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Ape Agitator posted:Edit: Congo is alongside Sphere for being better than their books and also not actually good but fun to watch. Sphere mostly leaves me baffled how they could make a movie that crazy bad while Congo is just a plain fun adventure movie that has several quotable characters. Why would you prefer the movie Sphere? Sphere is easily the best brook Crichton ever wrote (of the ones I've read, which is most of them) and while that might not mean much to some people, I'll take Crichton's best book over a utterly terrible movie. The whole premise and environment for the novel is great and utilized better than in the movie, IMO. I loved all the technical detail about underwater habitats and the kind of amazing technology we had even back then. Also Crichton's books just seem to actually have more action and tension in them than the movie adaptations for whatever reason. (why they cut the T-Rex chasing Grant and kids on the raft is beyond me)
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Jul 17, 2017 02:35
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NikkolasKing posted:Why would you prefer the movie Sphere? Sphere is easily the best brook Crichton ever wrote (of the ones I've read, which is most of them) and while that might not mean much to some people, I'll take Crichton's best book over a utterly terrible movie. Presumably money and time.
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Jul 17, 2017 02:55
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I hated the Sphere film but filming an underwater movie is always a huge pain the rear end so I can understand why a lot of it turned out the way it did.
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Jul 17, 2017 03:14
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Neo Rasa posted:I hated the Sphere film but filming an underwater movie is always a huge pain the rear end so I can understand why a lot of it turned out the way it did. The Abyss and DeepStar Six werent horribly boring though. Sphere just misses making the premise engaging. Its like a more clumsy less interesting Primer.
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Jul 17, 2017 03:24
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Martin Landau passed away at 89. This bums me more than Romero  https://youtu.be/ZZ10wLxSYUs
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Jul 17, 2017 06:41
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NikkolasKing posted:Why would you prefer the movie Sphere? Sphere is easily the best brook Crichton ever wrote (of the ones I've read, which is most of them) and while that might not mean much to some people, I'll take Crichton's best book over a utterly terrible movie. Sphere the book never clicked for me like Andromeda or Jurassic Park's books did. I can usually entertain myself with his technical obsessive passages but outside of the early sections I was left cold. The movie version ties my brain in knots trying to see how talented people arrived at this result.
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Jul 17, 2017 07:51
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Ape Agitator posted:Sphere the book never clicked for me like Andromeda or Jurassic Park's books did. I can usually entertain myself with his technical obsessive passages but outside of the early sections I was left cold. The movie version ties my brain in knots trying to see how talented people arrived at this result. Sphere sucks because Critchton quickly abandons an interesting premise (American spaceship from the future at the bottom of the Pacific) for a kind of lame one (psychic powers and not-aliens).
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Jul 17, 2017 07:54
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I had never read the novel, and I ended up seeing Sphere in the theater when it was released, and the "Crashed and time-displaced American spaceship via wormhole shenanigans" reveal was really cool. A shame the movie couldn't take that ball (sphere?) and run with it. The "BASURA" sign had me like "WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?" A cool concept. Poor execution. Solid cast, too! Alas.
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Jul 17, 2017 08:01
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Sphere was a weak sequel to Event Horizon.
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Jul 17, 2017 09:02
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wyoming posted:Sphere was a weak sequel to Event Horizon. This is correct. Goddamnit, was Event Horizon ever rad.
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Jul 17, 2017 09:33
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I'm glad people have come around on Event Horizon as a cult classic because it fuckin' rules. Wish they hadn't lost all that extra footage though.
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Jul 17, 2017 13:33
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Was it the first Jurassic Park that was going to have a scene with pterodactyls but the idea was scrapped due to budget?
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Jul 17, 2017 14:13
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FlamingLiberal posted:Was it the first Jurassic Park that was going to have a scene with pterodactyls but the idea was scrapped due to budget? Yep. The scene was used in JP3, along with the river attack.
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Jul 17, 2017 14:37
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wyoming posted:Sphere was a weak sequel to Event Horizon. Sphere was a half-assed retread of Forbidden Planet . It was still pretty decent, though. Crichton's worst is Timeline. It includes dialogue such as "O I am wrothed! I am sore wrothed!"
