The Congo film would have been immensely improved by dubbing over the dialogue with fart noises.
― DJP, Monday, 24 June 2013 19:48 (ten years ago) link
you can't improve on congo. it's a perfectly stupid piece of entertainment.
― lego maniac cop (latebloomer), Monday, 24 June 2013 19:58 (ten years ago) link
Jurassic Park fits in perfectly with early 90s chaos theory and fractal hype, which resulted in very many Mandelbrot screensavers and trapper keeper art.
Many, _many_ screensavers.
― Hockey Drunk (kingfish), Monday, 24 June 2013 20:02 (ten years ago) link
the incredibly stupid child robot voice that they gave Amy because they didn't want to do subtitles, I mean how did we as a society allow that to happen
― DJP, Monday, 24 June 2013 20:04 (ten years ago) link
haha yeah I used Jurassic Park to illustrate Deleuze in a lecture talking about whiz-bang 90s intellectual trends and their impact on architecture
it went over slightly better than my discussion of Lynch's Dune in the same lecture
― Doctor Casino, Monday, 24 June 2013 20:06 (ten years ago) link
i was heavy into crichton as a teen, at the time i'd rep for most of his stuff under his own name up to and including jurassic park - after that, it seemed like he was just writing books to be turned into movies. i think i'll vote for "the great train robbery" bc it's a heist, come on.
― congratulations (n/a), Monday, 24 June 2013 20:10 (ten years ago) link
I've probably posted on ILX about this before but my lady acquaintance and I watched Congo about six months ago and ended up working out a much improved version of the film over drinks afterwards. The big change was killing off the stupid ape expert guy (the only guy in the movie apparently not in on the joke) and playing up the angle of all these postmodern, cynical, stateless persons awkwardly rubbing up against old heart-of-darkness tropes in a postcolonial warzone. Like the sign-language gorilla, who finds a tenuous 'family' in the murderous super-apes, our heroes find a provisional, mobile and self-conscious kind of 'home' in each other, as Ernie Hudson and Laura Linney (rescued from a stint as adopted 'ape queen' in the second act), the only two likable characters in the movie, get together at the end. Also there would not be an hour of screwing around before they get to the damned lost city. Or a volcano. Could have been great.
― Doctor Casino, Monday, 24 June 2013 20:13 (ten years ago) link
humanity has no future
― mh, Monday, 24 June 2013 20:16 (ten years ago) link
Eddie Ventro: Wow, a talking gorilla! I can feel the money hairs on the back of my neck going "WOO-WOO-WOO".
― lego maniac cop (latebloomer), Monday, 24 June 2013 20:19 (ten years ago) link
I realized that the Sphere adaptation was too close to the source material when it managed to have a pretty ridiculous cast and the movie still had no charisma
It's been a while since I've picked up any of his books, but I think Crichton was a pretty heavy offender of telling the audience what a character was like instead of illustrating it via action and dialogue
― mh, Monday, 24 June 2013 20:20 (ten years ago) link
he was horrible with characters.
― lego maniac cop (latebloomer), Monday, 24 June 2013 20:22 (ten years ago) link
I mean, Barry Levinson was definitely not helping, but having a film with Samuel L. Jackson, Sharon Stone, Dustin Hoffman, and Liev Schreiber have no charisma to it is disturbing
― mh, Monday, 24 June 2013 20:23 (ten years ago) link
actually, wtf, Levinson should have done better
― mh, Monday, 24 June 2013 20:24 (ten years ago) link
I saw "The Andromeda Strain" again last year and thought it held up well. It might be the earliest example of a kind of ensemble-driven techno-thriller that's now pretty much a genre in its own right.
Are any of his books more successful than their movie adaptations?
― Brad C., Monday, 24 June 2013 20:32 (ten years ago) link
I remember liking Andromeda Strain the book a lot more than the movie but I was also a teenager and the movie seemed kind of slow and old-timey. I bet I'd like it a lot more now.
