An inquisitive hospital physician (Genevieve Bujold) discovers that unscrupulous higher-ups on the staff are drugging healthy patients into a comatose state, killing them, and selling their organs to rich patients in desperate need of transplants. When she confronts her ambitious doctor
lover (Michael Douglas) with the information, he refuses to believe her, and she sets out alone to expose the sinister conspiracy.
Adapted from the best-selling book by Robin Cook, COMA is the second feature directed by doctor-novelist-filmmaker Crichton (the first was the popular WESTWORLD), who later scripted the phenomenal JURASSIC PARK. As a rare attempt to invert some of the gender conventions of the thriller
genre--insistently presenting events from a female point-of-view--the film has won favor among some feminist critics. On the whole, however, COMA wastes a superb performance by Bujold on a simplistic, predictable series of cliched suspense scenes, seasoned with some last-minute moralizing about
contemporary medicine. Look for Tom Selleck as one of the comatose bodies suspended from the ceiling of a clandestine medical lab--the most memorably eerie image in the film. leave a comment