The plot of "Mysterious Island" begins with a group of Civil War soldiers taking an inexplicably strange balloon trip through time and space. The guys end up on a (you guessed it) mysterious island with dangers around every corner. There is a large sea creature, pirates, swamp monsters, and the most cunning foe of all--men wearing shag carpeting as coats. This being SyFy again, you only get glimpses of these dreaded evils (poorly done) and mainly have to content yourself with scary sounds. The drama, such as it is, is executed through amateur theatrics as the cast react to unseen horrors. To complicate matters, the gang encounter two modern girls. This creates the possibility for some of the movie's most uncomfortable scenes dealing with political correctness and racism. It's quite painful really, especially since one of the women is only concerned with her make-up kit and flirting. I might be concerned for survival myself, but who am I to judge.
Our heroes start to lose their own (don't worry, you're not really invested in anyone) as the secrets of the island are explained by a mystery man. A daring plot to escape is enacted and the movie ends rather abruptly after an out-of-left field display of self sacrifice attempts to make previously loathsome characters more noble. "Mysterious Island" certainly has all of the components necessary to make it a bad movie necessity, but ultimately I just didn't care. In the end, I just didn't even think it was smart enough to be dumb fun. And for SyFy originals, that's a crucial misstep. My advice, catch it for free on SyFy before making a blind purchase--that way you know what you're getting. KGHarris, 4/12.
Click Here For Most Helpful Customer Reviews >>
Rarely am I moved to write an actual movie review, but this movie was SO BAD that I will, if only to warn people off of it. I love Jules Verne. I read unabridged copies of (English translations of) From Earth to the Moon and Journey to the Center of the Earth when I was only eight years old. I've read Mysterious Island, arguably my favorite Verne novel, at least a dozen times cover to cover. These are some of the best adventure stories ever written, fruit of an unfettered imagination fueled by the amazing discoveries in physics and engineering of Verne's day, a day when anything seemed possible. They are also darned good STORIES, full of rich plot and historical context (well or poorly done). They literally beg for someone to make equally unabridged movies out of them, movies that simply realize on film the story that Verne so ably tells, with the lightest of editorial hands.Until someone does. That someone INEVITABLY decides that they are a better writer than Verne (or, in other contexts, than H. Rider Haggard, than Edgar Allan Poe, than Edgar Rice Burroughs, than H. G. Wells) and they absolutely butcher the story. The previous (1961) film version of Mysterious Island, for example, featured women in the cast and giant crabs. I'm amazed that Verne didn't return from the grave to rip off the fingers of whoever it was who wrote in such abominations.
But that version pales indeed compared to this one. Where can I even begin? The film supposedly starts in Richmond, Virginia, in civil war fields surrounded by trees festooned with Spanish Moss.
Excuse me? Spanish Moss? Really? I've lived in Virginia for almost a decade of my life, in North Carolina for four decades, driven through Richmond and visited it dozens of times. There isn't any Spanish Moss growing in a tree in Virginia ANYWHERE short of Virginia Beach on the coast next to the NC border, and it is rare even there. You don't find it even in North Carolina anywhere but at the coast (there's none of it in Durham, well over 100 miles south of Richmond, for example) and near the South Carolina border. You don't find trees decked out like the ones in the film north of South Carolina, and I wouldn't be surprised if those scenes where shot by a California Yankee in Georgia or Florida somewhere far, far from Virginia.
I gritted my teeth and tried to suspend disbelief, hoping that this was just a rough patch and that this version would indeed still be the one I fervently await, one that just presents Verne's story, with Verne's characters, Verne's plot, Verne's animals, on Verne's vision of the island. Believe me, the story is strong enough to stand being perfectly linearly translated into film. No crabs or clumsily inserted female characters need apply, giant or otherwise, no matter how romantic or politically correct it might be.
Ha, ha, silly me. The story starts "in Richmond" (it tells us that on the screen, although we never see as much as a building that might conceivably be part of Richmond, and the first scene resembles nothing whatsoever found in the actual book where the prisoners are literally wandering around town). In THIS movie A bunch of soldiers are marching through a country field escorting a bunch of prisoners. The prisoners are revealed to be -Verne's cast, sort of. Herbert, Neb, Cyrus Harding. Pencroft has transmogrified into ONE OF THE REBEL GUARDS (who is angry and violent and racist, nothing like Pencroft in the real story). A rebel deserter en route to his execution has been "mysteriously" grafted onto the cast as one of the prisoners. Gideon Spillett joins them through some clumsy artifice.