I've never seen Sphere but I'm pretty sure most fans rate the book wayyyy higher than the movie on that one.
It's funny, and a testament to how much I reread these things, how many of this dude's turns of phrase are still stuck in my head despite not being all that clever.
The dinosaur had torn him open. His guts had fallen out.
― Doctor Casino, Monday, 24 June 2013 20:34 (ten years ago) link
I probably have some of his "erotic" scene descriptions stuck in some corner of my mind and would pay real money to have them removed
― mh, Monday, 24 June 2013 20:37 (ten years ago) link
lol are you ignoring the discussion of how terrible the Congo adaption was or assuming that the book was bad, too? (btw the book was great)
― DJP, Monday, 24 June 2013 20:45 (ten years ago) link
i voted for Congo but i really loved Sphere too
― Mordy , Monday, 24 June 2013 20:47 (ten years ago) link
I've only read three or four of his books, but they all felt kind of like screen treatments to me
Maybe I should take a look at Congo, I think we have a copy at home somewhere
― Brad C., Monday, 24 June 2013 21:00 (ten years ago) link
I remember reading Rising Sun in high school, kind of LOL that the trickery used to obscure the true culprit's identity on the security video is something most people can do on their laptops now.
― Neanderthal, Monday, 24 June 2013 21:30 (ten years ago) link
o shit I forgot spoiler tag
His stuff was great when I was a stupid teenager. Was it ever figured out why he decided to write a climate change denying book, and name his threatening eco-terrorist villain _Nick Drake?_
I wonder if its the same thought process resulting in him thinking it was a great idea to put all the new age stuff in _Travels_
― Hockey Drunk (kingfish), Monday, 24 June 2013 21:48 (ten years ago) link
I remember reading Airframe and not getting much out of it other than "lol Japanese Pilots let their kids fly planes sometimes"
― Neanderthal, Monday, 24 June 2013 21:52 (ten years ago) link
Always got the feeling that Crichton felt he really got heavy industry and science in a way engineers and scientists didn't
― mh, Monday, 24 June 2013 21:56 (ten years ago) link
jurassic park is such a cool movie
the book is like my mate talking about graph theory or some shit iirc
― sjuttiosju_u (wins), Monday, 24 June 2013 22:04 (ten years ago) link
disclosure is amazing tho yeah. Also what phil D said, I've always wanted to read that one
― sjuttiosju_u (wins), Monday, 24 June 2013 22:06 (ten years ago) link
everyone go read The Terminal Man right now
― DJP
My sister and I both independently recommended this one to a cousin just a coupla months ago
― Sir Lord Baltimora (Myonga Vön Bontee), Monday, 24 June 2013 22:08 (ten years ago) link
i voted andromeda strian, seemed the most compelling read to me as a kid. second would probably be sphere
― 乒乓, Monday, 24 June 2013 22:11 (ten years ago) link
i read every crichton book i could get as a kid at the library. dont think i ever read rising sun or disclosure though. i even ended up reading airframe.
― 乒乓, Monday, 24 June 2013 22:12 (ten years ago) link
jonh lange more like john lame
I just started watching the TV version of The Andromeda Strain last night. Dim memories of the original, haven't read the novel.
― clemenza, Monday, 24 June 2013 22:40 (ten years ago) link
haven't read a word of him in nearly plural decades, but JP was the first. i actually heard about the movie coming out, and deliberately read the book first. andromeda strain seems like the "best" of the few that I read, though.
rising sun, the film, created one of the most uncomfortable movie watching experiences of my adolescent life
― well if it isn't old 11 cameras simon (gbx), Monday, 24 June 2013 22:49 (ten years ago) link
JP freaked me when I read it age 13 out due to how graphic some of it was. Like the part about reading that Nedry, blinded, held something warm in his hands and then found out they were his intestines.
at least in the movie when people got eaten, there was rarely gore (other than that severed arm)
― Neanderthal, Monday, 24 June 2013 23:00 (ten years ago) link
jp the book has some great gore moments
― lego maniac cop (latebloomer), Monday, 24 June 2013 23:02 (ten years ago) link
yes JP was definitely the first really gory book i ever read (i was about 11). the bit that horrified me most was the scene where one character (forget who) falls down in a swamp and wakes up to find himself covered in leeches. there's also a pretty nasty scene where a couple of adult raptors (i think) rip apart a baby one.
