Fluentiama
Perfect cast and a good story
Noutions
Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .
Python Hyena
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996): Dir: John Frankenheimer / Cast: David Thewlis, Marlon Brando, Val Kilmer, Fairuza Balk, Temuera Morrison: Remake of the 1977 classic about authority and power over a powerless medium. David Thewlis is boarded onto a ship where Val Kilmer takes him to an island populated by creatures that are half man and half animal. A device is planted within their system that controls them. Concept still works with much suspense but the climax is an ongoing battle that never seems to end. Director John Frankenheimer succeeds in the film's mood but he is hardly matching his work in The Manchurian Candidate. Thewlis fares well amongst the cast as a drifter becoming a prisoner but upon learning the process involved he sets his sights on survival. Marlon Brando is an interesting case as Moreau but his concluding scene was perhaps a tad premature. Val Kilmer is confusing towards the conclusion and unreadable before that. He locks Thewlis in a room and becomes like a different person. Fairuza Balk plays an animalistic female who attempts to help Thewlis but unfortunately her role is nothing more than a romantic tease and a violent dismiss. Whether viewers will prefer this over spending all day watching Animal Planet is up to them. The theme still works regarding our animalistic behavior that traumatize our society. Score: 7 / 10
Benjamin Cox
It might be tempting to think that modern film-makers have a God-given right to remake whatever they wish simply because we have better tools with which to make films. From incredible CG characters like Gollum to Keanu Reeves dodging bullets in slow motion, it would be easy to remake a much earlier film and throw every digital trick in the book at it, expecting success and critical acclaim. Of course, it doesn't always work like that as there are any number of things that can scupper a production from backstage fighting, studio disagreements and lead actors' egos clashing. And when you have all three then you get "The Island Of Dr. Moreau", a film so mired in issues that it's a miracle it was released or even finished. What's really tragic is that it had a really promising opening and could have been so much better. Instead, it descends into an absolute farce of a film with very little to recommend.David Thewlis plays Edward Douglas, a survivor of a plane crash drifting alone and almost dead at sea. Picked up by a man named Montgomery (Val Kilmer) and slowly nursed back to health, Douglas is taken to a remote island and made a guest of reclusive scientist Doctor Moreau (Marlon Brando). But the island hides a multitude of Moreau subjects - inhuman creatures that are monitored and kept under Moreau's control through implanted pain receptors. As Douglas desperately tries to escape the island, one such creature (Daniel Rigney) discovers the doctor's secret implant and removes it. As the mutants begin to rise up against Moreau and the others, Douglas realises that he must fight for his life before all hope is lost.Believe me when I say that this film really does start off well - the film offers a tempting mystery behind the enigmatic Moreau's jungle paradise and everything looks suitably ramshackle and intriguing. Then Brando himself appears, lording it up and caked in weird snow-white make-up and it's at this point that the film tanks like the Exxon Valdez. It goes from a promising sci-fi mystery with a slight horror element to a drug-fuelled "Twin Peaks" tribute, populated with dwarfs and jobbing actors covered in excessive amounts of make-up, prosthetics and facial hair. The only exception is Fairuza Balk as the pretty cat-hybrid 'daughter' who is there solely to provide a possible love interest to Thewlis. The cast do what they can with a dodgy (and hastily rewritten) script but none can hold a candle to Kilmer who, like the film, goes utterly off the rails halfway through. It also forgets what the story has established already - for example, the primitive and feral beasts call guns "the fire that kills" but within half-an-hour, they've learnt the word for guns but also can drive jeeps and reload an AK47. With claws and hooves. Riiiiight."The Island Of Dr. Moreau" will probably ensure that this particular H.G. Wells tale won't be remade for quite some time. It isn't a long film but it feels like it, especially once the madness begins and Kilmer's character acts like a junkie mid-relapse. The only real aspect of the production I can applaud is the creature effects which are convincing enough, to a point. Certainly, they made me wonder whether Brando was wearing prosthetics as he looks grossly overweight and acts like a mere shadow of his previous self. I know that sounds harsh but his performance is not his finest hour, one of many that people had during this movie. But this is undoubtedly the Val Kilmer show and frankly, I'd like to know exactly what he was on at the time. As I understand, hardly anybody had a good time on set but never before has that despondency appeared on screen so spectacularly than it did here. "The Island Of Dr. Moreau" is the worse kind of movie, the sort that builds up your hopes and then knocks them back like that glamorous woman out of your league at the bar. It's more disappointing than it is bad, throwing away its promising potential and settling with being a stupid and moronic action blast.
AaronCapenBanner
Troubled adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel, directed by John Frankenheimer after he replaced original director Richard Stanly, who wrote the script. Marlon Brando gives an indescribable performance as Dr. Moreau, as if he's barely there at all, looking and acting like a phantom, though it is strikingly original! Val Kilmer is bizarre as his assistant Montgomery, playing it for camp, yet it is an amusing performance. David Thewlis is Edward Douglas, shipwreck survivor who looks every bit as bewildered as the character he's playing. Fairuza Balk is the panther woman Aissa, and she is quite effective, as is Ron Perlman as the Sayer of the law.Film is faithful in spirit to Wells, if not in execution, and though it is far from a success, there is some guilty pleasure enjoyment out of it, and has some striking end narration in its memorable finale.The type of film that was more entertaining to watch than it was to make, if the first hand accounts from the cast and crew are to be believed!
c9909135
While this film has been written off by the filmerati types, that is only just the start of its appeal. Marlin Brando is unleashed here, and with absolute effortless extracts from his repertoire a delicious, eliding performance that dominates the film. However the transcendance of medium achieved here relies on David Thewlis and Val Kilmer as well. Each of main leads bring their own rich flavour of campiness. The happless Thewlis brings a turn of the century stilted formality to pay at least part homage to the original work, which is otherwise deservingly massacred. This arch patina of homoeroticism is in turn burnished up to a flashy sterile veneer by Val Kilmer's fleckless self prostitution. The dynamic between the two, compelling in itself, is both eclipsed and illuminated by the pure radiating light that is Brando. The three form a constellation of pulsing chaos that drives the film though its myriad of clichés punctuated with whatever viceral imagery stayed off the cutting room floor. The result shows film, even in the vacuum of commericality and popular culture, can attain an artistry as rich as any other form in history.
