Let's just get this out of the way: yes, I'm once more cheating on the site by reviewing this big-budgeted star vehicle directed by people who have some rather impressive accomplishments under their belts. However: this adaptation of
The Island of Dr. Moreau is considered to be one of the worst films ever made, in no small part to its legendarily troubled production. I knew bits and pieces of the story behind the creation of this film and that was why I sought it out to begin with--plus, there's always at least a little joy in examining movies that people consider to be the worst ever. Let's face it: the most famous "worst movies ever" are not actually the worst movies ever made, just the ones that are considered famously bad by mainstream audiences.
Freddy Got Fingered, for example,
is not nearly as bad as
Night of Horror,
Humongous, or any of the animated musicals based off of the Titanic story. I've determined for myself that sometimes mainstream audiences can be a little spoiled--while also constantly deserving better--and I think today's movie really speaks to that idea.
The Island of Dr. Moreau is actually a very impressive effort even if it's definitely still harebrained enough to have pissed off a lot of critics back in '96.
We open on the lifeboat of diplomat Edward Douglas (David Thewlis, whom many of you know as Professor Lupin of Hogwarts), whose plane went down on his way to Asia to negotiate a peace settlement. It's mentioned briefly that the year is 2010, but this has almost no bearing on the story whatsoever. Douglas is witnessing his two fellow survivors, army folk by the looks of them, savagely beating each other to death over the last canteen of water. Soon he is alone when the two inevitably kill each other (with no small help from the opportunistic Douglas himself), their bloody bodies vanishing beneath the waves to be eaten by the sharks. A delirious Douglas is eventually rescued by an apparent drug-addict and self-described veterinarian named Montgomery, played by Val Kilmer. Douglas is to go with Montgomery to the island of his employer, a scientist named Moreau.
Upon arriving on the island, Douglas meets Aissa, a stunning young woman who claims to be the doctor's daughter. Her presence helps bring Douglas a sense of peace, but it will not last long. When he inevitably goes poking around in the night, Douglas learns the secret of the island in the most gruesome way possible when he finds a bunch of doctors helping some kind of humanoid deer-creature gives birth to its braying, horrifying offspring. When he flees the situation worsens, as he finds himself surrounded by dozens by disfigured creatures that are seemingly half-man, half-animal. And indeed they are exactly that. As you may expect, Moreau (soon revealed to be played by Marlon Brando in a performance I cannot adequately summarize) is the man responsible, and Douglas has his chance to meet Moreau the next morning, when the scientist rides up in his draped palanquin, his skin obscured by thick white robes and a garish amount of sunblock. At dinner, Moreau introduces Douglas to his "children," including the exceedingly polite Azazello, made from a dog, and Majai, a diminutive creature made from God-knows-what who resembles something like a severely premature fetus who lived. Moreau has made his creations from splicing human genes into animals, but they must be controlled with a device called "the Pain" which administers electrical shocks to the beast-folk via implants--plus, they must be given drugs to prevent them from regressing back into their bestial forms.
The unstable peace of the island is finally broken when Montgomery and Douglas inform Moreau of a slaughtered rabbit carcass they found earlier. The beast-people live by a strict code of social etiquette called "the Law" which is another buffer against their reversion--one of the codes of the Law is "not to eat fish or flesh," so this is a sign that one of the beast-men is going rogue. This turns out to be a creature called Lomai, who is killed impulsively by Azazello at the trial Moreau holds for him. When Lomai's remains are cremated, a friend of his, a Hyena-Swine hybrid, discovers his implant and thus the source of the Pain. He removes his implant and forms a small gang who does the same. It won't be long before the questions Moreau refused to answer for his children catch up with him, and change the dynamic of who is a man, an animal, or a god in this place.
I think I've now seen basically every version of
Island of Dr. Moreau that there is. The 1977 adaptation was passable, the 1933
Island of Lost Souls is a minor masterpiece of great '30s actors, and the 1921 silent German adaptation is a racist pile of feces. Plus there are movies like
Terror is a Man and
The Twilight People which, while not featuring a Dr. Moreau specifically by name, use the same general character types and situations as H.G. Wells' original 1896 novel. Wells' book is one of the few pieces of Victorian lit from my childhood which can still give me chills to this day, and the general premise is one I'd like to play with in my own fiction someday. And I think that the film's original director Richard Stanley understood the concepts behind the novel extremely well (even arguably improving on some of them), and with some minor divergences in the presentation of the characters, this is a pretty pure adaptation on top of everything--it's certainly more loyal than
Island of Lost Souls, which Wells himself lived to see and hate. So it should be said right away that I will have a bias, because I have a certain fondness for the story. What makes it my favorite adaptation of the novel exists within those divergences. So, what did Stanley and Frankenheimer do that made it different?
Well, let's start with the most obvious, and that's Dr. Moreau himself. Marlon Brando apparently wanted to channel much of his previous portrayal of Kurtz from
Apocalypse Now in the formation of his Moreau character, and not without reason. Both of them are isolated eccentrics who live in quasi-inaccessible jungles, who are discovered by everyman protagonists who learn firsthand how deep their madness extends before the worlds they've made for themselves collapse. Both Kurtz and Moreau were once considered eminent in their respective fields, but have lost all sense of purpose and reason in a sea of ever-complicating horror. But at the same time, Kurtz did not take on attire which made him look like, as
this Wold Newton article has it, "the Pillsbury dough boy wearing drapes." Nor did he affect a mincing what-if-Truman-Capote-was-English accent. What makes Moreau and Kurtz different is that Kurtz's madness is a product of the Vietnam War, whereas Moreau seems to have a lack of motivation. This was one of the most interesting things about the character to me.