Suddenly, cannonballs explode nearby. Chaos! The guards are down! Escape! Spillett leads them to -a balloon (still no sign of anything vaguely resembling a human habitation, let alone a city, this is being shot in some farmer's field somewhere)! Off into the skies! Hooray, maybe they'll kill off the deserter and somehow return to Verne's story line.
No such luck. The very next scene has Gideon Spillett shot dead, not the add-on cast member. Pencroft (the rebel guard) has somehow hung onto the balloon and Spillett is killed in the ensuing fight once he gets on board. Damn, it's going to be hard to get back to Verne's story now, isn't it, with one of the main characters gone (two if you include Top, and personally I very much would include Top), a new character, and a character that shares nothing but a name with Verne's cast.
Naturally, the next scene has the balloon swept into a transdimensional spacetime warp that just happens to open up in the stormy Georg-I mean "Virginia" skies and everybody blacks out. Globe-spanning storms (Verne's artifice) are too likely, I suppose, too passe, we need space aliens or black holes or plain old tinkerbell magic. Naturally, they wake up on a beach, and -Harding is missing.
At this point I'm openly weeping, of course. I mean the pain is visceral. But the director toys with me this one last time -maybe, just maybe, after this absolutely absurd beginning we will return to Verne's excellent story and abandon this low budget self-abusive mental fantasy that the screenwriter is more talented than one of the most amazing writers of all science fictiondom, if only they get to plagiarize the name to suck in the unwary. I keep watching through a haze of pain.
After some egregious and clumsy attempts to make the film modern and relevant by using Pencroft as a foil for some sort of statement about racial prejudice (but oh so delicately, no use of the "n"-word here) we hear animal noises coming from the jungle behind the beach. Oh no! Giant Crabs! Or something. The rebel coward Christian deserter (cannon fodder from day one) sneaks into the brush at night, where we are treated to the usual cry of surprise
when the noises that sound like a large, dangerous animal turn out to be -a large dangerous animal! Totally in character, right, for a coward. Next morning the survivors find his eviscerated remains. They may not use the "n" word as it might unexpectedly offend viewers of a film set in the middle of the Civil War, but the director has no objection to piles of steaming intestines with a blood-smeared cross perched on top (so we can identify the otherwise unrecognizable mess as the deserter).
At this point I'm reaching for the button that will send this movie to where the lights go when the lights go out, to oblivion. I'm trying to make myself tap it gently instead of smashing the brand new Galaxy Tab on which I am watching in rage and frustration -anything to make it stop.
Before I can get there, the last scene that plays out on the screen, one that is emblazoned on my memory now as I tell this story to you to try to help you keep from making the horrible mistake that I myself made, conned into twenty minutes of agonizing torment under the delusion that this movie shares some memetic content with the superb work from which it righteously stole the name, is -wait for it -a SOUTHERN MANSION (one that no doubt just happened to be handy in this low budget piece of .... right next to the fields where they shot the original scenes) on this "mysterious" "island" that is probably somewhere in Mississippi or Louisiana or on the Georgia coast.
The screen finally darkens and goes silent, my trembling hand gropes for my beer, for Valium, for a syringe full of uncut heroin, anything to make me forget.
The Horror. The Horror.
If only life had a "delete forever, and pretend that it never ever existed" button. That's how bad it is. Don't watch it.
rgb
Best Deals for Jules Verne's Mysterious Island (2012)
Pruitt Taylor Vince fans will be pleased to know he dies early in the film so they can feel free to eject the disc at any time. This film combines Mysterious Island, and Bermuda Triangle time travel with morlocks (from Verne's "Time Machine") into one film and does so rather poorly.The film deals with issues of race, but does so as a "now vs then" scenario. Gina Holden and Susie Abromeit provide the token eye candy as women aviators from 2012 named Fogg. Phileas Fogg was a Verne character from "Around the World in 80 Days." Toss in Captain Nemo (William Morgan Sheppard) from "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" and a giant octopus that prevents any ship from leaving and I think you get the idea. In movies, not all gumbo is good.
The acting was not great. The dialouge was faux-drama. The special effects weren't. The movie ended with a sequel in mind (good luck with that). This film might work for preteens, although the 1961 version keeps looking better with time.
PARENTAL GUIDE: No f-bombs, N-word, sex, or nudity.
No comments:
Post a Comment