Westworld vs. Jurassic Park: when playing god is clearly a bad idea

Let’s play a quick guessing game. The franchise in question involves an old guy trying his hand at being god, a wondrous theme park that goes awry, and a lot of death and destruction. What pop-culture project am I describing?

If you answered Westworld, you’re correct! If you answered Jurassic Park, you are also correct!

Both were originally created by novelist Michael Crichton, who wrote and directed the original movie Westworld in 1973. Jurassic Park was a novel he wrote in 1990. If you’re still struggling to find the similarities between the two, CollegeHumor has you covered with this video linking the two stories.

Westworld and Jurassic Park came from the same writer, and they naturally share much of the same DNA. It’s this idea of iteration — Jurassic Park building on Westworld, The Westworld TV show building on the Jurassic Park movie — that’s so fascinating. Steven Spielberg directed the Jurassic Park film. Westworld is the work of Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan. Both the film and the TV show expand on their source material, but even under adopted parents, the two still feel like perfect siblings. They’re both stories of men toying with creation, then losing control. And they’re both tied to Crichton’s distrust of technological safeguards, and his belief in chaos theory. That’s certainly a more intriguing theory than “Crichton just really hated theme parks.”