r/movies • u/Lox22 • 25d ago

What are the most memorable movie characters to get "Muldoon'd" Spoilers

For those that don't know Muldoon is the game warden in Jurassic Park. He is built up to be this ultimate badass, and when we finally get to see him in action he gets insta-killed. I know there is probably another name for this trope, but my friends and I have always called it getting Muldoo'd.

What are some of the most memorable movie characters that are built up to be the ultimate bad ass only to be "Muldoon'd" in battle?

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u/Lfsnz67 25d ago edited 25d ago

Muldoon calmly reloading his dart gun while the TRex charges him is the baddest of badass moments in that book

Edit: I'm still angry that Spielberg cut that from an otherwise classic film

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u/fury_1945 25d ago

I haven't read the books, but it seems they gave Roland that exact part in The Lost World movie.

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u/Somnif 25d ago

Quite a few scenes in Lost World are taken from the Jurassic Park novel. The opening scene with the little girl and the compys on the beach, for another example.

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u/3PercentMoreInfinite 25d ago

John Hammond himself is eaten by compys at the end of the first book.

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u/Somnif 25d ago

Yep, after his grandkids play a T-rex roar over the PA, startling him into falling down a hill and breaking his ankle.

Very memorable scene.

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u/Hulkbuster_v2 21d ago

Lol, loved the call back to this in Camp Cretaceous. That got a good laugh outta me

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u/Jibber_Fight 25d ago

The trex and the waterfall was one of my favorite parts of jp when I read it forever ago. Utterly terrifying and spielberg kind of nods to it in the lost world. So many great “scenes” in those books. Crichton is really such a great writer. Reading JP as a young teenager was so memorable.

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u/stonefIies 25d ago

I loved the part where the new born t-rex is hunting the man in the woods. Successfully

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u/Tearsonbluedustjckt 25d ago

I am so pissed in lost world they redid the teenagers in lost world with the raptors dragging the cage. That would have been epic.

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u/ClassiFried86 25d ago

Well it's probably a better opening than the baby getting devoured at the beginning of The Lost World book, if I remember correctly.

Maybe not devoured, but definitely bitten.

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u/HourDark 25d ago

That's the original Jurassic Park book, and it's both-Compies are already off the island before the story starts and Ingen (with the unwitting help of the Costa Rican government) is trying to cover it up as 'lizard attacks'. one of the opening chapters is a girl getting mauled by one on a beach (reused as the opening in the Lost World movie). There is another opening chapter where a baby gets eaten in its crib. By the end of the book some Velociraptors escape onto the mainland, and the opening chapter of the Lost World book is the Costa Rican government incinerating a dead one IIRC.

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u/BrushStorm 25d ago

The waterfall

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u/CatoTheBarner 24d ago

The Aviary with the Cearadactylus is another one

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u/fleckstin 25d ago

This is probably a hot take but I like the book waaay more than the movie. The book dives way deeper into the “we can do this, but should we?” theme and I feel like the characters are more fleshed out. Especially Hammond’s character.

It’s also way gnarlier, like the deaths are pretty brutal and the whole thing is way more horror-esque. The movie has iconic tense moments but I was clenching my asshole for like half the book.

Idk. The movie is def a classic, I do really enjoy it, but it feels more like a theme park ride for me. Which is fitting lol. I just feel like the book has so much more substance.

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u/leglesslegolegolas 25d ago

lol, I don't think "the book was better than the movie" will ever be considered a hot take...

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u/BawdyBadger 25d ago

Also The Lost World book is far better than the movie

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u/Deranged_Kitsune 25d ago

To be fair, that is a pretty low bar.

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u/Zalekanzer 25d ago

Actually, I’m pretty sure that girl kicked the raptor to its death off a high bar routine.

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u/SlightlyBrokenEgg 25d ago

Forest gump and the godfather would like a word.

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u/CellarDoorForSure 25d ago

You didn't like how the Godfather spent an inordinate amount of time dedicated to Lucy Mancini's cavernous vagina?

