United Artists released Coma on 6 January 1978. It’s a bit weird. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer produced the film. They didn’t distribute their own films?! Whatever.
I remember seeing this film with my parents at the drive-in theater. My mother was an obsessive reader. And whenever they made a film based on a novel she’d read, we all had to go out and watch it. I barely remember it.
But I watched it recently. And it is really good. Michael Crichton is not much of a director. He clearly listened to the professionals around him. So the camera work is good. But it doesn’t do much more. It’s not like he had a plan. But the film is based on an excellent novel. And his screenplay is first-rate.
I’d love to say that Crichton is a piece of garbage but… Wait, he was a piece of garbage! He’s a typical example of how our society over-praises successful people. As a result, they become convinced of their brilliance and lose the humility that keeps the rest of us from becoming arrogant pricks.
I’m not saying he was William Peter Blatty, who had actual skill as a film director. But he managed to make watchable films. And I think Coma is way better than the excessively praised Westworld.
But maybe I’m wrong. I love 1970s paranoia. Watergate might have been bad for politics in the United States. But it was great for art! Night Moves is one of my all-time favorite films. And there are so many more. It’s like if you are into westerns. You’ll enjoy even poor westerns. I’m into paranoia that way.
I highly recommend watching Coma. It works really well. And Geneviève Bujold in the lead is fabulous. And best of all, from my perspective, the bad guy fails and gets punished!
Coma (1978) via Wikipedia under Fair Use.
Crichton’s later books are mostly garbage… but I remember one, Airframe, I liked. About a jetliner manufacturer investigating an in-flight mishap. The plot’s stupid, but the technical details about just How Hard It Is For A Plane To Crash helped me get over my fear of flying! I think I left it on a plane, hoping it would help another flight-phobic passenger.
Of course, Crichton’s predictive abilities were awful… he couldn’t see what was painfully obvious, that the very anti-union line he was pushing in the book (the union workers are all grumpily against the wise company’s decisions) would lead to Boeing turning from a good maker of planes into a corner-cutting one. Thereby making his own book outdated!
Bujold is great. I remember thinking nobody should be subjected to what she was in Dead Ringers, but she was able to project such toughness, it redeemed the role.
There’s another guy who was harmed by believing his own PR. I’ve only read AS. I’m not big on his kind of fiction — at least in book form. AS was interesting but it also showed that he wasn’t much of a writer. Pretty dry prose.