Jurassic Park is about an island off the coast of Costa Rica where a team of scientists cloned dinosaurs from DNA found in fossilized mosquitoes. A group of people are brought in to give their opinions on the whole set up and when a hurricane comes in and knocks out the power the people are trapped there along with a bunch of loose meat-eating dinosaurs. The movie adaptation was made purely for the sake of entertainment, where as the novel goes into depth about the process in which the dinosaurs were cloned and how the fossilized dino DNA was crossed with amphibian DNA to create a baby dinosaur. The novel also brings into light the many ethical and moral issues that could arise from something like bringing back extinct animals, which help create many undertones that are seen throughout the novel. Since the movie adaptation was made for entertainment purposes, Spielberg had to cut out many of the underlying themes that Crichton worked into his novel. I love Spielberg's take the novel and it is still my favorite movie of all time, but I would have liked to see him follow the novel's storyline a little more closely just so I can picture what I read in the book on a silver screen. The fact that Spielberg had to alter the storyline to appeal to audiences tells me something about the context of the novel. It tells me that maybe not all audiences would understand the themes or issues that the novel brings up and that when you look at it, it is very scientifically based and requires some understanding of DNA and biology to fully grasp some of the main ideas.