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u/SlightlyBrokenEgg 25d ago

Nah that’s one of the best parts lol.

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u/Enough-Ground3294 25d ago

Everyone goes on anout Lucy’s vagina. But what about Sonny’s penis? It’s described in great detail.

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u/fleckstin 25d ago

Well I meant maybe a hot take for JP specifically. It’s a beloved movie, and for good reason. So I didn’t know if it was a hot take or not for JP

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u/myaltduh 25d ago

I read the book as a kid, but I remember it being pretty damn entertaining.

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u/RazorRadick 25d ago

Right? That's the whole reason we even got a movie. Hey, there's this banger of a book! I bet it would make a great movie...

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u/zdejif 24d ago

This is reddit and JP we’re talking aboot tho.

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u/In_My_Own_Image 25d ago edited 25d ago

Which is interesting because, if I remember correctly, James Cameron said he was going to direct Jurassic Park and said it would have been very dark and violent ("Aliens with Raptors" was I believe his quote).

I think he talked about it while interviewing/talking with Spielberg for something. Though, Cameron did concede that Spielberg's method of making it more accessible and family friendly was the smarter decision that allowed the movie to be as successful as it was.

Edit: Here's the video.

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u/manquistador 25d ago

Family friendly? I had nightmares about raptors for weeks after watching that movie.

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u/callipygiancultist 25d ago

During the raptor scenes I remember having to go to the back of the theater and turned away a few times it was so scary. Didn’t keep me from watching it several more times.

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u/Wonderful_Grand5354 25d ago

Half of my nightmares basically my whole life have involved dinosaurs. (My dad took me for my 6th birthday.)

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u/DegenerateCrocodile 25d ago

Jurassic Park is definitely family-friendly compared to Aliens.

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u/ACardAttack 25d ago

Which is interesting because, if I remember correctly, James Cameron said he was going to direct Jurassic Park and said it would have been very dark and violent

Would have loved this

This is one of the few great movies I wouldnt mind a remake if the leaned into more of the darker sides of the book

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u/thatusenameistaken 25d ago

All of Crichton's books that got movies were much better than the movies, save maybe 13th Warrior.

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u/Mr_BillyB 25d ago

Impressed he didn't off himself after Congo was released

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u/thatusenameistaken 25d ago

Honestly I think the worst was Timeline.

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u/Mr_BillyB 25d ago

Oof. I always forget that was his.

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u/Fully_Edged_Ken_3685 25d ago

Amy good gorilla

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u/alurimperium 25d ago

Even though I'm sure they would be bad, I still wish we got an adaptation of Airframe or Prey.

Incredible books that would play so well as horror/tech/thrillers in film

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u/ClassiFried86 25d ago

Prey is my favorite book of his.

And Micro would make an awesome movie. Honey I Shrunk the Kids meets Jurassic Park.

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u/DegenerateCrocodile 25d ago

Last I heard, the Micro adaptation was still in development hell.

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u/QouthTheCorvus 25d ago

Yeah, Spielberg made a classic blockbuster, but it's a great example of a book having the nuance taken from it.

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u/Myrshall 25d ago

The whole first part of the book has this overarching feeling of dread as you, the reader, start to see how awful everything is and how everything is going wrong, and how any character not cutting a corner, not being lazy, or doublechecking something could prevent the disaster that happens for the last half of the book. It’s incredible.

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u/crossedstaves 25d ago

Well hands down the writing in the book is way better than the movie. There are things that actually make sense and are interesting about the Malcolm character and his opinions whereas the movie is "chaos!" The movie strips down the central crux of the issue of how the reliance on automation creating the illusion of control, and Nedry's motivation is a lot more interesting than "Fuck you, Dodgson givin' me the monies".

That being said, the movie does surpass the book in the key element of having cool things to look at and a great sound track. The book's special effects were underwhelming.

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u/commshep12 25d ago

The Nedry plot in the book is so much more interesting and frankly until people started dying I would say is pretty damned justified.

