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Is the book a lot less family friendly and a lot more horror/monster attack book?
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Jun 3, 2016 01:49
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| # ? May 25, 2024 01:33 |
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xcore posted:Is the book a lot less family friendly and a lot more horror/monster attack book?  . I read that book a billion times when I was little, but man Crichton was not a good writer.
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Jun 3, 2016 04:26
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david_a posted:but man Crichton was not a good writer. You can gently caress right off with this poo poo.
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Jun 3, 2016 04:30
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BonoMan posted:You can gently caress right off with this poo poo. He's not. He's also a climate change denier and is anti-environmentalism.
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Jun 3, 2016 04:33
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Snak posted:He's not. He's also a climate change denier and is anti-environmentalism. Ha! State of Fear was his last book I read and I distinctively remember thinking "what the gently caress?" That said, some of his earlier stuff was really good and fun and had some enjoyable exposition. I'm talking Airframe back to Eaters of the Dead. Timeline was fun (and, like almost all Crichton works, produced an abominable movie) but after that poo poo went south.
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Jun 3, 2016 05:06
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Snak posted:He's not. He's also a climate change denier and is anti-environmentalism. Was. He suffered from a slight case of death almost a decade ago.
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Jun 3, 2016 05:07
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Snak posted:He's not. He's also a climate change denier and is anti-environmentalism. What does that have 2 do with writing quality?
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Jun 3, 2016 05:23
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Hat Thoughts posted:What does that have 2 do with writing quality? It's doesn't have anything to do with it. I'm saying he was a bad writer, and additionally asserting that he was a bad person.
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Jun 3, 2016 07:47
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He was a pretty good writer.
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Jun 3, 2016 14:12
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He had definitely fallen off in later years. Like how Timeline doesn't really make a lot of sense because he says that it isn't time travel but then the plot only makes sense if it is.
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Jun 3, 2016 14:28
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muscles like this? posted:He had definitely fallen off in later years. Like how Timeline doesn't really make a lot of sense because he says that it isn't time travel but then the plot only makes sense if it is. That's just the literary equivalent of having a guy in a lab coat come in to explain that these vampires are totally different and then it turns out they're basically identical.
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Jun 3, 2016 15:30
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The problem was it was completely inconsistent. They point out early in the book that they don't actually travel through time, they go to other parallel universes where it is that year. The whole driving plot of the book is an archeology class having to save their professor and they find out that he's in the past because they find a note from in buried at their dig site. Except, again, this isn't time travel so they can't actually save that professor since all the stuff with that parallel universe version is over and done with because it happened hundreds of years ago. The rest of the book continues with this conflating the stated premise and time travel culminating in a stupid ending where one of the characters stays behind and the rest afterwards go find "his" tomb.
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Jun 3, 2016 16:08
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muscles like this? posted:The problem was it was completely inconsistent. They point out early in the book that they don't actually travel through time, they go to other parallel universes where it is that year. The whole driving plot of the book is an archeology class having to save their professor and they find out that he's in the past because they find a note from in buried at their dig site. Except, again, this isn't time travel so they can't actually save that professor since all the stuff with that parallel universe version is over and done with because it happened hundreds of years ago. The rest of the book continues with this conflating the stated premise and time travel culminating in a stupid ending where one of the characters stays behind and the rest afterwards go find "his" tomb. Crichton is dead and there's no point beating up his corpse for his love of nonsensical technobabble.
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Jun 3, 2016 16:11
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The main thing I remember about Timeline is that it's beat for beat the same story as The Lost World. It was probably written from the same outline.
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Jun 3, 2016 16:49
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muscles like this? posted:The problem was it was completely inconsistent. They point out early in the book that they don't actually travel through time, they go to other parallel universes where it is that year. The whole driving plot of the book is an archeology class having to save their professor and they find out that he's in the past because they find a note from in buried at their dig site. Except, again, this isn't time travel so they can't actually save that professor since all the stuff with that parallel universe version is over and done with because it happened hundreds of years ago. The rest of the book continues with this conflating the stated premise and time travel culminating in a stupid ending where one of the characters stays behind and the rest afterwards go find "his" tomb. All the evidence they find in the modern day from the past (from the professor and that dude who loved to recreate historical fighting who stayed behind) are people from another parallel universe (that is centuries in advance of ours) having left that stuff behind when they did the events of the story centuries ago. The people from that parallel universe did all that stuff because there was yet another parallel universe centuries in advance of them that did all that stuff even more centuries ago, and on and on. So nobody ever got to read notes or records about their specific version of the professor or that other dude, but they're still an accurate indication of what happened to them by the logic of how the parallel universes work. Instead of a stable time loop, it's a stable time spiral stretching out across parallel universes.
