The thing about Looker was that it couldn't settle on just one conspiracy.

You had the ray gun that dazed people, but sometimes it made them invisible. Then you had the "models are being killed so we can just use their simulated images instead" thing. Then you had them being altered by plastic surgery to the millimeter (thus making them perfect, but why kill them then?). Plus, there was this whole TV-advertising mind-control crap. I was 11 and I still knew it made no sense.

Really, they should have just made a movie about the misuse of that flash gun and called it a day.

Prediction: movie makes subtle comparisons of Republican efforts to reform SS with the "Carousel"

Well... yeah, but... the gun was really cool. And the climax was violent and fun. I could tell he was making a statement, even if I didn't know what that statement was.

It's Crichton. He likes to mix a couple of couple of extraneous sci-fi premises into a story to pad it out a bit.

West World! West World! It does just cry out for a remake. The old FX was terrible, imagine what you could do with the Roman orgy scene with CG. A cast of thousands!

Tob

Logan's Run & Looker! Surely the rapture is around the corner...
Logan's Run contains a solution to the Social Security crisis, albeit one not palatable to most!

You know what they should remake? The Karate Kid.

Only, this time, have the Karate Kid be trained as a Ninja assassin. And instead of confronting trust-fund bullies, he can get drawn into a turf war between rival gangs. And his girlfriend should be a lot hotter than Elizabeth Shue, and there needs to be a lot more nudity (the Roman orgy thing has real potential).

Pearls, baby. I'm just giving 'em away here.

Heh, I recently talked about a "Westworld" remake on another site.

Since Crichton himself directed "Looker" I wonder if he would want someone else doing a remake.

And I hate to tell you because it's Dave's job, but the "Logan's Run" remake is old news. :) But it would be a good thing to actually stick to the book this time. Singer's da bomb.

Later,
bbeck

I would love to see "Colossus: The Forbin Project." remade. The notion of a benign but dispassionate computer overlord would be a nice contrast to the "The Terminator" and "The Matrix." The excellent D.F. Jones novel actually had two sequals that could be mined for material and a "happy" ending (if one is needed), although the third book became fairly ridiculous. The 1970 movie was hardcore Cold War, and it might be difficult to update, unless we assume the Chinese in the near future. I'd go for a retro remake:

"This it the Voice of World Control. I bring you peace. It can be the peace of plenty and contentment, or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours. Obey me and live, or disobey and die."

I always thought the phrase "unburied death" was a little poetic for a computer. But in a nice way.

Holy crap. I haven't thought of Looker in years. And with a naked Susan Dey in it, how the hell could I have allowed that to escape my long-term memory banks?!? I am suitably chastened. Plus anything with both Albert Finney and James Coburn in it has to be cool.

Gonna go check Amazon to see if it's out on DVD...

No Looker on DVD yet, it seems. Sniff. No naked Susan Dey for Monty.

Why, oh why must we have nothing but remakes of old movies? Logan's Run was OK for what it was, basically B-grade Sci-Fi. Don't get me wrong, I LIKE Logan's Run, and a remake, properly done, could explore some serious questions - always a good subtext in scifi.

However - why can't we have movie adaptations of other books? It's not like there is a shortage of possibilities: Foundation, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Bolo, Beserker, - take your pick. Heck, even The Shiva Option by Dave Weber would be cool.

My brother was a consultant on a real mundane aspect of that movie, the city's transportation system.

"A boy and his dog" 1975

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072730/

the coolest, weirdest post-apocoyptic sci-fi, big-brother, on the run, psycho R-rated movie this 14 yr old ever snuck into.

Staring Don Johnson - the after "the harrad experiment" - before cheesy tv-movie-of-the-week carreer - smack dab in the middle of 17 year old Melanie Griffith - Don Johnson.

remake that!

Oh you just know that the Hollywood environut machine is itchin' to do a remake of Soylent Green.

The gun in 'Looker' didn't make the wielder invisible. He'd still turn up on video cameras and such. What it did was inhibit the ability of the victim to focus and track moving objects. If you watch the pertinent parts of the movie you'll see that the victims could tell there was something happening around them but being unable to deal with moving objects made it seem as though their assailant was superfast rather than invisible.

Crichton wasn't the first to use this in fiction. The lead character of Larry Niven's 'A Gift From Earth' had a psionic version of this, and could work it reverse so that people became so fascinated by them they could be very readily manipulated into accepting suggestions. In a perfect bit of 'I'm not a nerd, I'm a mutant' the power at first only manifests unconsciously when the guy becomes nervous and makes it easy to go unnoticed and avoid confrontations. But it also causes severely prolonged virginity.

They shoud remake Zardoz. But who can fill out a red plastic diaper like Sean Connery?