Brando and Kilmer make bizzare duo in movie

By Laskmi Pamuntjak-Djohan

JAKARTA (JP): The Island of Dr. Moreau, based on H.G. Wells' century-old horror novel, is, to put it mildly, a colossal mess. Given that the tale has been committed to film twice before - in 1933 under the title The Island of Lost Souls, and in 1977 under the title The Island of Dr. Moreau - this version naturally attempts to convince us that there is a worthy reason to do it again, the first and foremost being to promote the message that humans are capable of more animalism than animals. Hence the casting of Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer in one of the most bizarre duos ever seen on screen.

Apparently the bedlam involved in the making of the film baffled even the publicity people at New Line. First, the press release actually had Val Kilmer playing the wrong role. Then everybody decided to play musical chairs - first the original writers fled, then the director (Richard Stanley replaced by John Frankenheimer) then the actors (Rob Morrow replaced by David Thewlis). Not to mention that the poor remaining souls still had to contend with various comparatively minor obstacles - both natural and man-made - such as production delays brought on by a tropical storm, and something that has turned Val Kilmer into the Shannen Doherty of cinema - his God complex.

There is one positive thing that can be said about the movie, and it happens at the very start. It is unlikely that you'll see a more impressive title sequence. Unfortunately the movie gets worse from there on.

The story opens with a dramatic zoom, revealing a raft adrift on a vast ocean. The narrator on board, U.N. representative Edward Douglas (David Thewlis), tells us that his Jakarta-bound jet plane crashed and that he has been drifting on the Java Sea for six days. Jet plane? The U.N.? Well, apparently the reason why the century-old tale has been wrested away from its original Victorian setting and transposed into the here-and-now is to accommodate the recent issues of modern genetics. But we'll get to that soon.

Back to Douglas. He was found by a supply boat called Ombak Penari, with a Javanese captain (Agoes Soedjarwo) -- who, to my surprise, spoke "familiar" Indonesian -- and a doctor named Montgomery (Val Kilmer) on board. The latter brought the ill- fated Brit to a small island where he assists Dr. R.G.V. Moreau (Marlon Brando), a Nobel prize winning geneticist who, 17 years earlier, was forced out of the United States by animal rights activists who deemed his scientific interests too unhealthy for society. A trifle convenient, I'd say, that Moreau had managed to invent Velcro beforehand so that he has enough money to buy an island and construct a virtual paradise in which to conduct his experiments.

But up to this point it is all pretty delightful Orientalist escapism, with gorgeous architecture against a lush, tropical backdrop and an exotic maiden (Fairuza Balk as Moreau's daughter, Aissa) gyrating seductively to new age music like scenes straight out of a Conrad novel.

Poor Douglas wants nothing more than to radio for help, but fate has it that he stay and endure becoming the living witness to all the things that can go wrong when man tries to play God.

Having sensed something amiss when he found himself locked in his room by Montgomery, Douglas manages to escape, but only to find himself in Moreau's laboratory and stumbling upon a horrific birth in progress. As it turns out, Moreau has been pursuing his dream to create a non-violent, perfect human race.

For some unfathomable reason, he believes that combining human and animal DNA will produce a species embodying the best qualities of both. But the concrete results -- a proliferation of half-demented, snaggle-toothed and furry two-legged mutants -- display the possibility of a flawed theory. Some of Moreau's "manimals" are quite harmless, such as Majai (Nelson de Rosa), the ferret-like dwarf with whom he plays Chopin's Polonaise Fantaisie on the piano. However, he seems to end up with more byproducts with the worst aspects of men and animals -- those with natural instincts to kill.

These instincts were previously controlled by Moreau and Montgomery through plenty of drugs and "shock discipline" through electronic implants. But one day the most rebellious of the "manimals", Hyena-Swine (Daniel Rigney), finally says "enough is enough", rips the device out, and plots an uprising to overthrow the human masters.

Therein, it seems, lies the movie's social message. People like Moreau have done nothing but inflict pain and unhappiness by giving life to a population of tortured beings that are not sure whether they are humans or animals.

But bearing with Douglas can be fun. You haven't lived until you see Brando making a typically grand entrance - but this time not only grossly overweight, but looking like a medieval pope riding in a mosquito-netted carriage and flouncing around in a garb of flowing white veils and a wide-brimmed sunbonnet, with his face covered in Kabuki make-up that sticks like gooey pancake. You just can't make heads or tails out of what period or fashion he is trying to represent.

And that's just the beginning. Whether he's trying to recover from the heat with a foot-high ice bucket over his head, or explain Schoenberg's atonal style to a flock of growling furballs ready to leap at his throat, he's completely out of it.

The make-up effects by Stan Winston, the man responsible for both Terminators, Jurassic Park and Aliens, are worthy of recognition, for amidst the general furriness they do suggest a variety of genetic material - leopard, baboon, dog, cat, goat, and so on.

But those creatures are not what makes this movie so bizarre. Even more freakish are Brando and Kilmer. For one, here is Brando, once hailed as the great American actor, making a complete travesty of his talent. Acting like the Queen and speaking all his lines in plummy, heavily mannered tones, he has truly degenerated into an epic joke. Kilmer is equally unnatural, giving every line a tipsy reading that makes him more goofy than evil.

Perhaps all such indulgent eccentricities come into play because neither actor seems to have a clue about his role. And the giddy incomprehensibility of the movie does suggest that the director and his stars are working on entirely different films. Director Frankenheimer, best known for his sixties hits (The Manchurian Candidate, Birdman of Alcatraz and Seconds) may have wanted to do a good old thriller, although his predecessor may have wanted to stress the religious vs. scientific aspect of the story. But he surely cannot shoulder all the blame, for he was hired onto a project that was already in progress and he came too late to save anything, including the actors' allegiance.