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Monday, 24 June 2013 23:15 (ten years ago) link
yeah that was awesome
― lego maniac cop (latebloomer), Monday, 24 June 2013 23:21 (ten years ago) link
terminal man, of what i've read.
best part about the gratuitous illustrated operating-system interludes in JP is that they recur in TLW, which has a computer with a NEW EXPERIMENTAL OS where the buttons are the faces of a constantly morphing cube. i do genuinely appreciate his (repeated!) attempts to wring suspense out of characters looking for menu options.
― the white queen and her caustic judgments (difficult listening hour), Monday, 24 June 2013 23:33 (ten years ago) link
as a kid the shifting-cube operating system was easily my favorite part of the lost world and i was disappointed when (unlike crichton's previous obtuse-gui suspense scene) it was excised from the film.
― the white queen and her caustic judgments (difficult listening hour), Monday, 24 June 2013 23:36 (ten years ago) link
now i'm thinking maybe it's unclear in the lost world whether the cube is in fact changing or whether the character is having drug/dino-related hallucinatory issues. man i can't be remembering that right because if there were a scene in the lost world where someone has to perform a function in an operating system but can't because he's hallucinating that the operating system is a morphing cube it'd have to be the most important novel of the 1990s.
― the white queen and her caustic judgments (difficult listening hour), Monday, 24 June 2013 23:40 (ten years ago) link
― 乒乓, Monday, June 24, 2013 6:12 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark
i read airframe too! and disclosure. last one i read was the time traveling into medieval era one. well-meaning relatives kept buying me his books long after i had grown out of them. i kept reading them. i agree w/ whoever said above disclosure had deleterious effect on my beliefs about sexuality.
― Mordy , Monday, 24 June 2013 23:45 (ten years ago) link
i read the time traveling one, all i remember was the revelation that knights were muscleheads who were more than capable of wearing their 100 pound armor suits
― 乒乓, Monday, 24 June 2013 23:53 (ten years ago) link
loving that trio of difficult listening hour posts there
― Doctor Casino, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 00:20 (ten years ago) link
eaters of the dead is the only one i've ever read, so that one. i think i remember ibn fadlan's actual writing more than i do crichton's interpretation but i'm not sure. i remember thinking ibn fadlan seemed like a chill dude.
― Treeship, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 00:24 (ten years ago) link
it was me
I knew someone in middle school who said her mom wouldn't let her read Disclosure or w/e. Really, it was probably a good call on her mom's part.
― mh, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 00:39 (ten years ago) link
Is there ever a Crichton book where two people have a romantic (or even sexual) relationship that takes place during the work and is portrayed as reasonably normal or functional? Pretty much all he wrote was people with dysfunctional past relationships or sexual relationships with a weird power dynamic.
I have to also say that I never noticed that Rising Sun came out in 1992 with a main character named John Connor. Which was... a year after Terminator 2.
― mh, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 00:48 (ten years ago) link
Crichton had at least three different characters in his books with the name Richard Stone. And 3 or 4 characters in Jurassic Park named John. I think he really just didn't give a fuck.
― lego maniac cop (latebloomer), Tuesday, 25 June 2013 01:57 (ten years ago) link
Jurassic Park, but I thought about Sphere and Rising Sun for a second.
― Beatrix Kiddo (Raymond Cummings), Tuesday, 25 June 2013 02:11 (ten years ago) link
Disclosure was food too, Airframe was pointless
― Beatrix Kiddo (Raymond Cummings), Tuesday, 25 June 2013 03:03 (ten years ago) link
I love how the way that they discover that the dinosaurs are mating in Jurassic Park is by increasing the number of dinosaurs they search for on the inventory screen.
