The original Jurassic Park movie made a huge change from the novel’s characterization of John Hammond – and it ended up shaping the entire franchise. Michael Crichton’s bestselling novel Jurassic Park was adapted into a screenplay by David Koepp and Crichton himself for Steven Spielberg’s record-breaking blockbuster. While the movie maintains the same basic premise and story structure of the novel, it made some big changes to the source material, like toning down the violence to be more palatable to a wider audience. The adaptation completely recharacterized the mad scientist who created the park, John Hammond.
Although he only appeared on-screen in the first two movies, Hammond has loomed large over the entire Jurassic Park franchise. Without Hammond, there would be no park. All the cloned dinosaurs seen in these movies are a direct result of Hammond playing God. Richard Attenborough’s performance was so iconic that Hammond remains one of the most memorable Jurassic Park characters five sequels later. But he was almost a totally different character. In the original novel, Hammond is a much darker figure than the version that made it to the screen in Spielberg’s movie adaptation.
Hammond’s personality in the film adaptation of Jurassic Park is practically the polar opposite of his personality in the original novel. The only thing that the two Hammonds have in common is their eccentricity. In the novel, he’s a cold-hearted sociopath whose plan to resurrect dinosaurs is driven purely by his desire to boost InGen’s profits and pump up his own legacy. When he’s told that his state-of-the-art bio-engineering technologies could be used to cure diseases, Hammond callously dismisses those suggestions, because there’s not much money in curing diseases.
Whereas the movie version of Hammond takes it on the chin when his park’s safety measures start to fail, the book version of Hammond refuses to take any responsibility. Instead, he blames the park’s shortcomings on the failures of his staff. In the book, Hammond has no genuine feelings of affection for his grandchildren, and when the bodies start piling up, he has no compassion; he just looks at the rampant deaths with the detached heartlessness of a corporate analyst. He convinces himself that these deaths are just a hiccup in an otherwise perfect business model.
By the end of the movie, Hammond has decided that building a theme park full of living, breathing dinosaurs is a terrible idea. When Alan Grant quips that, after careful consideration, he’s decided not to endorse Hammond’s park, Hammond quips back, “So have I.” But in the book, he never comes to this realization. By the end of the novel, Hammond still believes in the park and wants to rebuild it after all the death and destruction. Of course, it doesn’t matter much, because in the book, Hammond is mauled to death by a pack of Procompsognathus.
When Spielberg set about adapting Jurassic Park for the big screen, he decided to characterize Hammond as a dark inversion of Walt Disney. He cast a legendary filmmaker in the role, because he knew that a fellow director would understand the motivation of a visionary genius determined to turn his grandiose ideas into a reality at any cost. In the movie, Hammond isn’t a cold, callous sociopath. He cares about his grandkids, he takes responsibility for his failures, and he’s optimistic about his park’s possibilities; it’s just that that optimism is woefully misplaced.
Making Hammond a misguided optimist rather than an out-and-out villain (as he was in the book) shaped every subsequent story in the Jurassic Park sequels. He became an activist in the second movie, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and his vision for the park and the animals shaped Simon Masrani’s equally optimistic outlook in Jurassic World. It also made Hammond a key, principled player in the human cloning subplot. Had he remained a villain, the entire franchise would be different.
If Hammond had been a villain in the first Jurassic Park film, then his successor Masrani might have still looked up to him in Jurassic World, but it would be for much darker reasons (and make Masrani a much darker character in the process). Rather than protesting against further dinosaur cloning in The Lost World, Hammond might have championed the return to the island and the salvaging of the dinosaurs. Rather than objecting to the human cloning storyline in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, he might have encouraged it, because there would be a lot of money in human cloning.
If the original Jurassic Park movie had faithfully adapted the John Hammond character as a full-blown villain, then his legacy would be totally different. The rebooted Jurassic World trilogy kicked off with a fully operational dinosaur park. If Hammond had remained a villain and didn’t decide against building the park at the end of the first film, then the series might’ve reached that point sooner. At the end of the book, Hammond is determined to rebuild the park. The movie could’ve seen that through if it made Hammond a villain but didn’t kill him off.
If the movie hadn’t changed his characterization but did change his ending to keep him alive, then Hammond might’ve had the park up and running in time for the second movie. Since the franchise has shown time and time again that Hammond’s business plan just isn’t feasible, the park would’ve eventually been shut down either way. Whether Hammond was a villain or not, the movies would’ve ended up telling the same stories about the fallout of cloned dinosaurs running riot on the island. But the interim might’ve been a lot different.
If Hammond had remained a villain in Jurassic Park and its sequels, then he could’ve been the big bad of the franchise. The dinosaurs aren’t the real villains of the Jurassic saga; the unscrupulous humans are. But the most recent Jurassic outings have struggled to come up with a satisfying big bad. Jurassic World Dominion made Lewis Dodgson, of all people, the big bad. This franchise needs its Emperor Palpatine. Making Hammond the franchise’s main villain could’ve connected all the Jurassic Park movies together in a more coherent way.