The Admirable Crichton

Michael Crichton died on Tuesday, and though he’s not a 5th Estate author, his legacy, at least for me, bears remembering.

If you’re environmentally minded then Crichton isn’t someone you’re likely to admire. He spent a great deal of his latter years concentrating on disputing claims about global warming, postulating that environmentalism was a religion and even testified to Congress on the behalf of climate change skeptics. How much of this was his genuine belief and how much at the time was used to publicise his book State of Fear we’ll never know. However, before all that occurred, he was a master at delivering action-packed, some might say B-movie concepts and packaging them in scientific believability. And I loved him for it.

I first read The Andromeda Strain in the very early nineties, probably because I’d heard of the movie (brilliantly directed by Robert Wise, it’s hard to think he’d done The Sound of Music some six years previously). The genius of The Andromeda Strain lies in its back pages. Crichton fabricated the entries for the scientific journals in the novel’s bibliography and even created his own scientific crisis decision-making process called the Odd Man Out theory. All of this is glorious nonsense, but as you’re reading the book it makes you suspend your disbelief and project the story into the real world. Crichton did it with a reading list and the sort of supporting material we’d nowadays put into a Perennial PS section.

The success of The Andromeda Strain brought Crichton to Hollywood’s attention and so MGM let him exercise his imagination with an idea about a theme park. The result was Westworld, a movie about a holiday resort populated by robots where ‘nothing can possibly go worng!’ (geddit?). Needless to say it all does, the robots go haywire and the humans are hunted by Yul Brenner, playing ‘The Gunslinger’ in a chase to the death. Yul wore his Magnificent Seven outfit, proof that the movie business had to cost-save in the early seventies as well as today.

Crichton’s greatest moment came in 1990. When Steven Spielberg learned that he was writing a book mixing dinosaurs and DNA, he got Universal to snap up the rights for $2m in a bidding war that included Tim Burton, Richard Donner and Joe Dante. Not bad for an unpublished book. Jurassic Park is, of course, about a theme park where dinosaurs are genetically recreated and ‘nothing can possibly go worng!’. Ignoring the by now familiar thematic similarities in Crichton’s work, it’s easy to see why Jurassic Park was so successful.

The movie is markedly different to the book, but contains so many stand-out sequences and trademark Spielberg touches you hardly notice. At first glance it’s easy to dismiss as a piece of enjoyable Hollywood hokum and in some ways an uneven film. It’s forty-five minutes of pseudo-science followed by a chase sequence; however I’d urge you to look again. The late Bob Peck looks like a raptor, look at his eyes and nose. The dinosaurs, comparatively early CGI nowadays, look ghostly, like they’re not supposed to be there. Look for the moment the raptor breaks into the control room and has GCTA coding projected over its leathery skin via a computer monitor. I’m not saying it’s art, but there are moments in Jurassic Park handled with more subtlety than some in Schindler’s List or Saving Private Ryan.

I didn’t get on quite so well with the later Crichtons. Rising Sun was accused of being quite openly racist about Japan. Disclosure was an attempt to mix gender and sexual politics with a techno-thriller edge. Airframe was probably specifically designed to be bought by people at airports and then be terrified as they read it in their passenger seat. Timeline was Crichton tackling time-travel and another theme park. Genetics and nano-technology were the science du jour in Prey and Next. While Crichton never quite achieved the heights of the early 90s again he has left behind a legacy of work that will stick in people’s minds for some time to come.

And if you’re thinking ‘Michael Crichton’s not for me, I really don’t think his legacy will stick in my mind’ I have two words for you: George Clooney. If George hadn’t been cast in Crichton’s TV series ER, he’d have never have shot to fame and never be best mates with Brad Pitt or topped a hundred most-wanted man polls. So you can at least thank the Admirable Crichton for that.