Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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SUCH A SENSATIONAL best-seller must have some redeeming qualities; but if they exist, one must look further than the plot to find them. Raise the Titanic! disproves the common notion that truth is stranger than fiction, for the outlandish twists and turns of Cussler's novel would defy detection by even the most dogged Woodstein. Loosely translated, the book is the inspirational saga of how a top-secret group of brilliant government physicists devises a scheme to save the world from nuclear destruction, realizes the plan requires large quantities of a mysterious element unknown to even the best high...
Still, for all its absurd complexities, Cussler's plot line is not what finally kills his book. Credible plots are not necessarily the stuff of which good mysteries are made; anyone who believes otherwise should take a long look at the marvelously improbable tales of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. What distinguishes Cussler's attempt from a genuinely good mystery a la Holmes or Poirot is the author's singular inability to create any distinctively human characters. Cussler's figures are worse than wooden: the neurotic physicist, dashing American agent, villainous Russian spy and confused but loving heroine...
...could be that some kind of "plot" in this case was not altogether a flight of Amin's paranoid imagination. Some observers in Kampala believe that he ferreted out a scheme involving dissident soldiers and pilots and ordered a military campaign against a border village in which hundreds of tribesmen may have been killed; Amin has made no mention of this. In any event, the world has only his word that the ministers and the archbishop were involved in some plot. He merely described the "accident" as "a punishment of God, because God does not want to make others...
Strangest of all is that when Raines complains to Rental Agent Ava Gardner, she is told that those other apartments have been unoccupied for years. Is she going mad? Is she the victim of a bizarre plot by her lover (Chris Sarandon), a lawyer with shady connections? Poor girl, if only she had seen such essays in pop demonology as The Exorcist and The Omen, she would realize that she is simply, almost literally, going to hell...
...film is fastidious about one thing though. The plot turns on a quotation from John Milton's Paradise Lost, and the script carefully identifies Milton as "the English religious writer...