The Island of Dr. Moreau

John Frankenheimer – 1996 – USA 

This is one of those movies that most of the world hates but I love, and not ironically.  What I think a lot of people don’t appreciate is the pronounced sense of sheer lunacy that characterizes the movie, which isn’t commonplace in big-budget sci-fi/adventure films like The Terminator or Jurassic Park.  This seems to be interpreted as unintentional – i.e. earnestness gone wrong – and therefore an error and a failure.  But the film’s crazy tone is so consistent that it can’t possibly be a mistake, and I believe it can be attributed to director John Frankenheimer’s strong feeling for dry satire.  Though typically known as a maker of espionage thrillers, Frankenheimer’s best films also have this undertone of absurdity – a trait shared with Stanley Kubrick; and it’s subtly on display in The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seconds (1966), and a bit closer to the surface in 99 & 44/100% Dead (1974), which was a critical and commercial failure that went on to achieve cult status, a fate that I suspect awaits The Island of Dr. Moreau.  Frankenheimer’s sensibility was fairly out-of-step with the mid-90s film world, and that’s why pretty much everyone else who worked on the movie didn’t get what he was doing.  They found him abrasive and dictatorial, but the production was literally spiraling out of control when he came aboard a week into shooting and perhaps his strong hand is what was needed in order to not only finish the thing but to infuse it with some type of personality that would be memorable.  Despite the notoriously chaotic production, I honestly don’t see much evidence of these problems on the screen.  The film is cohesive, just as darkly comedic in its finale as in its opening scenes.  It is certainly not the sober work its original director and shepherd Richard Stanley wanted to make or that any other safe-bet Hollywood director would have made, but possibly closer to what someone with a little vision and panache would have done, like Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton.  The film is anchored not by its stars Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer but by the feverish performance of the great David Thewlis, who replaced two successive (and much bigger) names, was just as horrified by the tumultuous atmosphere of the set as everyone else, and who supposedly refused to ever see the film.  He never phones it in or condescends to the material one bit; his perpetual state of untempered outrage and hysteria is alternately hilarious and moving.  Frankenheimer’s interpretation of H.G. Wells’ classic novel is not reverential, and there is no attempt to recapture the primitive horror of the 1932 adaptation Island of Lost Souls (1932).  Nothing is scary; everything is off-the-wall; an exercise in perversity to match Moreau’s biological experiments.  I think this movie was the victim of buzz rather than judged on its merits.  That happens from time to time – (Godfather III anyone?); a decision is made to label a certain movie a cataclysmic failure even before it comes out, and then everyone follows suit to appear in the right camp.