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Jul 17, 2017 15:19
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Pierson posted:I'm glad people have come around on Event Horizon as a cult classic because it fuckin' rules. Event Horizon is the one of the few movies where the crew correctly responds to a freaky/spooky encounter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RthgXpWDv6A
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Jul 17, 2017 15:19
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Ape Agitator posted:Sphere the book never clicked for me like Andromeda or Jurassic Park's books did. I can usually entertain myself with his technical obsessive passages but outside of the early sections I was left cold. The movie version ties my brain in knots trying to see how talented people arrived at this result. Fair enough. I expected the ending to be what turned you off. It seems to be a major complaint for many people, even though Beth tricking everyone is pretty cool in my opinion. Phanatic posted:Sphere was a half-assed retread of Forbidden Planet . It was still pretty decent, though. Are we talking about worst novel or worst adaptation? I think I heard there was a adaptation of Timeline but I never saw it and only read (most of) the book. I only really liked it for all the history. Crichton's style seems to be "read a lot about Subject then make a story around it." Here, he read a lot about English and French history. Also Crichton's worst book for me was the one with the nanomachines, or maybe Rising Sun. His most underrated books are A Case Of Need (a pro-abortion story which I think was fairly progressive for when he first wrote it) and Airframe, my first non-scifi Crichton book. NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Jul 17, 2017 |
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Jul 17, 2017 15:20
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NikkolasKing posted:Are we talking about worst novel or worst adaptation? Oh, novel. I don't think an adaptation of Timeline could manage to be worse than the book. At least the characters probably wouldn't talk like NPCs in a 12-year-olds D&D campaign.
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Jul 17, 2017 15:27
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The whole appeal of Timeline was that the past was so much more hardcore and violent than your sanitized fantasies, and then the film adaptation takes that and makes a totally sanitized PG-13 version of it starring Paul Walker.
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Jul 17, 2017 15:56
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Crichton also wrote some rad but minor books under a pseudonym when he was in school. I've only ever read Zero Cool but it was pulpy fun. You could definitely tell it was a Crichton book by how he clearly just wrote it around some article he read about computers.
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Jul 17, 2017 16:14
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NikkolasKing posted:Also Crichton's worst book for me was the one with the nanomachines, or maybe Rising Sun.
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Jul 17, 2017 16:17
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NikkolasKing posted:Also Crichton's worst book for me was the one with the nanomachines, or maybe Rising Sun. I bought a copy of Prey from a bookshop bargain-bin for £1. I still felt ripped off.
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Jul 17, 2017 16:42
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FlamingLiberal posted:Whatever you do, don't read State of Fear (his climate change thriller). It's embarrassing. It was kind of funny how he skirted libel laws by making an obviously analogous character out of some environmentalist and claiming he had a tiny penis and was a pedophile. So in order to sue for that he would have had to say that he resembled the character in those aspects and, welp.
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Jul 17, 2017 16:50
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FlamingLiberal posted:Whatever you do, don't read State of Fear (his climate change thriller). It's embarrassing. Yeah he seemed to lose his edge around 2000. Although I heard Pirate Latitudes, the novel released after his death, was decent. I heard SOF is about climate change denial but I dunno. Whatever his personal issues, Crichton seemed like an interesting character. My assessment of him, based on Crichton's actual speeches and his books, is that he was a weird sort of environmentalist that believes the environment can take care of itself. I'm not sure if there's a name for that but he really hated the idea that humans can save the Earth. He had a whole monologue about it in Jurassic Park, which I liked because I know gently caress-all about the ancient history of Earth. (I was really bad at science in school) “You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away — all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive gas, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us." “Let's be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves.” Plus I have been learning more about one Orson Scott Card and by comparison to him, Crichton seems a saint. Card told a girl I was talking to that, instead of pursuing a writing career like him, she should find a good man. Ugh.
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Jul 17, 2017 17:27
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Crichton's main MO for writing was "What's a new and emerging field of science or technology that's causing anxiety in our society, and write a book that yup that's terrifying." Card, on the other hand, is a devout Mormon who wrote a book series about evil technocratic liberals trying to take over the country.
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Jul 17, 2017 17:35
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Ah the george carlin,"the planet is fine,the people are hosed" school of thought.
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Jul 17, 2017 17:35
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NikkolasKing posted:
Carlin said it better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovbF0D2wySI&t=150s
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Jul 17, 2017 17:38
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*drives mass of biology on Earth into extinction* *planet is a lifeless rock* SEE LIBS PLANET CAN TAKE CARE OF ITSELF
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Jul 17, 2017 17:41
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New Blade Runner 2049 trailer. The trailer seems give away several plot points so stay away if you're avoiding spoilers.
