November 26, 2003
By D.K. Holm
Joust the Fax
TIMELINE
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
The best parts of Michael Crichton's novels are minor elements hiding in plain sight. Unfortunately, the movies made from his books ignore the subtle, small side issues he essays and go for the big, blockbustery main element.
With his fingers in fiction, journalism, hit TV shows, audio books, his own Web site, and even games, Michael Crichton is a true king of all media. Yet, shockingly, artistic success in the movies has eluded him. I've liked some of the films he has directed himself, especially LOOKER, but the last six or more films based on his books, from RISING SUN on, are at best unmemorable. JURASSIC PARK may be fair Crichton, but it is lesser Spielberg, a film with some virtues, but essentially a premise for a series of set pieces. And it's telling that for THE LOST WORLD, the filmmakers more or less threw out the book. Meanwhile, plans to film AIRFRAME, once posited with Sigourney Weaver under the direction of John McTiernan, have, as of this writing, long since been canceled. The third JURASSIC PARK film had little to do with anything Crichton created.
TIMELINE posed the same pitfalls found in AIRFRAME and the others. As with his air disaster novel, TIMELINE on the surface pretends to be one thing, but soon turns out to be something entirely different (I haven't had a chance to read PREY).
It's educational to look back at the previous seemingly unfilmable novel. At first exposure, AIRFRAME is an unnerving exploration of the technology that keeps airplanes in the air. But gradually the reader comes to realize that Crichton had really mounted that most embarrassing of hobbyhorses: critic-hatred. He is in good company. Superstars from Frank Sinatra to Jerry Lewis to George Clooney have each mounted that same shabby soapbox, decrying the inaccuracy, mendacity, unprofessionalism, and sheer sloppiness of journalists. That's not a particularly cinematic premise, and one sure to raise the hackles of hacks everywhere.
Worse though, as far as a screen adapter is concerned, the air disaster investigator at the heart of the book, once to be played by Weaver, all too often finds herself in passive situations, at the mercy of weather and wind, of planes and pilots. If books require active protagonists, conventional action movies demand them even more.
TIMELINE throws out similar impediments to smooth cinematic translation. Officially the book is about time travel (or space travel, as characters in the novel insist that it really is). But in reality, TIMELINE is a brief against Bill Gates, decrying the exploitation of modern technology for amusement.
If the reader feels as if he has been there before, he has. The character Robert Doniger is a stand-in for what Crichton seems to fear is the reckless Bill Gating of the global village. He also mirrors John Hammond in JURASSIC PARK, which was itself a reconsideration of ideas that Crichton had already put forward in WESTWORLD. The novel's loathing for Doniger is intense; Doniger (played by a miscast David Thewlis in the film) has few if any redeeming characteristics, and most of his traits are based on what we have learned about Gates from two biographies and numerous profiles, such as his impatience with others and his ridiculing of any outside idea as "the stupidest thing" he's ever heard of. It is a measure of the book's hatred of Doniger that he is accorded one of the worst revenges suffered by any character in the whole Crichton canon— he is teleported back to the middle ages where he is coughed on by a sufferer of the Black Plague (the movie lapses in favor of a more conventional, brutal, and obvious demise.
After some prefatory material meant to convince us that time travel is plausible, probably the most interesting part of the book, TIMELINE begins with a grumpy tourist and his wife driving through the Arizona desert looking for Indian crafts. Amid the swirling dust, they think they hit an Indian who seems to have appeared out of nowhere. Rushed to the hospital, the man's body provides exotic clues right out of a Sherlock Holmes story (Crichton admits that Doyle, whom he still reads for pleasure, is the main inspiration for his work).
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As far as a novel goes, this is a top-notch Crichton opener, and in setting and tone it's reminiscent of THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN (hospitals, desert). Unfortunately, Crichton introduces several characters, including an intriguing Indian policeman, who fail to figure in the rest of the book. They don't pop up in the film either, and as we shall see, the movie might have benefited from a major rethink of the sacred text, which the movie adheres to with a fealty worthy of a medieval monk.
In the book we meet the real main characters. First, there is Doniger and his continually brutalized assistants, and then Professor Edward Johnston, a Harvard historian, and his team. They are in Dordogne, France engaged in an archeological dig that is resurrecting a series of castles, monasteries, and attendant towns, all financed, for a reason not actually explained, by Doniger. Johnston's assistants are the real heroes of the book. One is a past-obsessed historian, Marek; another is a cliff-face climbing token female, Kate Ericson; and finally there is Johnston's protegé, Chris Hughes, the Everyman of the book, whose reactions to new and old things more or less represent what the reader would think if he were experiencing the past first hand. The only problem with this guy is that he's not funny, and he needs to be to offset the dour tone of most of the book—the whole project needs a really big dose of humor to fly. In the film he is called Chris Johnston and is the son of the old prof, and is played by Paul Walker, who immediately recedes from the scene, after establishing that he has a hopeless crush on the studious Ericson, played by Jessica-Harper-clone Frances O'Connor. Relegated to the weird sidelines, they more or less spend the rest of the movie running around fruitlessly, with the solicitous Walker asking her every five minutes if she is OK.
