Hunting for adventure in 'The Ghost and the Darkness'

By Laksmi Pamuntjak-Djohan

JAKARTA (JP): If you think that The Ghost and the Darkness sounds like one of your typical Joseph Conrad titles, you may not be far off the mark. Instead of taking place in some exotic Malayan locale, it tells the story of the "most famous African adventure" as seen from the eyes of yet another sterling specimen of the British Empire, Lt. Col. John Patterson.

The Ghost and the Darkness takes place during the waning years of the 19th century, when England, France and Germany are racing to complete the first railroad to facilitate the ivory trade. Patterson (Val Kilmer), a "brilliant engineer" and a "fine English gentleman" of Irish descent, is given five months by railroad magnate-cum-colonialist par excellence John Beaumont (Tom Wilkinson) to build a bridge over the Tsavo river. No problem so far.

Arriving in Uganda, Patterson churns out bookish facts about African flora and fauna while drinking in the beauty of the wilderness for the first time. The team's missionary, Angus Starling (Brian McCardie), is suitably impressed. When asked how long he's been in Africa, Patterson replies cockily, "Less than 24 hours." And you really don't expect any less qualified person to shoulder the white man's burden in a place as ominous as Africa, right?

But, Samuel (John Kani), his native adviser, acquaints him with reality by telling him that Tsavo is "the worst place on earth". Not a moment too soon, Patterson's utopian vision of "bringing worlds together" is shattered by feuding workers, endorsing the long-held view of Orientals being much given to superstition, intrigue, suspicion, and confrontation. And, as usual, this material is pure background. We're told that the Africans don't get along with the Indians, and the Moslems fight with the Hindus, but the ramifications of these internal struggles are left unexplored.

Why? For the simple fact that this tale is meant to showcase Patterson's other magnificent talent -- hunting. When a lion kills one of his workers, he hunts and kills it with one shot. He instantly becomes the hero of the people. But the glory soon proves temporary, as two almost supernaturally vicious man-eating lions start stalking his camp, dragging the victims off to their bone-festooned lair, and killing more than 130 people.

Falling way behind schedule, and confronted by the ire of his boss whose only concern is his own knighthood, Patterson just can't resist the profound demands of his own British ego. Together with legendary hunter Charles Remington (Michael Douglas), they set out on a hunting spree to eliminate the lions and show nature who's boss.

With lions being a threatened species, it's hard not to think that they might have a point -- right or wrong, they're at least looking out for their own interests. But, naturally, there is an excuse. The natives believe that these lions -- called "The Ghost" and "The Darkness" -- are evil spirits. After all, if they are just lions, then why be righteous about killing them?

Like most of the surviving accounts of white men in the dark and mysterious Orient, The Ghost and the Darkness is replete with Orientalist cliches: heat, dust, intense energy, the promise of terror, mystical force, and a proliferation of bare-chested African blacks and turbaned Hindus and Moslems as a sideshow. It also perpetuates the worst depiction of the Masai, a warrior tribe whose ethnographic richness has so inspired modern anthropology. Here we have an Orientalist discourse which, for all intents and purposes, only makes sense as an attempt to remind us of past western glories.

It sure explains all that soppy opening stuff about it being a true story. Sure, it is nice to know that yet another tale of a white man saving Africa from itself really did take place. But that knowledge casts a pall of inevitability over the whole affair: Had the lions won, you'd have heard of them before.

Yet there is something oddly satisfying about this movie. Basically, it is a kind of suspense film you just don't see very often. A force of nature in its own element can be a truly frightening thing, and why it succeeds where Twister doesn't is that director Stephen Hopkins -- whose screen credits include Predator 2 and Nightmare on Elm Street 5 -- knows exactly what works in this kind of film. Although he could have done better with the animatronics, the lions' formidability is sensed throughout. And whenever they are on the prowl, you'll find yourself scooting to the edge of your seat.

Granted, there is a tremendous primal appeal to the battle between man and beast, enhanced in no small measure by Vilmos Zsigmond's stunning cinematography. When a worker is dragged from the tent in a fast blur, the scene sends goose bumps up your arm. Best of all is the blowing fields of bramble where evil lurks -- somewhere.

Credits should also go to the cast, whose well-defined characters owe a great deal to two-time Oscar winning screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men). Beaumont, characterized here as the world's worst racist and manager, is portrayed with sufficient menace by Tom Wilkinson. John Kani's Samuel is exceptionally funny, especially when exchanging verbal ripostes with Brian McCardie's Starling, who is an irrepressible twit with "death" stamped all over his face. Om Puri, a veteran of Satyajit Ray's films, is intense as Abdullah, the leader of the Moslems, and Henry Cele is simply glorious as Mahina, the charismatic leader of the black.

But the film belongs to Kilmer. Though he bounces in and out of what is supposed to be an Irish accent, he makes a sympathetic and convincing hero. He is on screen in nearly every scene, and delivers a steady, subtle performance that does much to redeem himself from his embarrassingly self-indulgent performance in The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Less successful is Douglas. Playing a renegade type with a tortured past, his one moment of introspection is supposed to define his entire personality. But, in effect, he does little beyond recycling his scraggly Jack Colton character from the Romancing the Stone series. The only hitch is that he was younger and funnier then.

In the end, you can't help but feel that the lions are not "The Ghost" and "The Darkness" they are made out to be, but intelligent creatures viewing the railroad project as representative of white people's exploitation of the continent. They are merely articulating these feelings by eating as many of the builders as they can.

But, of course, history has its own ways, and all the white folks merrily go back to colonizing Africa. Don't we all love happy endings?