I saw it when I think I was 9. My mom was worried I would be scared and made me bring my CD Walkman, a book, and a flashlight Didn't need them. Loved every second of it and probably a top 10 movie all time for me. Might have been my first PG13 movie in theaters.

fig96 said:

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I devoured the book in a night a few months after seeing the film, and loved it but I'm glad I saw the movie first. There were a few really great pieces of the book (the old man being truly evil, the way they were tracking the number of dinos on the island, the bigger thematic references to chaos and life finding a way) that I think would have bothered me had I read them first then not seen them in the film.

And if anyone is a fan of the movie and not read the book, do it. It's a super easy read and really adds some depth to the movie.

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Yeah I do recall some things bugging me - but that is a constant issue for me if there is a book for a movie I probably read it first especially back then - really anything from Crichton, Clancy, Grisham, etc. and the movies usually alter stuff. For example:

Hunt for Red October
The Firm
Jurassic Park

But I also had an expectation built in for this one as it was Spielberg and I expected some glossing over details or minimizing the darker aspects.

fig96 said:

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I devoured the book in a night a few months after seeing the film, and loved it but I'm glad I saw the movie first. There were a few really great pieces of the book (the old man being truly evil, the way they were tracking the number of dinos on the island, the bigger thematic references to chaos and life finding a way) that I think would have bothered me had I read them first then not seen them in the film.

And if anyone is a fan of the movie and not read the book, do it. It's a super easy read and really adds some depth to the movie.

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This. My favorite book of all time. Lost count of how times I've read it.

malcolm's role is a lot cooler and more explained in the book, and nothing beats that moment when they expand the # of dinosaurs in the count to test his theory and it comes back as:


Expected Found
Velociratpor 8 37

I had read a couple of books by Crichton when I happened to be in a bookstore and saw that hardcover book called Jurassic Park with the Tyrannosaur skeleton head on the cover. I picked it up because, having been a life long nut on dinosaurs, and with previous experience reading Crichton's work, I knew I'd enjoy this book. Read the entire book the next day. Easily one of the best books I've ever read.

The movie came out a couple years later. By that time I was out of A&M by 4 years. Having read the book, I was familiar with what I was going to see in the movie. So imagine my surprise when Spielberg was able to elicity a lot of adrenaline and even heart-pounding fear during portions of that movie. When I got home, I recall having to walk over to the mailbox cluster which was located near some wooded area in Pecan Grove (Richmond, where I had my first house). I had this thought, WTF would I do if a freaking Tyrannosaur poked its head out from all those big trees?

There were portions of the movie that I really didn't care for, but all in all, JP is a classic movie that I believe will never be topped. And as I recall, there were some sequences in the original book that were not included in the original movie, but found their way into The Lost World movie (for instance, the scene in TLW where the Tyrannosaur chases the group from the camp into the waterfall, and sticks its tongue in there to try to grab someone, was right out of the book, but in the book it was Tim and Lex).

I'm 40 pgs from being done with JP for the first time. It's such a fun read.

Is Congo any good?

It's better than the movie, but not as good as JP.

The lawyer was an absolute badass in the novel.

Also, for whatever reason, the description of the rotting flesh that the compys left behind in the first few pages has really stuck with me all these years.

Sphere is his best novel.

Bruce Almighty said:

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Sphere is his best novel.

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Hmmm.... I like a lot it but

Disclosure (ignore the movie versions absurd sexualization of it) - coroporate espionage thriller
Andromeda Strain - very real and scary plague story
and
Jurassic Park

are all probably better. I'd put Sphere 4th.

Some other surprisingly good ones are:

The nanotech thriller Prey was terrifying to me - it's concepts have been used in so many military plots since then. But it's not better just more real to me.

Airframe is also surprisingly good since making a story about airplane design into something interesting and terrifying was no small task.

The greatest movie of the 90s is on E! right now just fyi