In the book, we learn that Doniger is building some kind of time- space travel device. We also learn that the dig has some connection to the project. The guy at the start of the book, who dies and is unimportant except as an intro to the whole plot, was a renegade figure in Doniger's company, and he seems to have messed up some stuff. Anyway, Doniger wants Johnston to go back to the past and fix things. So Johnston disappears for a while. In fact, for the bulk of the book. The same is true in the film. If he were not played by Billy Connolly the viewer would forget the impetus on which the whole middle of the film is based.
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One of the best parts of the novel is when the characters unearth a document that is 600 years old, but written in Johnston's handwriting, pleading for help. The only problem with this sequence, not solved by the screenwriters, is that the reader, and of course the viewer, already guesses what is going on, leading to one of those prevalent plotting problems you see in TV cop shows, in which the viewer knows more than the characters. The viewer then sits there twiddling thumbs waiting for the fictional people to catch up, thinking out loud and mulling over stuff that we already know.
At this point, because the team has a spy in its midst (again, a thread that is left hanging by Crichton), Doniger comes after them, both to shut them up, but also to ask them to go back into the past and rescue Johnston, who is trapped in medieval France, caught between two warring factions in the very town that his team, 600 years later, is excavating.
And so we come to the only part of the novel that Crichton's fans are interested in— the explanation of time travel. This scene unfolds much as they always do in Crichton. One guy does the explaining. His auditors ask questions. The narrative flow isn't particularly good, and in a movie, with all the visual distractions, the audience isn't allowed to grasp key points. But then, it is an explanatory sequence that is at root simply irrelevant. So they have to go back in time. Who cares how? Let's just get on with it.
On the other hand, there will always be those viewers (like me) who can't get their mind around the whole concept of time travel fantasies, even in comedies such as the Austin Powers films. Like prison films, the time travel movie is one of my least favorite genres. Still, in the book there are some enjoyable nuggets. For example, Crichton discounts the belief that if you go back into the "past" you will change the present. For one thing, his puppet explains, you are not important enough. Second, it is all happening in a parallel universe with no contiguous relationship with this one.
Crichton's books are page-turners. We sail through his books, eager to find out what happens next. He lures us on because we associate him with brainy and informative discussions that are at the cutting edge of scientific knowledge. He taps into that same hunger that James Michener fed, the pop novelist as tutorial leader. Unfortunately, the one overall attitude one takes away from Crichton, at least in the later books, is boredom, and we tear through the pages of his books with the same urgency as we do yanking through a roll of toilet paper.
Crichton is impatient: with the necessity to construct a plot; with language (Crichton, unlike most novelists, evinces absolutely no love of the English language); with readers and their desire for such mundane things as adventure and thrills.
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The time travel technique seems plausible when it is explained in the book. It seems that there are parallel universes breaking off of ours all the time; people can get to one via a "wormhole"; the person has to be "faxed," or broken down and reconstituted in the other place. This plausibility is eared despite the fact that Crichton sort of avoids explaining just how time or space travel is really done, the technical aspects of the actual transporting process. But then, since time travel is currently impossible, even almost unimaginable, he can't be blamed for failing to imagine it. The movie, with mirrors and gizmos and rising music and things shaking and people screaming in "agony," doesn't make it any more plausible that several people have been transported "back" to April 7th, 1357.
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Frankly, the whole "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" middle of TIMELINE is the most boring part of the book, and proves to be so in the movie as well. Conveniently, the Marek character (played by Gerard Butler, late of the second Lara Croft movie) speaks the local lingo, and has been practicing jousting and court behavior for years. But despite his convenient presence, the narrative situation is hard to follow. There seem to be two castles, plus a secret underground passage, and a standoff of some kind between two competing factions, one French and one English. It's all an excuse to provide cinematic fodder, and there to exploit the briefly the various skills of the characters that Crichton introduced pro forma when we first met them, such as Erickson's wall climbing skill (the movie makes little of her skill, so when she goes castle-climbing, it just seems like another thing to do).
All the traditional elements of the medieval film are in the book. There is a big hall sequence, there is a joust, there is an escape from a dungeon, and then a whole lot of chases, all up against the deadline by which the characters have to get back. Curiously, the film, in its haste, drops such pro forma elements as the jousting contest. In any case, George McDonald Fraser does this kind of historical reality stuff much better. There is the "surprise" that one of Marek's enemies is another renegade from the "present" who has turned into a villain and likes it better back in the 14th century, but the film minimizes his character. There is also the "surprise" that Marek, who knows so much about that time, would prefer to stay there himself. Appropriate poignant farewell scene follows. What the film version needed was a little more comedy and some legitimate suspense. But I don't get the sense that audiences are interested in medieval times per se. Given a general lack of interest, and a decline in Crichton mania, and given that Crichton's novels are malleable objects designed for movie adaptation in the first place, who cares if you are unfaithful to it (unlike with, say, the Patrick O'Brien novels, which are carefully crafted and work on several levels at once, few of them cinematic). Go ahead, improve on the book! The result doesn't have to be a Monty Python-style comedy take or A KNIGHT'S TALE anachronism, but you could focus on different characters, such as that Indian cop. The current writers certainly didn't care. They send one guy back in time who didn't do so in the book and in general minimize the Paul Walker role so that the whole film is more of an ensemble piece.
