To be honest, neither the movie nor the novel are usually considered to be so lofty in ambition. To put that another way, because Benchley's novel is considered popular /adventure fiction, few conscious authorial goals regarding theme are assume. Instead, it is assumed that the work is meant to entertain.

Personally, I would certainly say that chaos plays a role in the book, but not teleology per se. That gives the characters too much weight, and the book too much specificity. Instead, I'd say that the book sees nature as inherently beyond man's attempts to control it. If you seek to control, hunt, fish, limit nature, chaos and destruction will result. However, precisely because it is chaotic, no specific telos is implied.