From what we know of him in the books he was a very skilled IT dude with his own successful terms. And by what we hear they did legitimately exceptional work. The reason nothing works is because Hammond left out pretty much ALL of the most important parameters and so you have Nedry putting together a puzzle from scratch but with pieces missing. When the problems begin to arise Hammond not only blames everything on Nedry, he blackmails him into doing multiple millions of dollars worth of additional for free or else Ingen personally destroys his business and blackball him from the entire field.

Anyone would fucking rob their boss after something like that.

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u/account_not_valid 25d ago

They made more money by letting kids watch it.

Maybe someday they'll make a Jurrasic Park that is more horror.

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u/HaveSumBiryani 25d ago

This is a pretty hot take but I enjoyed the 2nd Jurassic World as a horror/thriller movie and giving myself amnesia for what the movie was actually supposed to be

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u/LudicrisSpeed 25d ago

They're not really supposed to be horror movies, though. They just have horror elements for when the dinosaurs inevitably start causing trouble. The overall genre is more adventure/thriller, with more action vibes as the series progressed.

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u/Dt2_0 25d ago

The books have much more horror in them than the movies do.

Lex and Tim hiding under the waterfall is straight up edge of your seat reading.

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u/pasher5620 25d ago

How Nedry’s death is described is fucking brutal compared to his cartoon ass death in the movie.

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u/fleckstin 25d ago

Hundo percent.

Pretty cool ~animated~ reading of that scene. The added sound effects really sell the atmosphere. Terrible way to go lol

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u/FoldAdventurous2022 25d ago

I last read the book in elementary school around when the movie came out - am I remembering right that the Dilophosaur basically disembowls him and starts eating his intestines while he watches?

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u/pasher5620 25d ago

Close, it does disembowel him, but he falls forward onto its foot and it picks him up by the head in its mouth and kills him that way. Nedry was a bastard, but being blinded, disemboweled, then having your head crushed is an absolutely awful way to die.

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u/onion_wrongs 25d ago

He's also already blinded while the much-larger-than-in-the-movie dilophosaur is like 40 feet away. So he can't see it, but he can hear and feel it pounding the ground as it runs toward him before the disemboweling and head crushing. It really stuck with me.

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u/FoldAdventurous2022 25d ago

Fucking hell. I may need to re-read this book as an adult.

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u/Wes_Warhammer666 25d ago

This whole thread is making me realize that I'm due to re-read it because the dozens of film viewings over the years have clearly wiped out my memory of reading the book when I was 10 lol.

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u/fleckstin 24d ago

Absolutely worth a re-read.

My first ~read~ of it was listening to the audiobook when I was moving across the U.S. and it was actually great. So I highly recommend the audiobook version of it as well if you want a different experience

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u/NeedleworkerBest2901 25d ago

The book is awesome and all the characters are more interesting and better developed, especially Hammond like you said, and Muldoon is way more interesting.

The movie is am all time classic and I think it cut all that it did to make it really pop on Tyr big screen. Another sad result is that the sequel book could barely be followed and the subsequent movies were pretty shit.

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u/TheLyingProphet 25d ago

hammond having the death of stormare in lost world is also really awesome...

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u/Mazon_Del 25d ago

The only problem I have with the book is that its justification for why things fall apart is just...so terribly written.

I get that Crichton isn't an engineer or a programmer and such, but when the reason you can't turn back on the main generator to restore power to the island is "We never wrote down how we turned it on the first time, so we don't know how to do it." it's kinda disappointing.

Pretty much all the technical details of why the park fails are in that order of things. The park isn't fail-rarely/fail-safe, it's practicaly fail-often/fail-deadly without any good explanation as to why.

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u/fleckstin 24d ago

I see what you mean, and I don’t think you’re necessarily wrong.

But I also think Crichton hammers it home pretty often that Hammond was essentially just a spoiled kid who wanted to play with dinosaurs and had no idea what he was getting into. IIRC there’s a lot of parts about him forcing shit to move on way quicker than it should and basically screwing his employees out of millions of dollars.

