When this movie first came out, I was a kid, and to me it was pretty interesting and eye-opening. Certainly compared to doing homework and my paper route in the suburbs, this kid was pretty lucky to get kidnapped by "indians". He got to hang out and swim with naked girls, hunt animals, and fight. There's definitely some wish fulfillment and some fantasy in the film, which presents itself as a sort of "heart of darkness" tale of the encounter between civilization and nature.
That's a good starting point, perhaps, for the problems with the film. We have basically 2 tribes, and one of them likes to take lots of drugs and have lots of sex, while the other one is brutal and cannibalistic. This neatly ties the 2 dominant ways that white colonists tend to look at indigenous cultures into a concrete dichotomy: the noble savage vs. the cannibal savage. Also interestingly, the film shows the father figure (Powers Boothe) as a would-be white savior, but his attempts to blow up the dam with dynamite are preempted by the magic of the noble tribesmen. Regardless of the political appeal of this conclusion, the film doesn't really offer any kind of answers for what is to be done to save the rain forests or the indigenous peoples or, more importantly, to help them save themselves by any means other than frogs and magic. It's just, like "Medicine Man" and other films of this type, using the "jungle" and its inhabitants as a means of drawing the audience in and giving us a fantasy version of indigenous life.
The cast in the film is notably poor, especially Boorman's son Charley, who plays the kidnapped boy as an adolescent. To be fair, the script demands an awful lot of Charley Boorman, but he can't really deliver much of it. Meg Foster barely registers, and the film in general has a very paternalistic and patriarchal tone, almost totally concerned with the relationship between men who are fathers and sons.
If, like me, you have fond memories of this one from your childhood, perhaps it's best to just leave them there. The film is very well- photographed, but all the scenes with "wild" animals look like somebody put the animals right there to be photographed. It suffers very greatly compared to, say, Herzog's films like "Fitzcarraldo" where instead of inserting tropical animals just to provide some momentary visual interest, the jungle even in its dangers is allowed to become "normal." We feel as if the tribes in Boorman's film live within a vacation destination or a zoo.
It's also well-directed, but in the sensational way that Boorman seems to only know how. If you look at some of Boorman's other films, like "Zardoz" and "Excalibur", you'll see that he sort of lets actors do whatever they want, resulting in the more experienced actors totally dominating all the film's energy (arguably, in "Excalibur", that's part of the design of the film). Here, we have no real actors. While Boothe has a nice low-key demeanor, that only makes it more ridiculous when he grabs a machine gun and starts killing the "bad" natives like he was your average 80s action hero.
It's somewhat of an admirable effort, considering how many other films you could see in the 80s that didn't offer the sort of escapist adventure, nor any of the message of this film -- however, it's deeply and intrinsically flawed and does not make up for in drama what it lacks in realism.
That's a good starting point, perhaps, for the problems with the film. We have basically 2 tribes, and one of them likes to take lots of drugs and have lots of sex, while the other one is brutal and cannibalistic. This neatly ties the 2 dominant ways that white colonists tend to look at indigenous cultures into a concrete dichotomy: the noble savage vs. the cannibal savage. Also interestingly, the film shows the father figure (Powers Boothe) as a would-be white savior, but his attempts to blow up the dam with dynamite are preempted by the magic of the noble tribesmen. Regardless of the political appeal of this conclusion, the film doesn't really offer any kind of answers for what is to be done to save the rain forests or the indigenous peoples or, more importantly, to help them save themselves by any means other than frogs and magic. It's just, like "Medicine Man" and other films of this type, using the "jungle" and its inhabitants as a means of drawing the audience in and giving us a fantasy version of indigenous life.
The cast in the film is notably poor, especially Boorman's son Charley, who plays the kidnapped boy as an adolescent. To be fair, the script demands an awful lot of Charley Boorman, but he can't really deliver much of it. Meg Foster barely registers, and the film in general has a very paternalistic and patriarchal tone, almost totally concerned with the relationship between men who are fathers and sons.
If, like me, you have fond memories of this one from your childhood, perhaps it's best to just leave them there. The film is very well- photographed, but all the scenes with "wild" animals look like somebody put the animals right there to be photographed. It suffers very greatly compared to, say, Herzog's films like "Fitzcarraldo" where instead of inserting tropical animals just to provide some momentary visual interest, the jungle even in its dangers is allowed to become "normal." We feel as if the tribes in Boorman's film live within a vacation destination or a zoo.
It's also well-directed, but in the sensational way that Boorman seems to only know how. If you look at some of Boorman's other films, like "Zardoz" and "Excalibur", you'll see that he sort of lets actors do whatever they want, resulting in the more experienced actors totally dominating all the film's energy (arguably, in "Excalibur", that's part of the design of the film). Here, we have no real actors. While Boothe has a nice low-key demeanor, that only makes it more ridiculous when he grabs a machine gun and starts killing the "bad" natives like he was your average 80s action hero.
It's somewhat of an admirable effort, considering how many other films you could see in the 80s that didn't offer the sort of escapist adventure, nor any of the message of this film -- however, it's deeply and intrinsically flawed and does not make up for in drama what it lacks in realism.