Island of Dr. Moreau, The |
  • USA • 1996 • 96m •    • Directed by: John Frankenheimer, Richard Stanley. • Starring: Marlon Brando, Val Kilmer, David Thewlis, Fairuza Balk, Daniel Rigney, Temuera Morrison, Nelson de la Rosa, Peter Elliott, Mark Dacascos, Ron Perlman, Marco Hofschneider, Miguel López, Neil Young. • Music by: Gary Chang.      Drifting at sea, the only survivor of a plane crash, UN peace negotiator Edward Douglas is rescued by a passing vessel and takento an island. The island is the home of the brilliant geneticist Dr Moreau, who has sought seclusion there so that he can continue his work unimpeded by the animal rightsmovement. In his search for the perfect human form, Moreau has geneticallyaltered animals and crafted them into intelligent, upright human hybrids. He acts as god to his populace of beast people, controlling them with pain-inducingelectronic implants. But when one of the beast people discovers that the implantscan be removed, rebellion starts.
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The movie opens on three plane crash survivors who have been adrift in the Java Sea for days. Two of them are killed by a shark leaving our hero, Edward Douglas (David Thewlis of "Naked"), a United Nations peace negotiator. Douglas awakens to the sight of a sailing vessel hovering over him. He collapses from exhaustion and reawakens to find Montgomery (Val Kilmer of "Tombstone") attending him. Douglas is too weak to do anything more than swoon. Eventually, the ship deposits them at an exotic island where the research center of Dr. Moreau is located. Montgomery persuades Douglas to join him, on the basis that they have a telecommunications system on the island that Douglas can use to contact the UN. As we soon learn, however, Montgomery is lying.
The island is actually the home and refuge of Dr. Moreau, a brilliant geneticist who was forced into seclusion due to his controversial experiments on animals. Moreau has learned how to transform common animals into human beings, or almost human beings. Douglas finds himself trapped on the island, surrounded by Moreau's beastly creations. He tries to escape several times to no avail. First, he stumbles in on an ungodly birth scene, then finds himself in a half-man, half-animal zoo at an abandoned military airfield. Finally, Douglas meets Moreau. They argue about which way the scales of morality should tilt and dredge up Biblical passages to support their arguments. Moreau tries to explain how his experiments will help mankind. He reveals that he has discovered that the devil is a collection of genes. Moreau means to sort out those bad genes and produce an ideal human. He is even willing to accept a failure or two along the road to success, which accounts for the vast number of beast-men. Moreau keeps these ugly creatures under his thumb by means of implants which he uses to shock them into paralysis. Meanwhile, Montgomery keeps the creatures dazed and confused with narcotics.
The inventive but predictable Richard Stanley & Ron Hutchinson screenplay updates the 1896 Wells novel and does a good job of establishing the action in the 1990s. The opening 40 minutes introduces audiences to everyone and everything they need to know about the plot. Sadly, the script packs no surprises. If you cannot figure out what's going to happen from one moment to the next in the film then you must be on horse tranquilizers.
Suffice it to say, "Moreau" doesn't qualify as a date movie, (unless you never want to see your date again). Some of the gruesome looking creatures may even go on to inhabit the island of your dreams. Stan Winston's creature designs are impressive. His mutants look as convincing as mutants could possibly look. Sometimes, they are even nauseating. Typically, they retain the basic shape of the animal from which they were mutated so they have a beastly looking head, hands and feet, while the rest of them is hidden beneath their apparel to conserve on costs. The first grisly glimpse that Douglas gets is a multi-breasted beast mother siring an "E.T." infant. The other animals are a hideous collection of mutants with claw hands and snaggled teeth. They gallery of beast men and women appears twice as grisly, gyrating their horrid bodies as Montgomery peddles narcotics to kill them happy.
Marlon Brando treats moviegoers to another of his characteristically peculiar performances. There is nothing ordinary about Brando's brilliant but eccentric Dr. Moreau. Brando stages a dramatic entrance, swathed in white garments under a pagoda-style hat, resembling a Japanese Kabuki actor in sunglasses. He tolerates the steamy island heat and wears chalky make-up to preserve his delicate skin from the sun. Metaphorically, this sun allergy relates somehow to Moreau's moral infamy; he cannot stand up to the light of morality. He appears like the great white hope in the camp of the beast men. Brando adopts the same sissified voice that he used for his Fletcher Christian in the 1962 version of "Mutiny on the Bounty." He also never appears twice in the same wardrobe. One scene finds him garbed like a nocturnal fridge raider while in another scene he appears bundled up like an Arab sultan. Audiences are meant to identify with the David Thewlis' narrator. Incidentally, Thewlis replaced Rob Morrow of CBS-TV's "Northern Exposure." A similar air of mystery clouds Val Kilmer's Montgomery. Montgomery gravitates between moments of extreme clarity and apathetic zombie like drug dazes. Either the script is purposefully vague or (more realistically) the editors sheared Kilmer's performance to reduce the film's running time to 90 minutes so they could squeeze in more showings and parlay a quick profit. Ultimately, Montgomery assumes a Luifer-like character in his apparent rivalry with Moreau. Again, the script doesn't clarify this part of the story. Is Montgomery Moreau's rival? We never know for certain.
"The Island of Dr. Moreau" ranks as an ambitious but flawed horror fantasy. Anybody who relishes Frankenheimer's version of "Moreau" can hope that someday New Line Cinema will release a director's cut that restores the lost parts of the film. This well-made but routine concludes with Douglas moralizing about how Moreau's island serves as a microcosm of the world and that we must all go in fear of man's unstable nature. The only thing that audiences can really go in fear of is the sequel that might lie over the horizon.
Review by zardoz-13 from the Internet Movie Database.
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