― Neanderthal, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 03:07 (ten years ago) link
hahaha yeah that's great! See, that's the kind of dopily techy plot detail I can get behind. The program was designed for one set of circumstances and totally leaves them blind to this other problem. Drama!
― Doctor Casino, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 03:08 (ten years ago) link
how many of his stories involved some dude unexpectedly being on the same team with his ex-girlfriend or w/e
― mh, Monday, 11 July 2016 18:54 (seven years ago) link
I'm actually struggling to think of examples, but only because I can't really remember the characters in most of his books. But it makes perfect sense to me that he'd go with that - lets him fantasize about his own exes while writing the book, and also lets him write a relationship without having to show any of it on the page.
― 'they pelted us with rocks and garbage' (Doctor Casino), Monday, 11 July 2016 19:02 (seven years ago) link
missed out on my annual lazy summer crichton re-read. :-( but i did see his 1981 sci-fi/mystery/social-commentary film Looker a couple months back:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoT-r1slAZ4
basically a mess btw - crichton clearly more interested in the bleeding-edge tech and ogling TV's Laura Partridge than in telling a compelling story. lotta good ideas for themes, not much of a movie.
― Doctor Casino, Monday, 25 September 2017 17:59 (six years ago) link
"hey look it's got eight pages of color photos from the movie" is what i say almost every time i open a book that has, like, plates of nicholas ii in his garden in the middle of it or something, even if i'm alone xp
― the white queen and her caustic judgments (difficult listening hour), Tuesday, June 25, 2013 9:41 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
i think about this post every time i open such a book
― if you steeleye spanshine (Doctor Casino), Friday, 23 March 2018 13:14 (six years ago) link
Seeing this thread pop up made me think of Hollywood having made the dumb book Sphere into an even dumber movie and having to see Dustin Hoffman starting at a computer screen and saying "Use your words, Jerry."
― Millennial Whoop, wanna fight about it? (Phil D.), Friday, 23 March 2018 13:35 (six years ago) link
i love that scene where he cluelessly keeps calling him the wrong name even when this malevolent shapeless force is like STOP CALLING ME THAT and is blowing up the whole underwater habitat or whatever. jerry, jerry, why are you doing this, jerry?! jerry!
― lol dis stance dunk (Doctor Casino), Friday, 23 March 2018 13:47 (six years ago) link
thanks to this thread all i can think of anytime anything crichton-related comes up is 'the dinosaur had torn him open. his guts had fallen out.'
it might be my favourite two sentences in the history of human endeavour tbh
― playing in his high school band “The Velvet Pickle” (bizarro gazzara), Friday, 23 March 2018 13:52 (six years ago) link
i will be able to recite that when i'm 103 and otherwise incapable of bringing to mind any other detail from any cultural field. that and the nickelodeon spot for looney tunes to the tune of mozart or whatever it is. "LOON-ey tunes! you'll find them all on NICK! LOTs of STUFF! enOUGH to make you SICK!" etc.
― lol dis stance dunk (Doctor Casino), Friday, 23 March 2018 14:04 (six years ago) link
I would love for someone to reprint Crichton's books with every other sentence beginning "And then" like a story told by a breathless six year old.