One narrative miscue that Crichton obeys is to alternate between the present and the past. While the kids are all forced to joust in France, Doniger and his harried aides are trying to figure out how to rescue them (the machine blew up). Crichton dogs a character named Daniel Stern, a member of Johnston's team who chickened out and decided to stay behind. He also happens to come up with all the ideas for getting them back. In the movie itself it would be much more suspenseful to stay in the past, and explain later how they are rescued, creating a sense of isolation in a strange world, of people trapped. Instead, it is tedious period costumery.
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TIMELINE The Movie began in deep trouble. PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY reported in its November 1, 1999 issue that there was some confusion as to whether any of Hollywood's studios actually want to make a movie of the film. Supposedly, the cost of recreating medieval 14th century France, even in this age of CGI, and despite the fact that there have been a few recent films about Saint Joan, was viewed as prohibitive by Disney, Fox, Warner, Paramount, Sony, and Universal. Crichton's then-new agent, the friendless Michael Ovitz, now listed as one of the film's producers, was viewed as a deterrent to a happy contract. In 2000, Paramount bit and hired someone named Jeff Maguire to write an adaptation. It was to start shooting in 2000, but was delayed when Paramount opted for a new screenplay, by George Nolpi. Casting began in the spring of 2001, and the film was slated for release first in 2002, then in summer of 2003, and now in November; between then and now the film enjoyed a massive re-editing, a revision so extensive that Jerry Goldsmith's original score didn't match the cut and was replaced with a new score by Brian Tyler.
The result of this protracted, complicated time line is TIMELINE, a movie that manages to look over-priced and cheap at the same time, with no discernible main character, and a predictable, tedious storyline. Crichton's bad roll of the cinematic dice continues.
KILL BILL VOL. 1, Volume Seven
KILL BILL VOL. 1
The new FILM COMMENT arrives and features what must have been a quickly conceived pair of essays on the film, one by Geoffrey O'Brien, an occasional film writer who has done some good book, and who here runs a straightforward appreciation of the film without the usual deep analysis FILM COMMENT is famous for, or at least used to be famous for. The second essay is by Chris Norris, who interestingly tackles Tarantino's theme of miscegenation. He's for it. Which puts Tarantino, at the fag end of the history of American movies, at the polar opposite end of the moral scale as D. W. Griffith, back at the birth of a nation and THE BIRTH OF A NATION. These aren't earth-shaking articles but they keep the fix in while we wait for Vol. 2.
But while I am on the subject, has anyone else noticed how much this magazine has deteriorated in the last couple of years?
These days, FILM COMMENT seems to be dominated by a bunch of second- or even third-tier film writers. I lament the passing of Robin Wood and the late Raymond Durgnat from its pages, and deplore its tribe of anonymous contributors who all sound the same and sometimes don't make sense (though currently the magazine or its editors have a grudge against former contributor David Thomson, whom they go out of their way to mock, perhaps justifiably but with unneeded relentlessness, in every issue).
I did a curious and dumb thing with FILM COMMENT in the '90s. I was so busy at a job that I would methodically buy the magazine six times a year but never read it. In this way I accumulated several years worth of un-consumed issues. This, after savoring every issue cover to cover in the Corliss years, when current TIME reviewer Richard Corliss made the journal a must read. Recently, I got a chance to dip back into the magazine, at the tail end of Richard Jameson's tenure, and found the "new" FILM COMMENT … impenetrable. The magazine seemed to emphasize a bold, "lively" James Wolcott style of jazzy verbal riffs over cogent and carefully delineated argument. On the one hand you'll read a demurral on a major director you assume that the magazine would be behind, a lengthy demurral so obscure and queerly argued that you emerge from the tail end of it wondering what the hell the writer has against the director. On the other the magazine still offers tenancy to a few old hacks, who whose tastes in movies are lodged very firmly in the early '60s, giving the magazine an occasional musty feel.
In its redesign, the magazine is also trying to look "new" while still feeling old and out of date. In fact, it has embraced a MOVIELINE level of physical ugliness. Progress isn't always good; the magazine looked better in the '80s. Now, FILM COMMENT is the only magazine in which the subheads are bigger than the headlines. Thanks to these recessive heads, you can never tell where an article actually begins. Meanwhile, the newsy stuff at the beginning of the magazine is takes a tone that also resembles the old MOVIELINE. FILM COMMENT appears to be attempting to compete with the newsier, and perhaps more somber, SIGHT AND SOUND but doesn't have the resources or the brain power, and surely it doesn't help make the magazine appealing when it takes cheap shots at letter writers, a bush league stance to take, especially when a magazine always holds the best cards in such disputes. In the current issue, on page nine, the filmmaker Chris Marker mocks a poor, unsuspecting letter writer simply seeking some clarification about Marker's filmography. Unless this is some kind of insiderish joke column that I'm not getting, this is a terrible thing for a prestigious publication to do: continually ridicule its very readers in print.
NEXT TIME: Guy Maddin's DRACULA
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