Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park

It was after my first week in my freshman year in high school. For five days I had gone to the city by myself to attend school. I lived some 16 kilometers away from the city and for the most part I was confined to our barangay (village) since I had been attending a local school. But high school was different. I got a scholarship from a school downtown. A few classmates from elementary school and I decided we should celebrate our first week of going to school in the city by watching a movie. So we went to the city, to Lim Ket Kai center, which was new back then, to see a movie. We went to see Jurassic Park.

We enjoyed it a lot. Residing as I did that far from the city, with parents who were never into movies, I rarely went to the cinemas. Jurassic Park was the first movie with awesome special effects I saw in a theater. I was blown away by the special effects. It was as though dinosaurs, extinct for millions of years, were back and roamed along side humans. Afterward, we agreed to watch it again.

It was only later that I learned it was based on a novel by Michael Crichton. I borrowed a book, "Congo", from a classmate in second year high school, and though published much earlier, the recently released paper back listed "Jurassic Park" as one of Crichton's novels. I've put off reading the book for a while. I went on to read the author's "Airframe", "Timeline", "Andromeda Strain", and most recently "Next". And then weeks ago, came the news that Michael Crichton died. I thought it's time to read "Jurassic Park". And so I looked for my copy, which started to gather dusts, and started reading.

It was good as always. I've yet to read a Crichton novel that bored me. I don't want to say that the book is better than the movie. I'd say that it was as enjoyable as the movie was. The book certainly digged deeper into the characters as only a book could do, but just the same I wouldn't prefer it over the movie that I enjoyed so much, that my friends and I enjoyed so much one Saturday afternoon, after our first five days of going to the city by ourselves.