30 Years Ago, The Island Of Dr. Moreau Ended Two Legendary Careers

While The Odyssey just reminded us that some stories are timeless, it’s very much an exception to the rule. The work of nearly every writer, actor, and director has a lifespan, and most of those lifespans aren’t much longer than those of their creators. Even Christopher Nolan had to reimagine The Odyssey for a contemporary audience, and one day, his approach will look old-fashioned too. That’s not a new revelation, but it was still remarkable when, 30 years ago today, one infamous debacle ended two of those long lives at once.

As Marx wrote, history repeats itself: first as Apocalypse Now, then as The Island of Dr. Moreau. The latter limped into theaters in 1996, took a critical drubbing, and dragged itself out of sight to perish in the cinematic wilderness. Both films star Marlon Brando, and both had productions so infamously troubled they inspired documentaries. But while Apocalypse Now overcame its challenges to become a haunting classic, Dr. Moreau is an obscure mess.

That’s a shame, because you can catch glimpses of the vision that drowned off the beaches of Australia. Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau tells the full story, but in short, a revolving door of co-stars eventually spat out Val Kilmer, who refused to get along with director Richard Stanley or anyone else. Stanley, already on thin ice with New Line Cinema, was fired and replaced with old Hollywood hand John Frankenheimer, who feuded with Kilmer, who feuded with Brando. Brando refused to learn his lines and would hole up in his trailer for hours as everyone else sweated through the jungle heat. It only got worse from there.

Into all of this came David Thewlis as Edward Douglas, a perpetually wild-eyed UN functionary who’s rescued from a plane crash by Dr. Montgomery (Kilmer) and taken to a remote island. There, Douglas discovers that Brando’s Moreau is making human-animal hybrids who worship him as a father and a god. Moreau’s goal is to elevate humanity to a more enlightened state, but his ambitions blind him to the fact that the animal side of his children is threatening to take charge.

Douglas stumbling across a llama-woman giving birth to a fresh monstrosity is a genuinely unsettling moment, and there are scenes in Moreau’s compound, like when Brando plays piano with the two-foot-four Nelson de la Rosa, where the doctor’s sad attempts to simulate family life have genuine pathos. But the film rushes through its first half, then falls apart in its second. Frankenheimer, appropriately, was stuck making a tortured hybrid, and whatever good ideas may have existed throughout various drafts, it ultimately becomes a movie about furries shooting machine guns.

Both Brando and Kilmer were dealing with personal issues — Kilmer blamed his behavior on a looming divorce, while Brando had recently lost a daughter to suicide. Kilmer brought a vivacious sleaze to Montgomery that showed why he was a star, but the legendary Brando, despite his inherent gravitas, only offered a pantomime of his famous Colonel Kurtz. Brando was panned for his performance, but frankly, he still deserved a fair bit of credit for gamely playing against grunting men in animal costumes. He’d make one more dud before bouncing back for The Score, which closed out the career of one of Hollywood’s most iconic actors.

A detached genius hiding out in his compound and refusing to accept the reality of his decline feels like an appropriate late-period role for Brando, but he wasn’t the only man to suffer through a nadir here. The Island of Dr. Moreau had so many things go wrong that no one asked what should have been the obvious question: did anyone want a new Moreau film?

Putting aside an obscure Soviet take on The Invisible Man and a cheapie Canadian production of The Shape of Things to Come, it had been 23 years since the last notable H.G. Wells adaptation, and that crack at Moreau wasn’t particularly good either. H.G. Wells helped create science fiction as we know it, and his bibliography is a laundry list of influential ideas: The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, When the Sleeper Wakes. But while The Island of Doctor Moreau is a fascinating novel, it’s also a decidedly Victorian one.

The questions the 1896 book asks about the role of religion in society, the morality of science, and what it means to be human in a post-Darwinian world can all seem as old-fashioned as the 1996 movie tends to feel, and while these and other ideas from Wells’ oeuvre can certainly be updated for modern times, watching poor Fairuza Balk freak out as she becomes more cat-like wasn’t really the way to go about it. The Island of Dr. Moreau came out a month after Dolly was introduced to the world, but it seems like there’s a century between them.

Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s been slim pickings for Wells adaptations since 1996 — a lousy 2002 Time Machine movie, Paul Verhoeven’s contentious Hollow Man, and a variety of cheap Wars of the Worlds that culminated in last year’s infamous debacle from Amazon Prime and Ice Cube. The best of the bunch took only loose inspiration from the source material (Leigh Whannell’s 2020 Invisible Man) or found a contemporary angle (Spielberg’s Worlds oozes post-9/11 anxiety). No one’s taken a crack at Moreau again.

It takes a strong vision to make Wells work now, and many creators (and budgets) don’t seem up for the challenge. Watching The Island of Dr. Moreau therefore feels like you’re watching two titans fade into the mist together. We’ll always have their creations, and we live in a world they shaped, but to go back to when they were truly relevant, well, you’d need a time machine.

The Island of Dr. Moreau is available on YouTube.