Ed Ranks Films Based on Michael Crichton Novels

Protip: This film is awful. Do not watch.

Michael Crichton was (RIP) a prolific writer of drama, especially with a light-touch sci-fi / "techno thriller" twist. Many of his novels were adapted into films, with mixed results. If you’re looking for Westworld to be here, you won’t find it because even though he wrote the script for it, it wasn’t originally a novel. Here the 11 films are, ranked:

11. Congo (1995) - Wow, what a shitshow this film was. Looking at the un-special effects, it’s hard to believe that this came out AFTER Jurassic park. This film is pretty much a poorly-thought out rip off of Romancing the Stone, but with really bad great apes that look like they escaped from the Jim Henson Workshop. Look, it’s really hard for me to diss any film with Tim Curry because Tim Curry is the best, but this one? Yikes.

10. Timeline (2003) - A film with Paul Walker (also RIP) and Gerard Butler before anyone knew who those two guys were. Crichton’s book itself wasn’t exactly A++ material, as it was a somewhat shoddy time travel story. But at least it could have been adapted into a stupid fun film where you looked past its plot hole and enjoyed the ride. This major motion picture, however, winds up having the look, feel, and (presumably) budget of a really, really bad SyFy Channel TV movie.

9. Sphere (1998) - A mysterious sphere is found at the bottom of the ocean. Is it alien? Is it from the future? The past? Why is the sphere sending out the 1990's version of angry Tweets threatening to kill people? Nothing makes sense about this, and so the Navy must call on a ragtag group of non-military scientist/civilians to help them out.  The novel read was enjoyable, albeit predictable in a number of ways. The film adaption was less amazing, despite having Sharon Stone, Samuel Motherfucking Jackson, and… wait… is that Huey Lewis?! Barry Levinson should probably stick to dramas about how miserable Baltimore is.

More like "The Terrible Film."

8. The Terminal Man (1974) - A young version of that guy from Just Shoot Me and The Goldbergs has seizures and gets a microchip implanted in his brain to stop them. Unfortunately, the microchip also for some reason gives him pleasure from being a sadistic asshole, so he of course goes around being a sadistic asshole. Crichton was arguably ahead-of-his-time with many of his ideas, thinking of new stories for films that Hollywood hadn’t dared to do movies about before. This film touched upon Cyberpunk and post-human themes before many other films walked on the same grounds. Unfortunately, it did it sort of shittily. This was a common problem with 1970s films though. Bell bottoms and those haircuts ruin almost everything.

7. Disclosure (1994) - Michael Douglas just seems to attract insane women, as this film is basically Fatal Attraction, Part 2.  Douglas’s new lady stalker is Demi Moore (not a bad lady stalker to have). But when he spurs her (we all know nobody would spurn Demi Moore, especially not this sex addict), instead of cooking a bunny rabbit Demi Moore makes up sexual harassment allegations about him. Since this is a Crichton story though -- some completely unnecessary sci-fi element had to be added, and thus all the players in this film are working for a computer company and, for no good reason at all, they force in a totally unnecessary “virtual reality” sequence that adds ZERO and easily could have been left out of the film. Meh.

6. The 13th Warrior (1999) - Based on Crichton’s The Eaters of the Dead, this film is about Antonio Banderas being an Arab ambassador/poet/warrior dude that’s exiled for having sex with the wrong noble’s wife (eh, it happens). In his exile, he’s sent to hang out with some Vikings, including a dude named “Buliwyf.” Apparently these Vikings are dealing with some pretty nasty demonic entities named the “Wendol.” That’s right. If you’re having a hard time recognizing what this story is based on, obviously your high school English teachers failed you. But the film and novel are really only half-based on Beowulf, since the other half is actually based on the actual writings of a real Arab dude who hung out with Vikings in the 10th Century. I shit you not. The fictionalized story adds in the part about a prophecy demanding that 13 Warriors must face the Wendol to defeat them, and one of the Warriors must not be a Viking (hence Banderas’ convenient appearance). Critics and general audiences were divided on the film, with audiences liking it a lot more than the critics. In the end it’s a somewhat enjoyable--although pretty standard--action film. The book is a lot better, and is a perfect example of a hard-to-translate to film novel. This is because the novel was written as if it were narrated as a scientific commentary on an old manuscript, which is pretty awesome. The difficulty in turning that format into a film is clear, given that the novel was released in 1976 and it took until 1999 for anyone to figure out how to “movie” it.

5. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) - So yeah, Jurassic Park was huge. Huuuuuuge. Huge. Obviously there was going to be a sequel to the movie based on the Michael Crichton novel. So Michael Crichton went ahead and wrote a sequel novel (he’d never written a sequel before) called “The Lost World,” and said, “Here you go, Hollywood! Enjoy!” Then Hollywood said, “Great, we’ll take the title and pretty much none of the rest of anything you wrote.” In fairness, the film starts off sort of similar to the novel in that Ian Malcolm has to to go back to dinosaur land and visit a “Site B” second island. And I know I’m ranking the films here instead of the books, but book-wise this made no sense because Crichton actually killed off Malcolm in the first book. But that damn Jeff Goldblum is so charismatic, they had to bring him back! Anyway, the movie replaces a somewhat interesting techno-thriller story about genetic manipulation inserted into the dinosaurs and shortening their lifespan with a “Hey, let’s box them up and bring them to the United States!” idea so that they can show dinosaurs running around in the streets of America. Ugh.

Seriously though. File your taxes.

4. Rising Sun (1993) - The folks on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes don’t rank this one so high, but fuck em’.  I say this film about Los Angeles cops Wesley Snipes and Sean Connery (and Tia Carrere!!!) investigating the murder of a white hooker at a Japanese tech firm in THE EXECUTIVE FUCK ROOM is awesome. It’s really a pretty good detective story / murder mystery and I didn’t find myself immediately figuring out what was going on or who did it. It also had a twist that for 1993 would have been pretty new -- that video tape evidence of a crime was manipulated and there was some face swapping done. Sorry if that’s a spoiler, but the film is from 1993 and you should have seen it by now. Today, we take that type of digital manipulation for granted when we replace every single actor with Nicholas Cage.

3. The Andromeda Strain (1971) - A team of scientists investigate a deadly organism from space after a satellite crashes into the Earth and kills everyone in a small town...and a director has way too much fun extensively using split screens. The alien virus also wants to kill everyone with a nuclear meltdown and stuff too. And something something about PH levels affecting it. Look, the “science” part of the science fiction here isn’t the strong point (it never is with Crichton) - but the “fiction” part is great and it’s a great story. This movie is probably the film that sticks most closely to the Crichton novel. It’s a good one. A good enough one so that parts of this film pretty much wrote every single Third Doctor story for the first two years of Doctor Who’s run in the early 1970s. I’m just saying.

2. The Great Train Robbery (1979) - The only Crichton theatrical release based on one of his own novels that he directed himself (aside from some 13th Warrior re-shoots), The Great Train Robbery is about master-thief Sean Connery and his plan to steal a shipment of gold from a British train back in the 1850s, based (loosely) on a real 1885 robbery. In the end, the film deviated a bit from the actual novel and went from a serious tone to more of a low-key comedy. And I repeat to you, Michael Crichton both wrote the novel and directed the film while penning its screenplay. That means that Michael Crichton took a story from Michael Crichton and said, “Fuck it, that’s stupid. What kind of idiot wrote this? Let’s make this story funny instead!” And making it funny worked. Why? Sean Connery is hilarious, that’s why. Yeah, we all remember that Connery’s James Bond was a suave, manly secret agent. But we often forget that he was the best Bond because his Bond was also a silly, ludicrous, pun-making, goofball fuckwit who mostly just accidentally stumbled into victory over SPECTRE and endless vagina.

Watch this every time it's on TV.

1. Jurassic Park (1993) - I’m not sure of exactly what to write here. I don’t need to explain the film or story to you. Nor do I need to justify why this is number one. It’s obviously number one. Dinosaurs are awesome. God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man loves dinosaurs. Man creates dinosaurs. Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth. Amazing special effects that are still better than the shoddy CG effects coming out 25 years later. This is a GREAT film and a great story, and you can see why people were thirsty to turn more Crichton novels into films after the success of this one, despite the fact that Crichton wasn’t exactly a new kid on the block and his novels had already been turning into films for years though. Still, it greatly expanded after 1993… much to our regret with some of those doozies like Congo.