Michael Crichton was already a seasoned writer (under the pseudonym John Lange) by the time he hit the bestseller list in 1969 with The Andromeda Strain. The success of the book pushed him into a career largely based on extrapolated scepticism with a popular scientific bent. Thanks to the commercial success of the 1971 movie adaptation of The Andromeda Strain (directed by Robert Wise), Crichton found himself circling Hollywood. Easy Rider had kicked down the door for new directors and, according to Crichton, “it seemed as if anybody who could speak in declarative sentences – and a lot of people who couldn’t – were going to get to make films.”
That film was supposed to be The Terminal Man, Crichton’s second novel under his own name, published in 1972 to rave reviews and instant commercial success. The Terminal Man – like much of Crichton’s work – was a mix of potboiler melodrama and scientific fiction (he hated the term “science fiction”), based on his recurring concerns around innovation for innovation’s sake: “In the 1970s I saw a patient in a hospital who was being treated with electrodes implanted in the brain, hooked up to a monitoring computer. I thought this treatment was horrific, and I was amazed that the research seemed to be going forward with no public discussion or even knowledge. I decided to write a novel to make such procedures better known.”
That novel is the story of Harry Benson, a former computer scientist involved in a car crash that left him with a particularly rare form of epilepsy: when gripped by a seizure, Benson becomes uncontrollably violent. He is a perfect guinea pig for an experimental “stage three” procedure that aims to implant a “brain pacemaker” – essentially a tiny computer designed to stimulate the brain into nullifying the seizures altogether. There’s just one small problem: Benson’s damaged brain likes being stimulated, and pretty soon it’s working overtime to put him into a constant homicidal fugue state. After murdering his girlfriend, an increasingly dangerous Benson finds himself the subject of a manhunt.
Warner Bros., keen to get in on the Crichton bandwagon, hired the author to adapt his own book, but Crichton’s attempts to improve on a book he never really cared for1 resulted in an adaptation that veered too far from the original story. Crichton dropped out, paid his directorial dues with the TV movie Pursuit (1972), and then went on to direct his own screenplay for Westworld in 1972. Into the breach stepped Mike Hodges, writer and director of two features – Get Carter (1971) and Pulp (1972) – and about to make his debut with a major studio.
Hodges was a quintessentially European director, specializing in arthouse alienation and salty social critique with a dash of genre deconstruction: Get Carter had transformed Ted Lewis’s gritty crime novel into a Geordie Jacobean revenger’s tragedy, while Pulp took a broad gumshoe parody and seasoned it with fascist horror. With The Terminal Man, he turned a wham-bam bestseller into a chilly treatise in dehumanization through technology. This wasn’t the first time Hodges had peered into the dark heart of social conditioning – his episode of the anthology series The Frighteners titled “The Manipulators” (1972) is a terrifyingly paranoid take on psychological testing – and he was a firm believer of Pessoa’s assertion that “the world belongs to those who feel nothing.”2
As a result, The Terminal Man feels more like a Mike Hodges film than a Crichton adaptation. Hodges cited Edward Hopper as an influence on his approach, and the film is almost a mood piece because of it, revelling in a monochrome palette, reflective surfaces, uncomfortable-looking furniture, and off-centre framing to emphasise Benson’s alienation. For the most part, the dialogue is curt and professional – only Benson and the orderlies get to crack jokes – and the medical staff at the sinister hospital (simply known as Babel) appear more like futuristic cultists than healthcare professionals, emotionally dead and little more than cogs in a machine. Even the lead surgeons, a fun double act of Donald Moffat and Richard Dysart,3 avoid the standard God complex cliché; they are instead almost totally detached, borderline bureaucratic, and when Benson absconds on his minor rampage at the end of the film, the tuxedo-clad doctors look more exhausted than concerned. The worst that can happen to them is a cushy job in Minnesota.
