One was the massive popularity of the novel, the second done by Robin Cook. Cook had apparently studied major blockbusters of the early 70‘s and fashioned this thing in their image...and it paid off for him in spades. I admit to buying (or shoplifting--I was going through the typical teenager shoplifting-is-fun-until-I-get-caught phase at the time) the paperback and trying very, very hard to get through the 306 pages of clinical exposition, old school 70‘s paranoia and chaste smuttiness. I failed.
The second reason was because there is a very specific sequence where Geneviève Bujold infiltrates the Jefferson Institute, a place we’ve known was Pure D Bad ever since Ultra-Creepy Elizabeth Ashley showed up, and is shown a room filled with coma patients suspended in a room on wires. Scenes and stills from that sequence were prominent in the advertising campaign, and those scenes and stills creeped the Hell out of fourteen-year-old-me.
The third reason was because I have been in love with Geneviève Bujold since my High School Days, and she’s in the bulk of this movie. Okay, admittedly loads of that screentime is composed of Bujold climbing up and around air ducts and accessways (At one point removing her shoes and pantyhose for stealth) but still....
Michael Crichton, who directed this, was a medical student, so I guess it looked good on paper when MGM wanted him to make Cook’s best seller into a movie. And the best parts of this movie are the little bits where we get the sense of medicine not as a holy calling but as a job--the moments where doctors and nurses are talking about mundane things as they’re cutting into their patients. There’s none of this glamorizing of the profession in the first hour, and for that first hour it sort of drew me into its world. I like especially how Crichton sets up the character of Bujold’s love interest (played by Michael Douglas) in such a way that I did not know if he was pulling a John-Cassavettes-in-Rosemary’s-Baby or not until the last few minutes of the film’s close to two hour running time.
And then we get hit with a 70‘s era Elevator Music Love Montage, and things start going...off.
See, up until the point where Bujold and Douglas’ Susan and Matt head up the cape for some lovemaking and antiquing, the film maintains its sense of reality barely. Even as Susan gets a little hysterical in her emoting, I was able to forgive it. I was able to accept that Lance LeGault’s windbreaker-wearing assassin is supposed to be scary instead of silly. Hell, I was able to forgive Geneviève Bujold’s not-quite-American accent and the jarring tiny roles by Tom Sellack and Ed Harris. I was able to do so because Crichton is actively interested in the mechanics and politics of a major hospital. But Crichton is a clinical director; this montage transitions the film into the blood-and-thunder phase that it was only flirting with up until that point and it starts falling all to pieces.
But even with the way Crichton whiffs the last half--starting with the introduction of Ashley’s Mrs. Emerson, who practically rubs her hands together maniacally while informing Bujold that she is the only occupant besides techs and guards in the Not-Sinister-A’Tall-Medical-Institute in the middle of nowhere, and leading right on through to the ‘shocking twist’ of the villainous mastermind being the character played by the actor perhaps being best known for playing psychotic villains--I cannot take away from him the fact that he nails the one iconic sequence in the movie in Bujold discovering the storehouse containing the coma patients. There’s something so...wrong about the sight of all these naked people (wearing some form of body stocking so we don’t see the naughty bits) in this sterile gunmetal grey box, their bodies being manipulated by a computer through a series of wires that puts the fear of medicine in me more than some of the more graphically frightening stuff does. It certainly still creeped me out for this viewing.
You know, even with the way the film goes insanely off the rails in the last act, with Bujold being ‘operated’ on by the villain while Douglas crawls through vents looking for the device that will feed carbon dioxide into her anesthesia, I think I’m going to end up mildly recommending this film. There’s enough that Crichton gets right in the first half of the film and in setting the atmosphere of this Big Ol’ Medical Institution--and there’s enough good acting as a whole (the actor who plays the main villain, whose name I will not reveal in case you’re interested in seeing this, is not surprisingly great and manages to keep his ‘reasonable’ facade on credibly even after he’s unmasked) that makes sitting through the silliness worthwhile.
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