Terrifying as a pre-teen me found the opening “SHOOOOOT HAAAARRR” scene of Jurassic Park, the movie can’t really be seen as a horror flick. The book, on the other hand, is full of babies being stolen from cradles to be devoured in the Caribbean jungle, grown men being torn apart by swarms of chicken-sized dinosaurs, and an ending that doesn’t so much imply as outright state that the shockingly intelligent velociraptors have figured out how to get lysine in their diet without human aid, have gotten off the island by taking over a passing ship, and are now migrating across habited farmland in South America.
So… lets just say that a movie adaptation could have gone a number of ways. James Cameron revealed one possibility last weekend: apparently, he missed the film rights to Jurassic Park by less than a day.
“I tried to buy the book rights and [Steven Spielberg] beat me to it by a few hours,” he told Huffington Post. “But when I saw the film, I realised that I was not the right person to make the film, he was. Because he made a dinosaur movie for kids, and mine would have been Aliens with dinosaurs, and that wouldn’t have been fair.
“Dinosaurs are for 8-year-olds. We can all enjoy it, too, but kids get dinosaurs and they should not have been excluded for that. His sensibility was right for that film, I’d have gone further, nastier, much nastier.”
So, probably, imagine if the entire movie was like the opening sequence. Probably there would have been a lot more Muldoon, which I would have been okay with. Probably there would have been way less Lex, which would have been sad. It should come to no surprise to anyone who knows me that I hold Jurassic Park in pretty high esteem, but it’s always fun to have a look down the other legs of the Trousers of Time.
Read the whole article at HuffPo.