And yet there are flashes of humanity. Dysart’s Ellis is outwardly all low-key arrogance, but pukes before the big operation; Joan Hackett’s Ross quotes Eliot, but appears to be the only person who actually cares about Benson; and the movie is punctuated with choric commentary by orderlies cracking wise about the idiocy of the whole endeavour. Even the lengthy operation itself – it takes up around twenty minutes of screen time – is undermined by the commentary from the gallery, which is lit like a campfire ghost story and frequently cut off mid-sentence, giving it a “blah blah blah science” feel. If Crichton’s novel is a cautionary take on Frankenstein, then the Hodges adaptation is a satirical one.4
Unfortunately, satire needs to stick the landing if it’s going to be effective, and The Terminal Man suffers when Benson gets out into the wild. George Segal is game, clearly, but there’s an inherent silliness in him sporting what can only be described as a blonde mop-top wig thrashing at a robot (or “robut”, as it’s referred to), screaming “Let it stop, let it stop!” Even the key murder scene, where an unfortunate (and underused) Jill Clayburgh meets her end on a waterbed, is rendered bathetic by its cacophony of style – a shrinking macaw, a television showing Them!, a slow-motion stabbing that does more damage to the bed than her, the diluted blood flowing like electricity through the circuitry of the floor tiles. It’s as if Hodges distrusts his own material, flooding it with flourishes to detract from what is a decidedly unscary scene.
And this is the movie’s main flaw: there’s nothing particularly frightening about Benson’s homicidal fugue state. Segal was a fine actor with considerable range,5 but there’s only so much he can do when the script calls for eye-rolling and grunting, and he’s too physically slight to pose much of a threat. His seizures may provoke the urge to kill, but they also weaken him – he might be able to punch a hole through a bathroom door, but he’s spent shortly afterwards. The film also robs Benson of agency – in the novel, he becomes intent on destroying the hospital’s mainframe – and instead subjects him to a brief search for spiritual help – “once a Catholic, always a Catholic” – before he claims someone else’s grave as his own.
Benson is also unknowable and difficult to care about, which doesn’t help, and this is an issue in the original novel (as noted by Theodore Sturgeon, he of the Law). The great Robert Gottlieb, Crichton’s editor at Knopf, concluded “that he couldn’t write about people because they just didn’t interest him,” and the feeling carries over into the film. A brief exposition scene (removed for the director’s cut) gives a cursory backstory, and a recorded interview with Benson that features later in the film mostly just lists his material possessions. Segal is personable enough to paper over most of this, but there’s an absence where a character should be, and the film never answers a key question: why would a computer scientist who has been vocal about machines taking over the world subject himself to the operation in the first place? Yes, his epilepsy has ruined his life, but there’s no sense of him giving in to the experiment as a last resort. And if we don’t care about Benson, why should we care about his fate?
The Terminal Man met with yawns from critics and audiences alike, most reviews citing the film’s glacial pace – I’d say deliberate rather than slow – and the subdued performances, agreeing that the film was style over substance. It was also marketed by the studio as a science fiction film, with a poster that made it look more like Logan’s Run than a cerebral thriller. Despite glowing recommendations from the likes of Stanley Kubrick and Terrence Malick,6 the film struggled to find distribution (it wouldn’t get a UK cinema release at all, though it would pop up on television quite a bit) and would soon sink into obscurity, destined for a semi-decent DVD-R release through Warner Archives before it finally hit Blu-ray in 2023.
As a crowd-pleasing thriller, The Terminal Man is an utter failure, but impossible to dismiss entirely. Working for a major studio meant sacrificing some creative control - the movie is never as dark as Hodges clearly wanted it to be, and so borders on narrative incoherence - and Crichton’s novel is fundamentally a facile take on a complex subject. But Segal gives it his all, Hackett is a solid, sympathetic presence, and the rogue’s gallery of surgeons are fun to hang around with, despite their professional detachment. And unlike some, I rather like the first hour, which feels controlled in the best possible way and is a good example of how effective (and cheekily subversive) Hodges could be when left to his own devices. The Terminal Man may be a failure, but it is at least an interesting one.
Next Up: “America’s Most Unlikely Hero.”
Crichton on The Terminal Man: “I worked on it for nine drafts and never felt like I got it right. I don’t know to this day what I would do differently, or what I should have done … I just feel that there was some opportunity to use a real technology in a fictional way that eluded me.”
How do I know this? Because I interviewed him for Noir City in 2020. And he was a delight.
Your obligatory reminder to rewatch The Thing, which features both of these guys, or else “spend the rest of this winter tied to this fucking couch!”
There’s even a weird dig at Scientology - when Dr Ross investigates Benson’s apartment, she finds a tape recording of someone (is it Benson?) extolling the virtues of the Hubbard cult.
And I’ll cut anyone who says different. He might be better known for his comic roles, but Segal had dramatic chops.