Topic: Michael Crichton (Spoilers warned.)
ITT we discuss Michael Crichton, as brought up by Gregory in the Jurassic Park thread. Reproduced here:
Anyone else reading the new Crichton book "Micro"? It's essentially "Honey I Shrunk The Scientists", but it's an interesting concept that I'd love to see get filmed. It's kind of impressive that Crichton's ideas got harder and harder to film as time went on, as Micro coud only be done on a budget of about $150 million to be done right, and only with today's technology, but Jurassic Park could be filmed in '92 for about $60.
Spoilers for "Micro" until the red text below. And they're not really super spoilers, it's just me saying what Crichton always seems to do in his books, and it does apply in the case of Micro.
Michael Crichton was getting more and more predictable, for the most part, with every book. Here's the plot for the new Michael Crichton book - not "Micro," or "Prey," or the one about the humanzee, or Reamde, or whatever...just, generally, you could assume this was the plot of the new book: sympathetic, weary man of the sciences is called into some sort of meeting with some sort of specialized group relating to emerging technology where you get a brief, too-short explanation of the technology before some sort of emergency forces the protagonist/s to succumb to the technology and thusly involve themselves inextricably in the new world to deal with interesting fictitious problems related to the world afforded by said technology, until all but two of the characters are killed or in some way absorbed into the technology, at which point the protagonist/s extricate themselves, showdown with the leader of the group who facilitated the technology, who gets a dose of their own medicine and probably dies.
End of spoilers for Micro.
A. Bam, suck my balls, Crichton formula. B. Holy shit, Back to the Future is almost a Crichton story. The only difference is we'd keep getting flashbacks to Doc Brown in the '80s, seeing him become more and more implausibly evil, until at the end he accidentally gets killed in a time machine related accident after Marty gets back.
Micro was okay. I was interested, because it's fun to imagine fending off attacks by giant wasps and stuff. On the other hand, it felt more contrived than Crichton has felt since the end of "Prey," and was generally kind of texty. (As opposed to subtexty.) I think another seventy pages in the right places would have helped that part of it.
Unrelated to this book, I'm generally a fan of Crichton, for the same reason I'm a fan of Nolan. Smarter than average pulp fun. Don't look too too hard, and you'll have fun with the thing. My favorite of his is probably "The Lost World," followed by the mileage-my-vary "Sphere."
You? Go.
I have a tendency to fix your typos.
The movie I did see again not that long ago, and like most older movies it's a little slow by modern standards, but it's almost entirely about scientists doing science, actual credible science at that. For that reason alone it still rates high on my list.