Word: westworld
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...with his height, which is usually listed at 6 ft. 9 in. He was married five times, and divorced four. But it's his polymathic professional achievements that make him an almost implausibly imposing figure. Crichton trained as a doctor at Harvard Medical School. He directed Yul Brinner in Westworld and Sean Connery in The Great Train Robbery. He created ER, one of the most successful TV dramas of all time, and co-wrote the screenplay for the 90s tornado-chasing thriller Twister. (See the 100 best albums, movies, TV shows and novels of all time...
...emergency-room pace seems to have governed all Crichton's working life. "Whatever the word is that's the opposite of lazy," says Gottlieb, "is what Michael is." He has written 24 books and directed seven movies--including Westworld, Coma and (based on his own novel) The Great Train Robbery. He mastered computers in their nascent stage and wrote one of the first texts on information technology (Electronic Life, in 1983). He ran a software company. He designed a computer game. He wrote essays for Wired, the hot computer magazine, even before it was hot. He collects modern...
...possible, he forces gratuitous cruelty between cliches. Dogs chew rats. A prisoner escaping from Newgate slices up his hands climbing the fence. Connery later strangles this poor innocent in cold blood. The funniest gag in the movie involves a decomposing cat. Nothing new for this butcher. In Crichton's Westworld, the most satisfying fantasies are also the bloodiest--robots blown to bits; one remembers brains being sliced up, organs flung about, dead bodies on dissection tables in Coma; now, Crichton gets his kicks injecting sadism into kiddie-movies. Bleah...
Such moments aside, The Great Train Robbery is a curiously enervated affair. In his previous films, Westworld and Coma, Crichton has shown a gut instinct for creating nasty suspense. His movies looked sloppy, but fiendish humor and scare tactics helped paper over the visual lapses. Train Robbery, paradoxically, looks gorgeous but lacks bite and narrative rhythm. The thieves carry out their complex scheme in a series of repetitive, evenly paced sequences, most of which involve the hijacking of keys to a safe. When you've seen one key theft, you've seen them all. The robberies...
FUTUREWORLD is a sequel to Westworld, a movie that concerned a sinister amusement park called Delos. The place was staffed with robots that were controlled by a bank of computers tended by some frosty-eyed scientists in immaculate white smocks. Delos was dedicated to the fulfillment of adult fantasy: pay the hefty tab for a stay at the park and one could be a gunfighter in the Old West, say, or a knight preparing for a joust. The robots eventually rebelled, however, and hay wired the whole park...