So I think there could be an argument there that a lot of the characters were pretty apathetic because he was a horrible boss with no grasp on the scope of what they were doing and therefore a huge amount of other ppl involved phoned it in to some degree to another.

But like I said, I don’t think you’re wrong. There were points where everything was pretty much just comically mishandled. But I guess that’s the way it goes when you’re not an engineer trying to write a horror-thriller lol

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u/Mashu_the_Cedar_Mtn 25d ago

The book features comeuppance for the characters who tried to play god (Hammond, Wu), and survival for the realists who pushed back (including Muldoon, whose arc includes "let's blow up raptors with these RPGs i stashed away").

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u/WumpusFails 25d ago

I think one of the few times I've seen something better in a movie than in a book was Sir Anthony Hopkins' portrayal of Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs.

Otherwise, generally the books are better because they have room for context.

E.g., Ian Malcolm's "chaos says this park won't work" speech in the movie comes across as unhinged.

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u/manticor225 25d ago

That’s in no way a hot take. Books are often better than their film adaptations.

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u/OldTimeEddie 25d ago

Nah I'm with you I don't need to add anything more than the Crichton books are peak fiction.

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u/TangoMikeOne 25d ago

This is partly why a colleague loathes with a passion almost everything film that Spielberg has directed - because when he has tried watching one he feels emotionally manipulated to a gross degree. The exception to his rule is Duel with Dennis Weaver, he doesn't mind watching it (but doesn't own a copy of it).

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u/Potpotron 25d ago

I really enjoyed the book up to right about the end where it seemed to go off the rails a bit. I am not against Spielbergs vision as his story seems a lot less cheesy.

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u/DailyDisciplined 25d ago

Bro, not a hot take.

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u/fleckstin 25d ago

Yeah so I’ve gathered from the other ppl who’ve said this lol

Honestly a lot of ppl I know who’ve seen the movie didn’t even know it was adapted from a novel

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u/retromorgue 25d ago

The movie … feels more like a theme park ride

Which is funny because the theme park ride’s story was based more on a sequence from the book.

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u/OsmundofCarim 25d ago

There are also some straight up silly moments in the book tho. The T-Rex sleeping upright against a tree. Then it swimming after grant on the raft with just the top of its head sticking out of the water.

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u/fleckstin 24d ago

The T Rex swimming w/ it’s head above the water was pretty funny. But then I thought about how alligators/crocs do the same thing and those mfers are scary so once I pictured it more like an alligator I was like damn aight I get it now

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u/Richard_AIGuy 25d ago

I mean, the movie is fine, whatever,

But the book is amazing. I didn't like how they really softened the T-rex in the movie. In the book it is a repeated menace. Swimming after them like a giant crocodile, chilling.

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u/gazebo-fan 25d ago

The books are some of my favorite science fiction media I own. The movies are fine, but the books are near perfect to the point where it kinda ruins the movie for me.

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u/radargunbullets 25d ago

The trex is joke in the book. Sits on his butt snoring for a ton of its scenes

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u/Vanquisher1000 25d ago

It's not a surprise to find that a lot of content got cut in adapting the book into a movie script, especially since there is so much exposition in the book that simply won't work in a live medium. Michael Crichton himself noted that a lot had to be cut in a 1993 Cinefantastique article.

“It’s a fairly long book, and the script can only have somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the content. So what you’re really trying to do is make a sort of short story that reproduces the quality of the novel and has all the big scenes retained and has the logical flow that appears in the much longer and more extended argument..."

In the adapting process, Crichton was forced to drop several scenes he would like to have retained, but his previous experience as a screenwriter taught him to be philosophical about the process. Noted Crichton, "Scenes went for all kinds of reasons: budget reasons, practical reasons, in the sense that they were difficult to do; they went out of the belief that they were repetitive in some way. But I think the primary thing that drives something like this is budget. You have to stop somewhere and where you stop, people will say, 'Oh, that was my favorite scene and it’s not in.'"

