RISING SUN (1993)

THE FILM

FILM DIRECTOR: Philip Kaufman

SCREENWRITER: Michael Crichton, Philip Kaufman, Michael Backes

FILM STARS: Sean Connery, Wesley Snipes, Harvey Keitel, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Kevin Anderson, Mako, Tia Carrere, Steve Buscemi, Tatjana Patitz, Tylyn John

COUNTRY: USA

THIS BOOK

AUTHOR: Michael Crichton

TYPE: Novel

PUBLISHER: Arrow

THIS EDITION PUBLISHED: 1992

COUNTRY: Australia

COVER: Paperback

THE ORIGINAL BOOK

ORIGINAL AUTHOR: As Above

YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 1992

ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: The film title

NOTES

GENRE: Crime

WORDS: A slick book and a slick film.

Michael Crichton is one of my guilty pleasures. He writes superior pulp thrillers. Superior because his stories are always (usually) set against new and / or emerging issues and trends in the world which gives them more believability and plausibility than most. Most of his novels have a science sci fi reality bent. Here he tackles global economic power struggles and US / Japanese economic relations Written in 1993 it is a fascinating look behind the scenes of international trade and if written now in the era of US / Chinese economic relations would, perhaps, be even more fascinating.

The thriller elements are all there: shady deals, sex, murder, corporate greed, culture clashes but all against the real world US / Japanese economic power relationships. His grounding of characters in real world issues is what makes his books a great read. This is plane and beach reading but of a most superior kind.

The film is equally slick. Directed by the not so prolific and much underrated Philip Kaufman (Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1977), The Wanderers, The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being). Kaufman seems to always have one foot in indie art and one foot in the mainstream. This is perhaps his most straight mainstream film but it still has enough quirk to make it interesting. The plot has been altered a little – Wesley Snipes is the protagonist, therefore changing the character’s race from Caucasian to African-American. (talk about “Blackwashing in film , errrr colour blind casting. It’s odd, when a Caucasian plays a traditional character of colour in a film it’s called “whitewashing” but when and actor of colour plays a traditionally Caucasian character its not called blackwashing (or any other colour) but “colour-blind casting”. The formers sounds like a negative and the later like a positive … go figure). In any event Crichton argued against it unsuccessfully because “In a movie about U.S.-Japan relations, if you cast someone who’s black, you introduce another aspect because of tension between blacks and Japanese”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_(film)

But Wesley Snipes was hot at the time and it’s all about the money and box office return. On top of that some names have changed as has the identity of the murderer (!), though that change didn’t take away from the meaning or implications in the book.

All is almost forgivable when you have Sean Connery in the lead and Harvey Keitel, Mako, Kevin Anderson, Tia Carrere and Steve Buscemi in the supporting cast. Unfortunately, despite having a smart script (David Mamet did a draft but I’m not sure if anything ended up in the final) the films ends up being “a “buddy cop” thriller, albeit a smart (er) one.

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