+1/2
Truly awful film, based, vaguely, on the H. G. Wells novel of the same name. Unlucky plane crash survivor (David Thewlis) is picked up in the Java Sea and taken to a small island where a mad doctor with a God complex (Marlon Brando) mixes human and animal DNA in a quest to create a race of "superior" beings. Goes downhill the moment Brando appears, his face, hands and arms covered in pasty white cream, as if an allergy to sunlight were in any way relevant to his character or the story. (As metaphor for the need for him to do his work "in the dark," it is overkill of the highest order.) "The" story, in fact, is a misnomer: screenwriters Richard Stanley and Ron Hutchinson try to tell too many stories, one of which is an ironic mirror of their "accomplishment": even as the film devolves into incoherence, Moreau's horrible creations, without regular injections, regress to their disordered animal states. Meanwhile, the beast creatures chafe at their subjugation, and the survivor, in an idea cribbed not from the book but from the first adaptation of the book, The Island of Lost Souls, meets a beautiful woman (Fairuza Balk) with whom he develops a personal relationship. And then there's Montgomery, Moreau's all but superfluous assistant, played by Val Kilmer. A self-indulgent crazy-quilt of a movie, redeemed only by a few pretty pictures along the way.
Truly awful film, based, vaguely, on the H. G. Wells novel of the same name. Unlucky plane crash survivor (David Thewlis) is picked up in the Java Sea and taken to a small island where a mad doctor with a God complex (Marlon Brando) mixes human and animal DNA in a quest to create a race of "superior" beings. Goes downhill the moment Brando appears, his face, hands and arms covered in pasty white cream, as if an allergy to sunlight were in any way relevant to his character or the story. (As metaphor for the need for him to do his work "in the dark," it is overkill of the highest order.) "The" story, in fact, is a misnomer: screenwriters Richard Stanley and Ron Hutchinson try to tell too many stories, one of which is an ironic mirror of their "accomplishment": even as the film devolves into incoherence, Moreau's horrible creations, without regular injections, regress to their disordered animal states. Meanwhile, the beast creatures chafe at their subjugation, and the survivor, in an idea cribbed not from the book but from the first adaptation of the book, The Island of Lost Souls, meets a beautiful woman (Fairuza Balk) with whom he develops a personal relationship. And then there's Montgomery, Moreau's all but superfluous assistant, played by Val Kilmer. A self-indulgent crazy-quilt of a movie, redeemed only by a few pretty pictures along the way.
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