11/8/08

Admit it:  you learned at least half of the science and history you know from pop culture.  This may well mean that half of the science and history you know is inaccurate, but I was taught the George Washington Cherry Tree Chopping story in elementary school, so I can't really speak to which half that might be.  Because our test-driven educational system is so woeful at grabbing our attention and TV/Movies/Books are so good at it, there are few higher callings than being an educational entertainer, and few people of his time were better at wrapping science (both real and theoretical) in a fascinating package than Michael Crichton.  He passed away earlier this week after a private battle with cancer, leaving behind some really smart books and their considerably less smart film adaptations.

Of course, you can't talk Crichton without talking about one of the single greatest high-concepts ever, Jurassic Park.  The tale of a businessman just mad enough to think he could resurrect the dinosaurs through cloning and then safely charge people to see them was filmed in 1993 as one of the first modern FX movies.  I love both versions, the cold, ruthless book with its' baby-eating dinos and Spielberg's more family-friendly version and its' immortal money shot of the T-Rex rearing back and roaring as the “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth” banner falls in the foreground.  We all know how Crichton stretched the imagination of filmmakers by challenging them with a seemingly unfilmable book to combine animatronics and CGI like never before.  Earlier this year we also lost the great Stan Winston, whose life-sized animatronic T-Rex still roars at the Times Square Toys R Us.  But the book added much more to the popular understanding of science than it ever gets credit for:  the science of cloning, the previously long-forgotten but wicked cool Velociraptor, and perhaps most importantly Chaos Theory, as eloquently explained by the doomed (and then not-doomed, thanks to Spielberg's sympathy for the charismatic Jeff Goldblum) rock star physicist Ian Malcolm.  Even before it had a name, Chaos Theory reverberates through the Crichton cannon, of course, boiling down to this simple thought that was the backbone of all his sci-fi works:  You might think you can control the implications of cutting-edge science, but something will always go wrong. 

Proving his own theory was Crichton's only attempt at a sequel, and how could he not try to return to The Lost World of Jurassic Park?  There are some interesting ideas at play in the sequel's third act, the notion that a society of clones would lack those parts of us that are passed down not by DNA but by physical contact with parents, but it's mostly an attempt to write a pretty bad movie sequel, filled with kids in round observation cages being rolled away by raptors and attacks by invisible dinosaurs.  Screenwriting, truth be told, was not Michael Crichton's strong suit, although he gave it plenty of tries (even directing most of them) apart from adaptations of his own novels.  I vaguely remember seeing and enjoying Runaway as a kid, although any eternal struggle between Tom Selleck and Gene Simmons' killer robots is probably best left in childhood.  Looker is dry as a bone, and while it's sounding notable warnings about the evils of advertising, it's funny in this day and age to think that people need to be hypnotized by “a computer generated optical pulse synchronized with caudical algorithms” in order to vote for an idiot.  But he did produce one great work as an auteur, the 1973 thriller Westworld, another of his Murphy's Law Chaos Theory tales that placed tourists in a theme park where robots act out fantasy scenarios, at least until they go crazy and start killing everybody.  It's been quoted, copied and parodied (the Simpsons' trip to Itchy and Scratchy World, “the state of the art theme park where nothing can go wrong” is a personal favorite) relentlessly in the 25 years since its' release, and is probably second only to Jurassic Park in cultural influence among his works.

Oh, and there was the little matter of Twister.  An imperfect movie that represented a perfect marriage of Crichton's fact-flushed storytelling (he co-wrote the script with then-spouse Anne-Marie Martin) and Jan De Bont's empty calorie adrenaline rush directing style.  Sure, the characters were paper-thin and the plot didn't really go anywhere, but we saw a friggin' HOUSE roll across the street and a truck drive through the living room while running from an F5 tornado!  And, for that matter, we learned what an F5 tornado was:  certainly the Fujita Tornado Intensity Scale owes the same sort of debt to the author as Chaos Theory.

Like John Grisham or Stephen King, Crichton became almost as famous as a movie brand name as an author, but few films of his works could match their written counterparts.  The Andromida Strain, of course, was able to muster a pre-Star Wars clinical intensity that suited his style well, and Congo actually surpassed one of his lesser works by substituting all-out Summer movie spectacle and sentimentality for his trademark cynicism.  The bouncy Rising Sun did put the words “Get away with this?  Oh, no, they woooooon't get away with THIS!” into the mouth of Sean Connery, and should be admired for that alone.  But the amateurish Timeline, the laughably overheated Disclosure, the entertaining but totally slipshod The 13th Warrior... Crichton may not be remembered as a wordsmith of great craft, but his books were SMART, and that's something Hollywood often just couldn't handle.  Never more egregiously than in the case of my personal favorite of his novels, the trippy Sphere, which tells the story of an artifact from outer space discovered by a team of researchers who're almost destroyed by its' utterly alien powers.  Barry Levinson assembled a first-rate cast (Dustin Hoffman, Liev Schreiber, Sharon Stone, Samuel L. Jackson), but the bottom line is that if you can't afford the squid, you can't film Sphere.  Climactic sequences with the three stars sitting next to each other imagining that they're having an action climax are among the low points of any of their filmographies.

Crichton's politics weren't always popular or in sync with my own, and I tended to skip the “issue” books like Disclosure and State of Fear, just as I was never a fan of his endlessly popular side project as creator of TV's ER.  But for most of his 66 years, he tingled our spines, made us think and taught us stuff, all at the same time.  We could use a few more of those.