Robin Cook wrote COMA, but I had to see it in the credits before I remembered, I thought it was by Michael Crichton. Oh, well.
COMA is the story of a bunch of evil, greedy doctors who put profits before the welfare of their patients-sounds like nonfiction so far.
Our modern day Nazis have decided that waiting for some kind of government approval is just a waste of time-it’s so much easier to just grab up the occasional patient that meets your study criteria and preform all the tests you want. Everything goes fine for thirty years or so, until someone comes along asking too many questions.
The cast is filled with familiar faces and they do the best they can with what they have to work with. The villains are mostly mustache twirling baddies and the good guys seem a touch on the naive side, especially the young doctor whose family has been in the medical research business since the Civil War-or was that someone else? There were just a few too many people for me to keep track of for a four hour movie.
Then there was the odd business at the very beginning of the story where some unknown group of people break into the secret laboratory, but find nothing at all like we see later. I kept expecting our poor dumb doctor to get help from the people who made the video-we even see the video again later, but we never see the people who made it.
The story moved at a pretty slow pace and the ending was a little abrupt. They did a good job of updating the story and showing all the advances in medical science. They also do a good job of showing how badly patients can be treated in hospitals. There was very little tension or suspense here. When there finally is some drama, someone we barely know decided to help our hero, who is then ignored as she stumbled and wanders through every room in the complex.
A&E’s COMA was ok, but not great.