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Jul 17, 2017 17:51
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Rising Sun is the worst Crichton movie. Nothing about it is fun or compelling. The 13th Warrior despite its flaws is the 2nd best Crichton movie.
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Jul 17, 2017 18:03
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This was also Stephen Gould's position and frankly I agree.Stephen J Gould posted:This assertion of ultimate impotence could be countered if we, despite our late arrival, now held power over the planet's future (argument number one above). But we don't, despite popular misperception of our might. We are virtually powerless over the earth at our planet's own geological time scale. All the megatonnage in our nuclear arsenals yield but one ten-thousandth the power of the asteroid that might have triggered the Cretaceous mass extinction. Yet the earth survived that larger shock and, in wiping out dinosaurs, paved the road for the evolution of large mammals, including humans. We fear global warming, yet even the most radical model yields an earth far cooler than many happy and prosperous times of a prehuman past. We can surely destroy ourselves, and take many other species with us, but we can barely dent bacterial diversity and will surely not remove many million species of insects and mites. On geological scales, our planet will take good care of itself and let time clear the impact of any human malfeasance. The earth need never seek a henchman to wreak Henry's vengeance upon Thomas a Becket: "Who will free me from this turbulent priest?" Our planet simply waits. As Gould goes on to say this is mostly irrelevant to the real issue of climate change, nukes, etc - namely that they pose a looming and immense threat to human life and happiness, and to some greater or lesser chunk of current biodiversity. I think that hyperbole about the end of life (or even of humans, who have managed stable populations in harsher environments than even a 10c warmed world) just play into the hands of greedy assholes who want to claim this is all doomsaying nonsense. The threat is not the extinction of humanity, it's the individual deaths and suffering of perhaps billions and certainly millions of (mostly brown, impoverished) people in the subjugated provinces of the empire.
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Jul 17, 2017 18:05
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Casimir Radon posted:Rising Sun is the worst Crichton movie. Nothing about it is fun or compelling. I still think The Great Train Robbery is better than The 13th Warrior
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Jul 17, 2017 18:32
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Casimir Radon posted:Rising Sun is the worst Crichton movie. Nothing about it is fun or compelling. That's pretty harsh on Jurassic Park, I think it deserves a comfortable if not especially close second to The Andromeda Strain
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Jul 17, 2017 18:34
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syscall girl posted:I still think The Great Train Robbery is better than The 13th Warrior Until I checked IMDB I thought you were making a weird joke about the 1903 film, and now that I've checked IMDB, the dude wrote Westworld, which if you think about it has basically the same plot as Jurassic Park. Michael Crichton was a lazy rear end writer.
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Jul 17, 2017 18:43
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Pretty decent director though since Westworld owns.
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Jul 17, 2017 18:45
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DeimosRising posted:That's pretty harsh on Jurassic Park, I think it deserves a comfortable if not especially close second to The Andromeda Strain The remake of Andromeda Strain might be the worst Crichton movie. What an awful piece of poo poo.
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Jul 17, 2017 18:53
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Andromeda Strain was awesome, that movie really messed me up as a kid.
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Jul 17, 2017 18:56
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Phanatic posted:The remake of Andromeda Strain might be the worst Crichton movie. What an awful piece of poo poo. Started with promise and then set everything on fire. One of the biggest gulfs in how something starts and how bad it is by the end. I would give the edge to JP over Andromeda just because the movie made, I think, great choices in focusing the movie and making Hammond likeable. Because it had enough villains already.
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Jul 17, 2017 18:59
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State of Fear is basically a thriller about some ecoterrorist group interspersed with a science lecture about how climate change is nonsense, complete with graphs and statistics Yes i did read it.
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Jul 17, 2017 19:30
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I think it's completely dumb to say to cap how bad things are going to be considering what's been happening climate wise exceeds the most pessimistic forecasts climate scientists had even a decade ago. We're going into uncharted waters and arbitrarily scoffing at the amount of damage we will be incurring is a foolish proposition.
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Jul 17, 2017 19:43
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Shageletic posted:I think it's completely dumb to say to cap how bad things are going to be considering what's been happening climate wise exceeds the most pessimistic forecasts climate scientists had even a decade ago. We're going into uncharted waters and arbitrarily scoffing at the amount of damage we will be incurring is a foolish proposition. Also, the whole "the Earth will be fine, humans are hosed" thing is based on a willful misunderstanding of informal language. Which is fine for stand-up comedy, but not so much for an actual argument.
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Jul 17, 2017 19:50
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