In the scene where Douglas meets Moreau, he specifically asks him, "Why are you doing this?" And Moreau is clearly uncomfortable with the question--he changes the topic entirely, to make it about how he "just can't tolerate the sun." Later, at the dinner scene, he gives a deeper explanation, that infusing animals with human traits will create people who are freed from the "Satanic" faults of human psychology. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense, as what happens to the beast-people is exactly what you'd expect--they have gained enough humanity to walk, talk, and have manners, but they are still close enough to being animals that this creates an existential crisis for them. They have
more psychological problems than the average person, and any idiot would know in advance that that was an inevitability. Moreau shows on several occasions, however, that he simply doesn't care--it's the
end result of this work that matters, and if there are some fuck-ups in the prototyping he'll coo and purr them back into submission. One clue to the mystery arises in the summary of the Law, where one of the tenets
not present in Wells' novel is "not to make love to more than one, or in any which way." So polyamory and homosexuality are apparently off the table entirely for the beast-folk. One could argue that in the case of the former, Moreau is trying to avoid the sort of socialization that animals like lions practice; a lot of animals are naturally polyamorous. But assuming that the "any which way" bit
is meant to refer to homosexuality, then we can view Moreau in the context of a social purist, a person ruled by his intolerance of the imperfection of the people around him. This ties in with the film's theme of Christian dualism, "God vs. Satan," as it pertains to Moreau's role as a creator. Moreau thinks he can remake a flawed mankind anew, but no amount of science can give him that power. "He tampered in God's domain," as Ed Wood once put it, and as my MST3K-loving ass put it as the movie ended.
But I don't think the theme of the movie, as it is in other movies about God-domain tampering, is an anti-science one. I think it simply argues against perfectionism. The movie is all about flaws, and related to that, it's about chaos. Why else does beastman M'Ling read Yeats' "The Second Coming" at dinner? Moreau, as hypocritical and flawed as he is, is the lynchpin holding all of this together, and as in the book, his death means the end of social order on the island as a consequence of what he left for his "children." And here we're starting to get into what makes people think this movie is bad. After Marlon Brando leaves the movie, dismembered by his own beast-men, we lose our sense of narrative structure. I'm not the first critic to point this out. Things just sort of
stop. We see Douglas trying to find a sample of the anti-regression serum for Aissa, and it takes way too long. We see Val Kilmer slowly go insane from stress and drugs, and this seems to linger unnecessarily. After the hour mark, you could cut out about twenty minutes of the forty which remain, and the movie would flow much better. But you'd still have to make something of the comparatively sloppy editing and continuity that ensues.
I think the real-world reason for this post-Brando chaos, where it seems to become an entirely different movie, is probably a result of Richard Stanley's scenes contrasting with John Frankenheimer's. A lazy, less art-inclined script might be accountable for moments like Kilmer's "I wanna go to Dog Heaven." But just for funsies, let's assume this was deliberate. Suddenly, the shift in editing, acting, and flow are a result of the absence of God. The Maker has been slain, and in his wake reigns disorder. Moreau almost gets posthumous vindication of his godhood in this, even if all of the shit that follows his death cascades out of all of the mistakes he made in his attempts to control the beast-folk society. One could almost see a pro-religion message in this, given that invariably the message at the end boils down to, "I wonder who the real animals are? Man? Or beast?" Have we, too, lost our God? Is that why we are dragged down into the Satanic flaws instilled in us in birth, which make us create the evils of this world?
I myself don't buy that that was what they were going for, because Richard Stanley has indicated that his outlook on life is considerably more mystical. In preparation for this review, I watched the 2014 documentary
Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau, which is a fascinating watch even if you don't end up doing anything at all with this movie. The older I get the more I love hearing production stories for movies, and it is my shame to admit that I take special interest in movies with bizarre or horrifying production stories.
Island of Dr. Moreau was pretty fucked up, to say the least. How the movie metamorphosized from Stanley's artistic vision of mystic, universal questions to Frankenheimer's relatively commercial New Line product is like a goddamn drug trip. An apt metaphor, as psychedelic drugs were a big influence on Stanley's scripting and directing, alongside his beliefs in magic. For a movie based on the idea of post-theistic chaos to have a production as chaotic as the events depicted in it is one of those magical breaches between fiction and reality that I love looking through history for. Every so often we are hit with something that
satisfies our desire to see patterns in everything reminds us that while life creates art, sometimes too does art create life. I don't recall if Stanley talks about this link directly in the documentary but I know his type well enough to feel that he was satisfied by this. Even with the trauma and career damage it brought to him.
The Island of Dr. Moreau is far from perfect. Some of the lines are horrible, the performances vary depending on at which point in the production the scene was filmed, there are some awful CGI monkeys, and its female lead doesn't really get to do anything but look pretty, flinch a lot, and eventually make embarrassingly dubbed-over cat noises. But it definitely deserves a better appraisal than what it's gotten over the years, so give it a try. And don't worry about the art. Just keep your eyes on Brando's insanely campy performance and all will be well.
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