Let's start with the park itself. John Hammond is a billionaire phil(mis)anthropist who decides he wants to leave the world with something magic. So he creates an amusement park that is not only not magic, it's suicidal for any man alive to step foot on it who's not Chuck Norris. A theme park whose theme is dinosaurs fully capable of killing anyone in a matter of minutes. Never mind that Hammond keeps a couple of the world's best paleontologists in his pocket with funding and champagne, he never considers consulting them BEFORE he makes his park, and only afterwards to gloat about it. The paleontologists- surprise surprise- tell him his park is ridiculously dangerous and he has a hissy. But that doesn't stop him from sending them off on a tour, the very first tour, not only when there's a HURRICANE on the way and they're on a FUCKING ISLAND, but sends his OWN GRADCHILDREN along with them. Hammond's not worried. He'll redeem himself when he plays Kris Kringle in the Miracle on 34th Street years later.
Not only is the idea for the park stupid, Hammond can't even pull it off. Before the jeeps break down in front of the T-rex area, the only dinosaur we've seen on it is the dilophosaur, which, as Nedry finds out to his supreme delight, can spit venom yards away. Where are the relatively harmless dinosaurs that might only crush you if you walk underneath them? Apparently running rampant. At no point did I see the Brachiosaurs limited by high voltage pins, a fact which the Tyrannosaur seems aware of and resents. I'll come back to that resentment later.
Among the people he invites for his big premier is a mathematician named Malcom. Malcom is such a genius he not only predicts the park will go haywire and everyone will die, he also has the smarts to both go to the island and take the tour. Why? Because he wants to flirt with Satler, who would rather dig through triceratops shit. I think that's a circumvention Jeff Goldbloom should be used to by now. All he does for the first half of the movie is smart aleckly remind everyone that he's already prophesied the park's collapse, oblivious to the fact that HE”S IN IT and his attitude makes him a rather conspicuous dinosaur target. If not directly, I'm sure Grant or Timmy would push him in the way of a charging triceratops to both avoid getting trampled and shut him up.
Now, a few words about Ingen's corporate rivals. They couldn't have hired a more incompetent accomplice. A fat slob with a criminal past- whom Hammond forgives, but makes him pay by running the system pretty much all by himself. Because you know all Samuel L. Jackson is going to do is shout “motherfucker” a few times and whimsically remark “They deserved to die and I hope they burn in hell” when all hell breaks loose. This company could have bought any of the geneticists and gotten the goods with little or no harm, but they arrange an elaborate espionage whose key operative is a guy who, low and behold, fucks it up so badly the very idea of a Dinosaur themed amusement park will from now on be associated with death and calamity. And it's good that he got his comeuppance, because he's by far the dumbest character in the movie. He shuts down the fences along the tour, not only maliciously insuring the deaths of innocent kids, but making the VERY PATH he himself has to take to get on the boat home a Newman buffet. Why didn't he just let the raptors out from the very beginning? That way, Hammond and Jackson and Muldoon would have oohed and ahhed the tour as it continued to fail to produce dinosaurs, only to have the kiddies come back to headquarters by the time the raptors got there and get happily eaten. Happily, because the raptors would be the first dinosaurs they had laid eyes on, seeing as they decide to take the tour RIGHT BEFORE NIGHTFALL.
When the system breaks down, Hammond is immediately aware that his grandchildren might be dinosaur chow, and he has Muldoon hunt them down in his best jeep- which maybe should have been used for the tour, in case the Tyrannosaur broke out and you suddenly needed to be back at headquarters lickety split. Satler goes with him, because maybe she's afraid Hammond knows the end is near and might put some moves on her. They take the carnage scene they come upon pretty nonchalantly. Malcolm is severely wounded, there's shreds of the lawyer lying around, and the jeep which last had her lover and two prepubescent kids inside is at the bottom of a fifty foot ravine, flipped over and mutilated as if it got raped by a rhinoceros. All in all, they keep their cool and go back to headquarters, Satler no doubt with more than a little I-told-you-so delight she can't wait to lay on Hammond. She apparently doesn't give as much of a shit about Sam Niel as she does triceratops.