― Millennial Whoop, wanna fight about it? (Phil D.), Friday, 23 March 2018 14:13 (six years ago) link
system was Nedry's request to leave the ordinary user interface and access the code itself. The computer asked for his name, and he replied: nedry. That name was authorized to access the code, so the computer allowed him into the system. Nedry asked to goto command level, the computer's highest level of control. The command level required extra security, and asked Nedry for his name, access number, and password.nedry040/#xy/67&mr goodbytesThose entries got Nedry into the command level. From there he wanted security. And since he was authorized, the computer allowed him to go there. Once at the security level, Nedry tried three variations:keycheck offsafety offsl off"He's trying to turn off the safety systems," Wu said. "He doesn't want anybody to see what he's about to do.""Exactly," Arnold said. "And apparently he doesn't know it's no longer possible to turn the systems off except by manually flipping switches on the main board.After three failed commands, the computer automatically began to worry about Nedry. But since he had gotten in with proper authorization, the computer would assume that Nedry was lost, trying to do something he couldn't accomplish from where he was. So the computer asked him agian where he wanted to be, and Nedry said:security. And he was allowed to remain there."Finally," Wu said, "here's the kicker." He pointed to the last of the commands Nedry had entered.whte_rbt.obj
nedry040/#xy/67&mr goodbytes
Those entries got Nedry into the command level. From there he wanted security. And since he was authorized, the computer allowed him to go there. Once at the security level, Nedry tried three variations:
keycheck offsafety offsl off
"He's trying to turn off the safety systems," Wu said. "He doesn't want anybody to see what he's about to do.""Exactly," Arnold said. "And apparently he doesn't know it's no longer possible to turn the systems off except by manually flipping switches on the main board.
After three failed commands, the computer automatically began to worry about Nedry. But since he had gotten in with proper authorization, the computer would assume that Nedry was lost, trying to do something he couldn't accomplish from where he was. So the computer asked him agian where he wanted to be, and Nedry said:security. And he was allowed to remain there.
"Finally," Wu said, "here's the kicker." He pointed to the last of the commands Nedry had entered.whte_rbt.obj
― Doctor Casino, Friday, 20 March 2020 19:21 (four years ago) link
whte_rbt.obj
a file name conforming to MS-DOS naming conventions?
― A is for (Aimless), Friday, 20 March 2020 19:26 (four years ago) link
I thought at first you were quoting The Andromeda Strain, the part where they try to override the auto-destruct function.
― clemenza, Friday, 20 March 2020 19:28 (four years ago) link
no, that's actually exciting (if contrived)
― Doctor Casino, Friday, 20 March 2020 19:35 (four years ago) link
"Automatic," Stone said quietly. "The system cuts in when the level is contaminated. We can't let it happen."Hall was holding the key in his hand. "There's no way to get to a substation?""Not on this level. Each sector is sealed from every other.""But there are substations, on the other levels?""Yes ...""How do I get up?""You can't. All the conventional routes are sealed.""What about the central core?" The central core communicated with all levels.Stone shrugged. "The safeguards ..."Hall remembered talking to Burton earlier about the central-core safeguards.
― Doctor Casino, Friday, 20 March 2020 19:43 (four years ago) link
At midnight in Africa he comes
eye to eye with an elephant
― difficult listening hour, Wednesday, 10 February 2021 05:12 (three years ago) link
the Timeline movie is just as bad, maybe worse than the book. kind of surprisingly hacky and shapeless as a screenplay - you'd think a vet like Richard Donner would have insisted on a real story. mostly plays like a sci-fi channel original movie.
― honkin' on bobo, honkin' with my feet ten feet off of beale (Doctor Casino), Thursday, 4 March 2021 13:05 (three years ago) link
just learned, via the Blank Check episode on The 13th Warrior, that the late Michael C. has a new book coming out, finished up by fellow best-seller-list standby James Patterson. per Deadline:
Hachette Book Group’s Little, Brown and Company will release Eruption on Monday, June 3, with Hachette Book Group CEO Michael Pietsch calling it “one of the most spectacular meetings of minds in literary history.”
― not the one who's tryin' to dub your anime (Doctor Casino), Sunday, 14 April 2024 11:45 (three weeks ago) link
oh, and:
The subject: A once-in-a-century volcano eruption of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano threatens a secret cache of chemical weapons that can destroy not only the island but the world.
― not the one who's tryin' to dub your anime (Doctor Casino), Sunday, 14 April 2024 11:46 (three weeks ago) link
tbf that's also where i wd have stored the chemicals
― mark s, Sunday, 14 April 2024 12:30 (three weeks ago) link