Games without frontiers? War without tears? |
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Michael Crichton is what I would consider to be an Alpha Male. First off, his appearance is quite unsettling: the man is 6' 9". Secondly, he graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, lectured in anthropology at Cambridge, and graduated an MD from Harvard Medical School. He paid the bills during his schooling by writing novels under several pen names, one of them, A Case of Need, both winning an Edgar Award for best mystery and being turned into a film by a little known guy by the name of Blake Edwards (oh, just IMDb him, you heathens). All of which he kept secret (hence the various pen names) for fear that his professors would think less of him for being a novelist.
The cat was let out of the bag when Crichton published what would be his career making novel, The Andromeda Strain. Not only is it a fine piece of writing, the first to display what would become his trademark documentary-style verisimilitude, but the literary world was taken aback at the fact that it was written by a 24-year old medical student. It was when the film rights were optioned by Robert Wise that Harvard became aware of Crichton's extra-curricular activities, but at that point he didn't care: he had made the decision to not work in the medical field after all.
He would go on to write almost 20 books under his own name, as well as several screenplays, one of which, after languishing on a shelf for almost 20 years, became the wildly popular television show ER (of which he has scripted three episodes himself).
But did you also know he directed movies?
Of course you did. I made the discovery quite accidentally about two weeks ago, and since have been chagrined to find that apparently I am the only person in existence who did not know. *sigh*
So, it went like this: while researching my James Gunn column, I ended up watching SCOOBY DOO several times. The scene where the Scooby Gang finds the secret monster training facility seemed eerily familiar to me. After some thought, I figured out that it made me think of LOOKER (1981). LOOKER was a very important film around my household in the 80's, and I was flabbergasted to find it was directed by Michael Crichton. I saw the name, and said, "Hey, he has the same name of the guy whose books I don't read. Wait a minute, it is the guy whose books I don't read!"
On the surface, LOOKER seems to be a cheesy little piece of 80's fluff, with graphics by Atari and score by Casio. But after my recent Crichton-Immersion therapy, I recognize it as being full of his trademark pet peeves: namely, his dissatisfaction with the media and the misuse of technologies for less than noble purposes.
In this example, a company called Digital Matrix hires models, has them get millimeter-specific cosmetic surgery, and then scans their likenesses into a giant cahm-pew-toor. These "perfect" woman can now be digitally inserted into a variety of commercials at the advertisers' discretion. Which is all well and good, until the source humans begin meeting mysterious ends. Ends to which the surgeon who did their respective reconstructions, played wonderfully by Albert Finney, is framed for. Throw in a villainous James Coburn, a naked Susan Dey, and a gun that shoots light pulses that cause a trance-like state, in essence causing a person to "lose" chunks of time, 
Did you think I was stupid, Ramsay? |
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and you've got yourself a neat way to while away 90 minutes. Plus, you'll have the theme song stuck in your head, like, forever.
If I was flabbergasted by LOOKER, then I was low down and dirty, shocked and awed to find that Crichton also directed another film that holds almost as reverent a place in my childhood as LOOKER does, 1984's RUNAWAY. In a near-future setting, Officer Jack Ramsay, played by Tom Selleck and his mustache, works in a special division of the police force that deals exclusively with "runaway" robots. That is to say, robots that jump their programming and cause harm to humans. The robots in this film are boxy affairs, not at all like, say, the replicants of BLADE RUNNER. This only serves to ground the film in reality a little more than the average sci-fi flick.
Ramsay enjoys his work, but his life gets immensely more complicated once a homicidal madman devises an "assassin chip" which, when retro-fitted into any robot causes it to embark on a murderous rampage. You've got more obtrusive media, glorified vacuum cleaners with .357 revolvers, mechanical spiders that spit acid, heat-seeking bullets that can be programmed for a specific person's heat signature, and a bad guy played by none other than Mr. Gene f*cking Simmons. Hello! This marks Simmons's first film, if you don't count KISS MEETS THE PHANTOM OF THE PARK, and, quite frankly, I don't. It also predates his legendary turn as Mr. Big in the "O.D. Feeling" episode of HBO's long-missed The Hitchhiker. Plus, Kirstie Alley gets what's coming to her. That's always a plus.
As I continued my researched and delved into films that I had not seen before, I noticed a curious thing: his films get better the farther back you go. Case in point: 1979's THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY. Though Crichton did generally write his own screenplays, this was his first directorial effort actually based on his own source novel, if you don't count the made for television PURSUIT (based on his pseudonymous effort Binary) which, quite frankly, I don't.
So, THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY is a period piece, circa late 1880's, about, well, a great train robbery. The first, in fact. It stars Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland as, well, great train robbers. The first, in fact. This film is singular in Crichton's oeuvre in that it does not center around some sort of technological advance. It's just a good old-fashioned caper flick. In that respect, it was able to better showcase Crichton's rather dry sense of humor, only hinted at in his more equipment-burdened efforts.
Now I'd like to skip back a bit to Crichton's first feature film, 1973's impressive WESTWORLD. Richard Benjamin and James Brolin (very much so informing many of Christian Bales's performances here) are on their way to Delos, the theme park of the future...today. There are three options at Delos: Romanworld, Medievalworld, and, of course Westworld (sometimes referred to as Westernworld). The two heroes have chosen the titular section which, like the other sections of the park, are populated by hyper-realistic robots. The gig being that you can live out your wild west fantasies with the assurance that no harm can come to you. The guns have heat-sensors, and thus cannot be fired at anything body-temperature warm, ensuring that only robots can be shot.
They have a good old time having 
Stop looking at me like that, Yul: seriously. |
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stand-offs, sexing up lady robots, and getting into raucous bar fights, until...can you guess it? Yep: something goes wrong in the place wher nothing can go wrong. The results are positively chilling, and the threat of the renegade 'bots is embodied perfectly by The Gunslinger, as portrayed by Yul Brynner. Brynner's performace here is awe-inspiring: he is twice as chilling and menacing as Michael Myers hugging Jason Vorhees on top of Freddy Krueger. It was also nice to see Benjamin in a not so often dramatic role.
Lastly, I want to discuss COMA, directed by Crichton in 1978. This choice was an interesting one, in that the source novel, from which Crichton adapted the screenplay himself, was written by Robin Cook, who is also a medical doctor who writes technical thrillers. A nice little bit of synergy there. The film, like most of Crichton's work, starts off rather slowly, with Genevieve Bujold slowly getting clued in to a major conspiracy of crimes being committed at the hospital where she and boyfriend Michael Douglas work. The slow pacing is paid off for in the last act of the film, when revelation after revelation come flying at you, and by the end you are sitting at the edge of your seat going, "Noooo!" Oh, wait, maybe that was just me. Anyway, it is a terribly impressive film, and I strongly suggest giving it a try. The scene in the cadaver storage freezer is worth the rental alone. *shudder*
To pick up the thread of the Alpha Male comment, I would say that being such also has it's disadvantages, namely his sometimes shabby treatment of women. The female roles in his books and films are generally either stone-cold bitches or ineffectual emotional basket cases. I wouldn't go so far as to call him misogynistic, I would just like to see a more well-rounded female who sometimes kicks a lot of ass. Also, even though he often displays a self-deprecating style of humor, he likewise is the first person to tell you how groundbreaking some of the themes and images in his works were. I guess there is a kind of balance there, after all.
NOTES:
1. Crichton was first published at the age of 14: it was a travel essay that appeared in The New York Times.
2. Crichton co-wrote a book with his brother, Douglas, under the pen name of, get this, Michael Douglas.
3. I did not include PHYSICAL EVIDENCE in this column, mainly because it didn't look interesting to me, so I spent my time reviewing the other films.
4. I did not talk about PURSUIT because Netflix was too slow.
5. Even though THE 13TH WARRIOR (which I refused to see after the name change from the original EATERS OF THE DEAD) was done by Joe McTiernan, Crichton supposedly did some uncredited reshoots on it.
6. EATERS OF THE DEAD was done on a bet that Crichton could make the Beowulf legend a less boring story.
7. Crichton has a bit part in THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, as "the bearded surgeon."
8. LOOKER was made after the film Crichton intended on making, a version of his own novel, CONGO, fell through, due to an inability to get gorillas (they were endangered.)
9. I've read five Michael Crichton novels in the past two weeks. That doesn't have anything to do with the column, I just wanted to point out the extra geek lengths I got for you people.
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| Agent Provocateur |
Every other Sunday
Eating the flesh of lesser film geeks since '72.
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| Zombie Boy |
Zombie Boy is not a Hollywood insider, just a movie
geek with a big mouth and a strong desire to spew
opinions. His column will concentrate on the things he
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