The presence of Ray Arnold the Chief Engineer

Two IT guys

Jurassic Park was operating with a skeleton crew at the time

The opening scene - a working class schlub dragged into the Velociraptor cage because the transport protocols weren’t up to the task of containing a dinosaur - illustrates the core conceit of the movie. That humans and their modern technology simply aren’t ready to contend with a far more primal and powerful animal kingdom.

The hurricane flushing everyone off the island illustrated a major vulnerability. But the premise of the movie is that this park was never going to work precisely because the people running it were consumed by their own hubris and incapable of seeing the full extend of risk at play.

Nedry has a whole team working on the park’s IT system.

A team he’s undercut and sabotaged in order to afford him the opportunity to steal Hammond’s embryos. The subsequent movies are all around various mega-corps trying to seize control of the island and its bounty of dinosaur specimens and failing time and time again. The issue isn’t merely that they’re cheap, its that they’re all greedy, myopic, and self-destructive.

Hammond was not stupid enough to trust the entire park’s computer infrastructure on just one guy.

He was stupid enough to get locked out of his own systems by trusting a skeleton crew to manage the park during a hurricane. But that’s just the kick-off of the story. Crichton could have written it differently - an engineering problem that the hurricane exposed, dinosaurs that outsmarted the security, the EPA coming in to shut the park down Ghostbusters style, animal liberation activists trying to free the dinosaurs - and ended in the same place.

In many ways, Jurassic Park is a retelling of King Kong. Just swap out the big monkey for a big lizard. But the core of the story - the belief that humans can turn these primal forces into an entertainment commodity revealing man’s hubris - is tied up in Hammond’s belief in his ability to control the uncontrollable.

Nedry is just an example of one more thing Hammond can’t control.

Also, it’s not like the problems were only caused by Nedry or his team being understaffed or incompetent. Quite the opposite. He was a bad actor. And a bad actor in the right position can cause a lot of damage. He purposefully sabotaged the park in a way that couldn’t have been easily averted.

Yes, Nedry owned his IT company, but Hammond was withholding Nedry’s final paycheck until debugging was done. Which had already gone over budget due to feature creep, so Nedry was doing it himself because he didn’t have money to pay his people because Hammond wouldn’t give him the money they agreed on. Hence why Nedry was looking to make some side money, he’s literally doing all that debugging and final system fixes for free on the promise that he won’t be screwed again by Hammond. IIRC anyway, its been like 30 years since I read the book… And a lot of my perspective changed as I got older and I got more experience in the industry. As a kid, I thought you took the job you should do the job, but as an adult I understand a lot better the dynamics of the situation and while I still think if you took the job you should do the job, I completely understand the feeling of getting Fucked by someone who would rather throw money at lawyers than just pay what they agreed on.

I have been in his position, and while I didn’t betray the client and get killed, I really understand his mindset and “Fuck-it” attitude. Hammond is wealthy and using his position and power to spare as much expense as possible and step on as many contractors as possible. Kind of like an Orange Cheeto I know of. I had a company I work for that had to file bankruptcy because a half-billion dollar a year company hired us then charged back their initial payment and refused to issue final payment unless we did a ton of extra work, and when we did that, they just said “thanks” and vanished. Apparently American Express lets you contest a payment 6-12 months after it was issued and their stance is if you want your money you should sue.

I was just thinking about this yesterday - and how it seems like one of the very few flaws with the film was how unclear they made this. Nearly everyone misunderstands this. It would have really helped if there’d been a couple more lines on it, or shots of staff clearing out, etc. Instead it seemed like there were about 10 people at the whole park.

Yes, they were on a reduced crew because of a storm.

Supposedly, that is the whole deal with the Chilean Sea Bass that he gloats about. Spared no expense. Apparently that fish sounds fancy, but is actually super cheap. The whole park needed to have the shine of a top-of-the-line facility, but in the end, Ingen and Hammond had no idea what they were really cooking up.

The raptors for instance, I always got the feeling that paddock was kind of small and rapidly constructed. Those things had killed multiple people in the past, and the park’s response was cram them into a jail cell. You’d think an intelligent, dangerous animal, that was not part of the tour or experience would be euthanized, rather than risk the whole park…but here is Ingen not dealing with the problem, and instead, actively making more raptors.

The movie really dumbed Hammond down to “overly optimistic money guy with a vision”. Which was a bit distasteful if you’ve read the books. Just a bit.

because it’s impossible for richard attenborough to be a villain

The book was a million times better than the movie. It was the first time I had read a novel that was turned into a movie and then saw the movie after reading the novel.

14-year-old me had never been so disappointed. And it taught me to never ever read the book before the movie.

He was evil in the books and was horrible to Nedrey

Nedry was the systems engineer, Arnold was the operations admin. One was a construction worker, the other was the architect. Neither can truly do the other’s job, but are aware of how they do it.

In the book it was a huge amount of scope creep, Hammond refusing to pay for it and then acting all entitled.

That’s a stress ball

What is the rubber duck used for? Is it like the seashells in Demolition Man?

Isn’t that Mona Wilder?

Yeah, he was always ready to lend a hand.

Arnold was an engineer, though. He was competent in using the system and not totally lost when poking around the code, but he’s no computer scientist. Basically, he was a power user / sysadmin rather than a developer.

Don’t even, all of us thought that can was cool