Now, why the hell did Grant, of all people, even go on this fucking tour? He already knew that Hammond had cloned Velociraptors, about which he knows more then anyone on the planet, but most auspiciously that they have a tendency to disembowel their prey and eat them alive. He even has one of their claws to foreshadow that raptors will go primeval on any ass they happen to come across. One of his objections to the park is that we don't know how these animals will behave. Really? BULLSHIT. You know EXACTLY how they'll behave. He knows raptor hunting strategy well enough to have saved Muldoon's life if he'd bothered to tell him. His expertise on Tyrannosaur optics saves his life more than once, and he keeps this specialized expertise now IMMENTLY PRACTICAL all to himself. The only reason I can think of is this. At some point Malcom makes a smart ass remark about paleontologists becoming extinct now that dinosaurs are alive and well. Grant resents this, and decides to go on the tour hoping that the dinosaurs will eat a few people (Malcom especially) and thus usher in his new career as a forensic investigator specializing in homicide by dinosaur. Think not? He doesn't warn Malcom about the Tyrannosaur's fatal vision flaw until AFTER he makes an ass of himself trying to lure it with the flare like a kid at a rave.
Once it's been established that the dinosaurs are on the loose, Hammond demands that the park's power be turned off so they can reboot the system, because “people are dying.” No, Hammond. People were dying five minutes ago. Now people are dead, and locking the barn after the horses are gone won't bring them back. Hammond is also upset that his park has made a murderous debut. Did he expect it to break the cycle of wrongful death suits he must have been paying hush money on since Day One? He doesn't really care about his departed attorney, only insofar as it looks badly on the T-rex. It never occurs to Hammond that he has cloning technology with infinite applications at his disposal, and all he has to do is clone the lawyer, who conveniently left some DNA in the toilet prior to being eaten, and all is well.
Here's where the plot goes from dumb to brain dead. If the entire system is shut down, this might enable the raptors to escape. Only Muldoon is worried about this. Alas, the power gets shut down anyway. And that's just fine. I mean, it's not like the raptors SYSTEMATICALLY CHECK THE FENCES FOR WEAKNESSES ALL THE TIME and have a tendency to jump METERS IN THE AIR and can outrun a fucking cheetah. Well, the power doesn't come back on because the damn plot wants those raptors out so bad it taught them how to chew through metal cables in mid-air and then somersault into the open jungle. Because besides being able to open doors, the raptors are also off-screen ninjas. And it seems they've been premeditating their escape/revenge in some detail, because they've already mischievously set up a game trail that leads DIRECTLY TO THE GENERATOR needed to get the power back on. My god. The raptors envisioned this exact crisis scenario and set a trap right by the very thing they knew we would need to stop them. You know, that generator we need so we can turn on all the fences the dinosaurs have already escaped from.
Said generator Sam Jackson goes to and gets dismembered, but it happens off-screen because his severed arm is more useful as a prop scare than the gory details of his actual demise. Satler and Muldoon go right off to rescue him, because anyone who doesn't come back in Jurassic Park has a more than decent chance of surviving if only a slim woman and her Aussie companion are there in time.
The only intelligent character in Jurassic Park is the Asian geneticist. “What, there's a hurricane coming, and I've done gone and cloned all these rapacious raptors? Fuck that. I'm gone. I got a bid from Law and Order anyway...”
So the raptors confront the surviving cast and get eaten by the Tyrannosaur, whose final plot position as deus ex machina is utterly unbelievable. First, how does it manage to SNEAK UP on the raptors when every move it makes generates IMPACT TREMORS? Why does it go to the park headquarters in the first place? To file personal grievances about being locked up? Goofy.
Michael Crichton is known for being pretty catty when people call him out. So catty indeed that he writes characters of his critics in his novels as child molesters with small penises. My best guess as to why the Jurassic Park persona dramatis are so retarded is that among the paleontology circles Congo got a bad reception, and Jurassic Park is Crichton's clandestine revenge.
The best thing that can be said about these people is that their stupidity inadvertently saved lives. Can you imagine what kind of shit would have went down if Jurassic Park OPENED TO THE PUBLIC? Not just a handful of scientists and a couple of kids would be in danger, but BUSLOADS of kids on a field trip and perhaps the entire field of palaeontology as well.