For those that are interested, here are the main differences between the book and the film:
| Film | Novel |
| John Hammond is a nice, loveable old guy. | John Hammond is a manipulative schemer willing to risk the lives even of his grandchildren. |
| Gennaro is a rather unpleasant lawyer who gets eaten by the T-Rex. | Gennaro was a dodgy lawyer, but didn't get eaten. It was the publicist Ed Regis who was killed by the T-Rex cub (not the mother). |
| The girl was the oldest of the two children. | The boy was the oldest of the two children. |
| Wu and the other genetic engineers left the island on a ship early on. | Nobody left the island on a ship early on, and Wu was killed by a velociraptor. |
| Muldoon was killed by a velociraptor. | Muldoon survived, despite taking on board quite a large amount of liquor. |
| John Hammond survived. | John Hammond was killed by a load of the diminutive Compsognathus dinosaurs (which turned up in Lost World, the sequel to Jurassic Park). |
| The spitting dinosaur that killed Nedry was about the size of a large dog. | The spitting dinosaur was actually considerably larger than Nedry. The film understandably also veiled the unpleasant aspects of Nedry's death. |
| Nedry stole the embryos because he had financial troubles (implied by Hammond in the film). | Nedry stole the embryos because he felt InGen (Hammond's company) had cheated him. |
| Ian Malcolm wasn't too badly hurt. | Ian Malcolm was so badly injured by the T-Rex that he died near the end of the book from his wounds. |
| Dr Harding (the vet) played very little part in the film. | Dr Harding played a considerable part in the book. |
| The velociraptors in the building were killed by the T-Rex. | The velociraptors in the building were enticed by Dr into eating eggs that he had injected with deadly poison (and two of them killed each other!). |
| The story ends when the survivors flee from the control building after the T-Rex kills the marauding velociraptors. | After the site is made secure again, the palaentologists (plus Gennaro, unwillingly) have to go down into a raptor nest to establish how many of the creatures are living in the wild. This was possibly one of the key points of the book, and it's a pity it couldn't be included in the film. |
| Jurassic Park was abandoned intact. | The island of Nublar and its reptilian wildlife were destroyed by the Costa Rican armed forces in a bombing raid. |
Most of this isn't really criticism of the film: after all, film and book are different media, and it is accepted that books made into films are often considerably changed in the process. But if you read the book you will probably understand parts that the film only briefly touched upon.