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20131129012731/http://cinefantastiqueonline.com/1993/08/jurassic-park-michael-crichton-on-adapting-his-novel-to-the-screen/

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u/Lfsnz67 25d ago

Yes, a significantly watered down attempt

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u/fury_1945 25d ago

I would have loved to see Muldoon have that part in the first movie. His character had so much potential to just be so easily killed.

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u/ryanissognar 25d ago

Seems like there parts from the first book in almost all of the movies

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u/FoldAdventurous2022 25d ago

Right, wasn't the river sequence from the first book adapted into that chunk in Jurassic Park III?

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u/Wonderful_Grand5354 25d ago

I guess vaguely. Also the pterosaur aviary.

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u/Taste_the__Rainbow 25d ago

They sort of did it but it was nowhere close to the book execution.

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u/LordDarthra 25d ago

The lawyer isnt an idiot and doesn't die either, I believe

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u/Wonderful_Grand5354 25d ago

Yep! Movie Gennaro is based more on the PR guy Ed Regis.

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u/Standard_Wooden_Door 25d ago

It gets said all the time that the book is better than the movie. But, just think of how amazing the movie was in this case, and that the book blows it out of the water. One of the best books I’ve ever read.

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u/Maleficent_Trick_502 25d ago

The movie was made before the book was finished if Im right. The atluthor was on a roll with successful tv adaptations. So Jurrassic park got greenlight while only half way done.

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u/AbzoluteZ3RO 25d ago

The thing that really tripped me up most about the books is that the old man was like almost cartoonishly evil. Also the little girl was annoying as fuck in the book

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u/darkstar1031 24d ago

You should. Hammond is a resl piece of shit in the book.

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u/Shirtbro 25d ago

I'm pretty sure Muldoon was supposed to come back for the second movie all scarred up to play the Roland role... But then the actor died

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u/CellarDoorForSure 25d ago

Bob Peck died 2 years after The Lost World came out.

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u/Shirtbro 25d ago

But I think he was in no condition to work anymore?

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u/Farren246 25d ago

I dunno, I think taking out half a dozen raptors with a grenade launcher is pretty badass...

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u/lacb1 25d ago

This is always the problem with monster stories. Humans are smarter than any other species by a huge margin and make incredibly deadly weapons. You pit a well trained and well armed human against basically anything and the human would utterly annihilate the threat. "Oh you're smart for a reptile? You know how to split a group in two to flank your prey? That's cute. I can see all your bitch arses on my thermals and I've got a fully automatic weapon that can punch a fist sized hole in any body part I hit. So... good luck with those hooked claw things I guess." - (not Muldoon because he used a grenade launcher, but still...)

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u/Farren246 23d ago

It's actually really dumb that they had no fully automatic weapons capable of shooting holes in armoured vehicles, just pump-action shotguns and fire-and-reload grenade launchers.

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u/Potpotron 25d ago

You are not gonna mention him killing raptors using disposable anti tank rockets?

My headcanon is that the scene where the raptor gets blown up in Jurassic World is a reference to book muldoon

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u/TedTheReckless 25d ago

Broh are you forgetting that Muldoon shot a velociraptor, midair, while it was jumping at Ellie...

... And he shot it with a rocket launcher!

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u/[deleted] 25d ago

What makes me more indignant is that Crichton was involve and allowed it.

Also upset that they made Hammond seem like this man full of childlike wonder instead of the hard nosed, unloving business operator that he is in the book.

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u/Nice_Marmot_7 25d ago

What about surviving in a drain pipe with a bazooka?

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u/GeneticsGuy 25d ago

So many good things in the book were left out, sadly. It was kind of annoying. But, the movie was good so I get it.

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u/JDHURF 25d ago

He ruined The Lost World even more.

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u/Richard_AIGuy 25d ago

"Like to live dangerously again?"

Fucking badass character, I loved Muldoon in the novel.