Michael Crichton · 1990 · survival

Crichton's 1990 novel, and much harder than the film. A bioengineering company has built a park on an island off Costa Rica and stocked it with animals grown from DNA in amber - and invites a palaeontologist, a mathematician and two children for the weekend to sign off on the safety case.

1. 1
   Snakewater

   The Montana badlands, where Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler are digging velociraptor - underfunded, sunburnt, and about to be offered a consultancy fee large enough that neither of them asks enough questions about it.

2. 2
   Mano de Dios

   The amber mine in the Dominican Republic that supplies InGen - biting insects trapped in tree resin a hundred million years ago, with dinosaur blood still in them, which is the premise the whole thing rests on.

3. 3
   San Jose

   Costa Rica, and the loose thread: a construction worker mauled by something nobody will name, a doctor who cannot place the injuries, and a lizard on a beach at Cabo Blanco that bites a child and does not match any known species.

4. 4
   Isla Nublar

   A hundred and twenty miles west of the Costa Rican coast, in permanent cloud - eight square miles of park with electrified fences, and Crichton's actual subject, which is not dinosaurs but the arrogance of controlled systems.

5. 5
   San Jose

   The survivors are taken off by the Costa Rican air force and the island is bombed - and then held in San Jose by a government that does not want them talking, which is the ending the film cut and which is the better one.