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Jun 3, 2016 16:59
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Instead of belaboring later Crichton, let's talk about how goofy and dumb both Congo and Sphere's onscreen variations ended up being. One author gave us two movies, one with Dustin Hoffman and the other with Bruce Campbell. That's gotta be a sort of record on how far across the sliding actor scale you can go.
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Jun 3, 2016 17:03
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Sir Kodiak posted:All the evidence they find in the modern day from the past (from the professor and that dude who loved to recreate historical fighting who stayed behind) are people from another parallel universe (that is centuries in advance of ours) having left that stuff behind when they did the events of the story centuries ago. The people from that parallel universe did all that stuff because there was yet another parallel universe centuries in advance of them that did all that stuff even more centuries ago, and on and on. So nobody ever got to read notes or records about their specific version of the professor or that other dude, but they're still an accurate indication of what happened to them by the logic of how the parallel universes work. 
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Jun 3, 2016 17:04
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Everblight posted:Instead of belaboring later Crichton, let's talk about how goofy and dumb both Congo and Sphere's onscreen variations ended up being. One author gave us two movies, one with Dustin Hoffman and the other with Bruce Campbell. That's gotta be a sort of record on how far across the sliding actor scale you can go. I'm pretty sure there are worse actors in Crichton films than Bruce Campbell.
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Jun 3, 2016 23:23
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Even when Crichton was "good" his habit of awkwardly plopping a middling high school essay about electron microscopes or DNA or whatever in the middle of a chapter was really awkward. It's just funnier in retrospect knowing how bad at science he actually was.
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Jun 3, 2016 23:55
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Those random lectures in the middle of chapters was my favorite part as a kid. A rad book about dinosaurs eating people AND I get to learn about evolution and natural selection? Helll yeah.
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Jun 4, 2016 02:34
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I guess Crichton was channeling Herman Melville. Or Victor Hugo.
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Jun 4, 2016 03:04
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feedmyleg posted:Those random lectures in the middle of chapters was my favorite part as a kid. A rad book about dinosaurs eating people AND I get to learn about evolution and natural selection? Helll yeah. You should probably read Neal Stephenson then. He's not for everyone, but he does an insane amount of research for his books, and you can tell because when he learns something cool while he's researching a book, he's gonna work in a few pages about it somehow.
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Jun 4, 2016 03:22
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I know a lot of movies used to start with little musical pieces (I don't know what you'd call them), but has there been an example of another feature that begins with a fairly lengthy piece over a black screen like 2001? I'm surprised that it hasn't been ripped off a million times by now, or maybe my memory is just bad.
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Jun 4, 2016 03:49
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:I know a lot of movies used to start with little musical pieces (I don't know what you'd call them), but has there been an example of another feature that begins with a fairly lengthy piece over a black screen like 2001? I'm surprised that it hasn't been ripped off a million times by now, or maybe my memory is just bad. Like an overture? The theatrical cut of Kingdom of Heaven has one, off the top of my head. It's less that it hasn't "been ripped off" and more that modern audiences are impatient and don't care for them. They were extremely common in theatre and early film.
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Jun 4, 2016 03:57
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An overture, that's the word, thank you. I suppose I meant post '68.
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Jun 4, 2016 04:00
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:I know a lot of movies used to start with little musical pieces (I don't know what you'd call them), but has there been an example of another feature that begins with a fairly lengthy piece over a black screen like 2001? I'm surprised that it hasn't been ripped off a million times by now, or maybe my memory is just bad. There were actually a fair amount of high-profile movies that apparently had them in theaters but cut them for home video, so it's like they never happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_with_overtures I'm pretty sure they're wrong about the star wars prequels, though. I saw the first two in theaters and have no memory of an overture.
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Jun 4, 2016 04:00
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I don't recall any before any Star Wars movie, but I can't believe I forgot about Hateful Eight.
