The Island of Dr. Moreau
Year: 1996
Rating: PG-13
Length: 96 minutes / 1.60 hours
As a fan of H.G. Wells’ works, I was intrigued by the negative reception The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) received in this latest film adaptation of the novel of the same name. Surely it couldn’t be as bad as everyone says it was? Having obtained the Director’s Cut of the movie on DVD, I finally found an evening to sit down and watch it and can confirm it was pretty bad. Not so bad it’s good, but that’s the problem.
For a movie that had both the up-and-coming Val Kilmer and the respected titan Marlon Brando, it’s weird that both actors play such minor roles in this film. Of course, if you read more about the troubled production, you’ll know why the result is a bit of a mess. But ignoring these behind-the-scenes facts, it’s difficult to watch this movie and wonder what the point of it all was. Wells’ original novel wasn’t terribly long, but it felt like there was so much padding here that you could sleep through entire sections and you wouldn’t be missing much.
While the slight modernizing (to mid-90s tech, mind you) was an interesting way to handle the source material, this movie seems to mostly gloss over the point of the original book in favor of grotesque animal-hybrid costuming and makeup. Granted, these transformations look quite good for when it was made, and it doesn’t suffer from early CGI that doesn’t age as well as it did for other films of this era. But the handling of this story made it seem as though it would have been better as a Twilight Zone episode than a 100-minute movie.
A fluff-filled movie that doesn’t play to any strengths, I give The Island of Dr. Moreau 2.0 stars out of 5.
