We don't have anybody like Michael Crichton anymore. People will tell you to try Brown (Dan) if you say that too loudly, but it is true.
Sure you can read Brown, but only if you consider dumbed-down pseudo-science and poorly researched historical conspiracies presented as fact 'the exact same', then maybe.
I suppose Dan Brown is Michael Crichton for the masses; he draws normally uninterested readers in with socially controversial topics and makes them feel like they have some ridiculous new insight into them. Dan Brown writes basically the exact same kind of books Michael Crichton does.
The big difference is that with Dan Brown books he throws in cliffhangers at the end of every chapter.
I have yet to find any other author that matches Michael Crichton's dedication to proper research for a novel nor one that understands the topics he writes about as well as he did.
Read some of his older books (Terminal Man, Congo) and nothing in them seems all the extraordinary because today all of that technology is commonplace. Apply that to his newer books (Prey, Jurassic Park, etc. even aspects of Timeline) and consider that he might able to give a very real view of the future and problems we might want to contemplate before it's too late.
If we're able to produce enough anti-matter to blow up the Vatican (or do anything useful), measure the weight of someone's soul, or even create a practical rifle that can compress/heat snow/sand into ice/glass bullets in the next 40 years, I'll come back here for my public shaming.
As far as I know, there's currently no replacement for Michael Crichton.
I don’t know if you have noticed but the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park have never been what science would call accurate.
When you go into a JP movie you are going there to see “real” dinosaur come to life. Just like you aren’t going to see any other Hollywood give you a look at reality with its other offerings.
Yet I have heard from a number of people that they want accuracy for the movie, if only to “enlighten the general public.”
The general public are exactly the people who would be turned off by a raptor that’s 3 feet tall and feathered. If you want accuracy from the world you will need to read the book.
Michael Crichton did a lot of research going into writing the original Jurassic Park. Every decision he made was based off of something he found in his research; even the Velociraptor-Deinonychus name change was based on a hypothesis that Deinonychus was another species of Velociraptor.
Though that hypothesis was later disproven, but still, that’s where it came from.
I think Crichton was of two minds– for one thing, he favored research and he himself felt obligated to go through painstaking details to bring his story to life.
However, he also knew that audiences expected entertainment and ultimately they were looking for entertainment first before learning about dinosaur accuracy. For as much research as Crichton put into his work, he also indulge
d the truth quite a bit for thematic purposes.
If he wrote Jurassic Park in the present day, I can guarantee the raptors would be feathered and the dinosaurs overall would be far more bird like.
Most people don’t care about being knowledgeable about dinosaurs, truthfully. And the fact is that every single JP movie, even the worst and least accurate ones, has contributed to getting a bunch of little kids hooked on dinosaurs where they will learn on their own what’s real and what isn’t.
Bottom line is, just because the original JP was nice enough to provide fairly accurate (for its time) dinosaurs, and is a science fiction movie th
at leans hard into the science aspect, doesn’t mean they ‘owe’ us scientifically-accurate dinosaurs.
Jurassic Park was praised for when it came out, both the book and the movie: for such an updated look at how dinosaurs behaved and looked.
Wouldn’t you say the series has a standard to live up to in that regard?
To live up to Crichton’s hard research and creative work that spawned from that research?
I do.
~XO 
I was told I should try Lake Mungo (2008), but it left me cold. Out of all of the movies I have watched recently it was the one that made my least favorite list.
The reason that I tried it was purely off of the positive comments I’ve seen about it and was unfortunately disappointed with it.
I liked the documentary feel to it, and I did think it worked well in eliciting empathy for the family. It was un-engaging and the ending was just sort of there. 
While I enjoy a good paranormal movie, I have watched my share for sure, anything with ghosts, zombies, spirits, and haunted houses do not scare me at all. I know that the people that are really frightened are those that “believe” in them, but that isn’t how I work.
They can be fun when they are well made but it doesn’t go much further than that.
Based on suggestion I received I decided to add some more options to my list. They include:
So I was looking for some good sci-fi movies to watch. I had been in the mood for sometime now but just never seemed to make the effort to watch them. So I put a list together and decided that it was now and never.