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First off, I've always gone bananas over books and movies that have giant apes & big gorillas in them, going way back to when I was a kid, particularly with movie classics like, King Kong and Mighty Joe Young, that were a blast for me and my brother to watch together.

Reading books and watching movies about big apes helps me reconnect with those experiences I will always hold dear to me.

I've been going ape over everything & anything simian fiction-related ever since.

When I first saw the preview for the movie, Congo, it was a no-brainer that I would be seeing it as soon as it came out.

Anyone who may have seen the original advertisements for the movie may remember that the 1st preview centered on character, Charles Travis, played by fan-favorite actor, Bruce Campbell. *Ever since I first saw Evil Dead, starring Bruce Campbell as Ash, I followed every single film he did. But, if you saw Congo, then you'll know that he was only in the film for about 5 minutes or less!



I rushed out to see the 1st showing on the 1st day of the film release with my best friend, Doug, at the time.

Before I read the book.



I knew it was gonna have a Jurassic Park sorta cheeziness to it but I was looking forward to that and otherwise not really knowing what else to expect. The acting was a mixed bag of fine performances like Laura Linney and Dylan Walsh, along with some of the worst acting since the very dawn of time. Tim Curry, an actor I've loved since watching his iconic legendary performance as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show many many times, was just God-awful! As Herkermer Homolka, his Russian accent defies logic as to why they would even keep the cameras rolling after his first line, Which, to me, sounded like he got his tongue stuck in his throat.



Though, by this point, I wouldn't trade him in for the world though his is the worst accent I've ever heard! *Now that I think about it, the way over-the-top French accent by Julia Ormond in Mad Men is definitely up there for debate! ~ I'm guessing that the Mad Men producers must've got confused thinking she was French actress, Juliette Binoche, when they brought her on, since they look dead-on identical!:
http://0d.img.v4.skyrock.net/2749/195...

Back to Congo. As my buddy Doug and I watched the film we kept sinking lower and lower and lower into our seats until we were, seriously, nearly sitting on the floor. Throughout all the impossibilities that could only happen in an 80's movie, we burst out laughing in places where we weren't supposed to dozens of times! (much to the hatred of the rest of the audience, I'm sure). By the end of the movie, as we were walking out, I said in my best Amy voice - the pet gorilla who had the female equivalent of a Stephen Hawking-like computer voicebox -n   "Bad movie, Amy, Bad movie."n Yeah...we were little shi†s then just like most guys that age, I guess.



Just so you know, I've watched the film a few times since and it gets better every time. It's a real hoot! and now I think I love it!

But, back to the book.

In case it surprises anybody, I don't think Michael Crichton wrote this one just so it would turn out to be a mega-million-buck movie.

And though it's a tech-thriller, it's also a throwback to the pulp adventure-style books going on for over a century now. Most notably, King Solomon's Mines:

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The difference? It's been updated, everything moves faster, there's better equipment, and everybody's more sarcastic and cynical than ever before. No duh. Really!?

I enjoyed this novel. I'm pretty sure everybody has an idea what it's about so why go into it.

It was a good book.

However...

Since most of the covers, including the movie poster and dvd, have a GORILLA on it, you would expect there to be some damn gorillas IN IT.

I kept asking:

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...a common question I ask whenever I expect to see more of something, or, when there's an element sorely missing throughout what I'm reading!

Here's one where you would want Michael Crichton to use his time machine from Timeline so he could fast forward to the future and take notes of the formula that worked so well in books he wrote later and were more successful. Jurassic Park had a great abundance of dinosaurs in it. Too bad he couldn't have used that same formula here!

It is a well written, nicely plotted book, with good characters, a great premise, action-packed, and mostly a lot of fun.

It was just missing one thing for me: MORE FREAKING GORILLAS!



* This is one of those rare books that has many great artwork covered editions. I hope you pick a good one. Buying the bland books allows the publisher to think it's ok to skip the art department, leaving us with a world of mediocre book covers to choose from. So you know, many of the cheapest editions have some very nice covers.

Admittedly, what brought this up from a 3 star for me was that I was just really interested in the science and history packed into this. It’s like a snapshot of computer science and a bit of spec fiction coupled with interesting stuff about primates and diamonds. The actual structure and plot is pretty basic, but I found it to be fun.

So the ancient inhabitants of the lost city of Zinj were deliberately breeding/training insanely violent killer ape creatures, and Michael Crichton is referring to them merely as “Zinjians”? Bitch, please—the term you want for these ultra hardcore proto-mad scientist badasses is clearly Zinjas.

Compared to Jurassic Park and The Lost World, this book was boring, filled with massive science info dumps, and very little horror. The writing was also sub-par.
Any tension there may have been in the book was always almost completely eliminated because the author kept writing sentences like this:
"Elliot would later recall..." or "Ross would later discover...". So you always knew the characters were going to survive. The scary element in the book turned out to be a different species of guerrilla--yeah, really scary [not]. The characters themselves weren't very likable or interesting. The science is so out of date, and because it took up such a big part of the story, it makes for very difficult reading in the 2020s.
I do realise that this book was written ten years before Jurassic Park, and you can really tell. Crichton developed into a much better author during those ten years.