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Jun 4, 2016 04:03
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:An overture, that's the word, thank you. I suppose I meant post '68. Yeah I get what you were saying, but I think it's not something that people would "rip off" despite the critical acclaim of 2001, because films with overtures were a dying breed then. I think that Tree of Life might have had one.
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Jun 4, 2016 04:04
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Snak posted:You should probably read Neal Stephenson then. He's not for everyone, but he does an insane amount of research for his books, and you can tell because when he learns something cool while he's researching a book, he's gonna work in a few pages about it somehow. Was Crichton's science universally bad? I always loved how large his bibliographies were as a kid and felt like he did more research than most for his books. I mean after State of Fear I definitely felt a tinge of "uh oh" but has there been any good essays or anything that examine the science across his body of works?
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Jun 4, 2016 04:14
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BonoMan posted:Was Crichton's science universally bad? I always loved how large his bibliographies were as a kid and felt like he did more research than most for his books. I don't know, I didn't read any Crichton besides Jurassic Park/The Lost World and The Andromeda Strain. I didn't get the impression the science was horribly bad. I'm pretty sure his climate change denial was about his politics being disgusting.
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Jun 4, 2016 04:16
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:I don't recall any before any Star Wars movie, but I can't believe I forgot about Hateful Eight. I'll call bullshit on Jurassic Park as well. One may have been composed, but I saw that like three times in theaters as a kid and would have found it boring enough to remember.
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Jun 4, 2016 04:17
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Overtures were a thing for big epic "A" level movies that would open in limited roadshows, and it kinda served the purpose it does in a musical play or opera, basically letting everyone know the show's about to start but giving you time to find your seat. (Hence Hateful Eight doing it in its roadshow release.) Before that the last example I can think of is Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979.
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Jun 4, 2016 04:18
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Jack Gladney posted:I'll call bullshit on Jurassic Park as well. One may have been composed, but I saw that like three times in theaters as a kid and would have found it boring enough to remember. It's strange that the "overtures" listed on the star wars films are just other pieces of music from the films. That basically never happens. And overture is usually called "Overture" or has a unique title.
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Jun 4, 2016 04:21
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BonoMan posted:Was Crichton's science universally bad? I always loved how large his bibliographies were as a kid and felt like he did more research than most for his books. I mean I haven't done any critical analyses or whatever but most of the time it's very pop-sci stuff with a bit more jargon. Like the book with killer nanobot swarms that can replicate people's faces, or the physicsish babble in Timeline, or his plain misunderstanding of chaos theory for Jurassic Park.
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Jun 4, 2016 04:22
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The overture on Star Trek: The Motion Picture was added for the director's cut on DVD. It was never shown in theaters, perhaps outside of some early 70mm prints. Often 70mm presentations had stuff added, but a lot of this is from laserdisc editions having overtures, intermissions, and exit music added that never existed on actual prints. It's also worth noting that almost all overtures were simply black leader with sound. Only a few films actually had a visual like West Side Story or My Fair Lady. A lot of DVD and Blu-Rays have faux visuals added, but a lot have the genuine intermission card like Doctor Zhivago, Ben-Hur, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. 2001 has always had just blank visuals for the overture at least since the early 90s. The pre-widescreen tapes were edited to remove the overture, intermission, and exit music (as well as featuring a poorly done video-generated main title).
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Jun 4, 2016 05:57
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If you ever get a chance to see 2001 in a theater, it's worth it just to hear the overture cranking out of the biggest speakers possible
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Jun 4, 2016 08:09
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Alternatively just drop some acid and watch 2001 in a dark room with some good headphones on and crank the volume up to where it drives out rational thought. Watch only the beginning and end.
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Jun 4, 2016 10:23
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Egbert Souse posted:The overture on Star Trek: The Motion Picture was added for the director's cut on DVD. It was never shown in theaters, perhaps outside of some early 70mm prints. I'm not sure about this since it's on the BR which is specifically the theatrical cut without any of the Director's Cut re-edits.
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Jun 5, 2016 21:22
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Maxwell Lord posted:I'm not sure about this since it's on the BR which is specifically the theatrical cut without any of the Director's Cut re-edits. As released in 1979, The Motion Picture had the overture. It played over an empty screen. In the Director's Edition, they added the starfield.
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Jun 5, 2016 22:25
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i still remember when they invented stars.
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Jun 5, 2016 23:16
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