Before the year’s out, I’d be remiss not to take one last dive into the short-lived but intriguing Hollywood dalliance with the creature feature in the nineties, a trend that was unarguably spurred on by Jurassic Park. None of the subsequent follow-up movies is more directly connected to JP than Congo, another genre blockbuster based on a Michael Crichton novel that not only features special effects by Stan Winston and Co., but Spielberg’s longtime collaborator Frank Marshall in the director’s chair (one of Marshall’s previous directorial efforts was Arachnophobia, a missing piece of nineties creature feature history that will gets its due on this site eventually.) While its ambitions are certainly on a smaller scale than its predecessor—bringing to life a bunch of mutant gorillas is not quite as impressive as animating dinosaurs—through its rollicking adventure structure and jungle setting, I have no doubts it was trying to bring in at least some of the vast audience that the previous Critchton adaptation got. However, even if many of the surface elements remain similar, the explicitly throwback nature of this story makes for a different beast,
The original novel version of Congo preceded Jurassic Park by a decade, and came about after Michael Crichton failed to get a new movie version of H. Rider Haggard’s 1885 novel King Solomon’s Mines off the ground, instead modifying the script into a modernized homage to Haggard’s influential adventure stories like Solomon’s Mines and She. So, Congo as a book and a movie is a return to the “lost civilization” tale beloved by early twentieth-century pulp fiction, updated to base itself around the concerns and political situations of the latter half of the twentieth-century, but nonetheless treading into dangerously colonialist waters. There’s a reason the “darkest jungle”-style stories became rarer as time went on, and it’s not just because the world had become more mapped out and less mysterious.
The motivations and money for this trek into the “unknown” territories of the world, in this case located in Central Africa, are crossed conspiracies, creating questions of priorities and loyalties that feels in the spirit of this sort of adventure narrative. On one hand, you have telecom company TraviCom, whose representative/communications technology scientist/ex-CIA operative Karen Ross (Laura Linney) is secretly there to try to find the missing son (a few brief moments with Bruce Campbell) of company CEO and cartoon millionaire sociopath R.B. Travis (Joe Don Baker), after the son found a mine full of diamonds perfect for laser satellite technology (he is also Ross’ ex-fiancee, which colours her involvement); on the other, you have the even less reliable Romanian “philanthropist” Herkemer Homolka (Tim Curry), who is secretly an old school adventure archetype, an individual obsessively seeking out a lost city (Zinj) and its treasures (diamonds.) As a front, both parties bring along primatologist Peter Elliot (Dylan Walsh) and his ward Amy, a gorilla who has been trained in sign language and sometimes wears a glove that translates her signs into a disconcerting electronic voice, as part of an attempt to reunite Amy with a population of wild gorillas. They hire the jovially hyper-competent mercenary Monroe Kelly (Ernie Hudson) to guide them through the region, and he seems mostly aware that some of the travellers have ulterior motives, but does his job when the money is there.
As per the tradition of most nineties blockbusters, the tone of most of the movie is glib, with jokey dialogue, scenes of a gorilla drinking martinis and smoking cigarettes, and a rather detached approach to its own sometimes brutal violence. It feels all the odder because it uses chaos and corruption in the Congo and surrounding nations as its backdrop, with much of the time after our protagonists reach their destination devoted to them trying to swiftly sidestep militia-on-militia firefights, with comical references to government instability (mostly through Joe Pantoliano as fast talking liaison) and a whole scene devoted to bribing a local military leader (Delroy Lindo) to get safe passage—while Lindo’s “Stop eating my sesame cake!” line became a somewhat popular Internet meme, I also enjoyed the moment where he gleefully staples his paper bag full of bribe money. There are a few attempts to add some detail to the mostly surface level interaction between the western world and Africa, such as having the local mercenaries state that they leave Peter and Amy alone because they don’t want bad publicity in the west from being seen bullying a gorilla, but given that these lost civilization adventure stories generally come from a place of white chauvinists trampling over locals in the third world to get what they want, playing a broad version of many African nations’ endless conflict for both laughs and exotic “thrills” feels like just the 1995 version of that same kind of exploitation. Even attempting to soften the iffy racial elements of the subgenre—for example, by portraying the briefly-appearing “mysterious” native tribe as helpful—can only do so much.
As a Hollywood genre piece, Congo mostly lives and dies on the quality of its cast and the propulsion of its action, and it certainly has the former down tight, with the likes of Hudson, Curry, and Baker playing enjoyably outlandish character types (Hudson as the de facto action lead in this gives this role an edge over the one he had in Leviathan.) The action in the first two thirds of the movie are pretty standard for jungle adventure fare, with extra planes and rocket launchers, but I will give them credit for including a nighttime hippo attack scene—certainly a unique choice in marauding African wildlife! All the talk of communications satellite technology, not present in the novel (which instead focused on our heroes competing with rival microchip corporations to find the mines in a subplot that sounds a lot more like Jurassic Park‘s rival cloning companies) is an incredibly nineties bit of techno-hokum. It does broadly fall into the hybrid monster movie form like most of the nineties films I’ve covered, but this is probably less of a monster-focused thing than the others in terms of pure volume—even so, its made-up creatures are there at the beginning of the movie, and make up the primary threat of its final third (in addition to an erupting volcano that the lost city was inconveniently built next to), so it still qualifies for my purposes.
After finally discovering the lost city of Zinj and its associated diamond mines, our cast discover that the vanished citizens had bred an entire new species of hyper-violent gorilla to defend their precious diamonds (in the novel, they are a cross-breed between gorilla, chimpanzee, and human, which sounds like an awfully messy process), and the population persists to crush human heads in the modern day. These lightly disfigured, gray-furred attack apes—all portrayed by actors in suits, as are Amy and all the “normal” gorillas, and while none are particularly realistic the quality is still acceptable—look as much like Morlocks as they do gorillas, and they offer an overwhelming force that quickly winnows down the cast to its final trio (plus Amy.) That, of course, justifies just how swiftly our heroes begin to mow them down, with a particularly absurd climax where Ross uses the diamonds to power a “communications laser” that can slice up rampaging apes by the boatload, before we get an ending where the gorillas rather gleefully hop into pools of fake-y CGI lava. That the movie held off on egregious CG for so long is another thing that makes it feel retro.
The biggest surprise is that a script—written by Academy Award/Tony/Pulitzer-winning playwright John Patrick Shanley(!)—that feels fit to throw out logical and ethical consideration for airy good-time carnage also tries to reconcile the negative and positive portrayals of gorillas. Peter, an aw-shucks optimist protagonist whose personality and hair seem to have time-warped from a mid-eighties family film, is outraged at the suggestion by Homolka (who knows the legends of Zinj) and Ross (who witnessed her fiancee being attacked from a satellite up-link) that there exists a population of violent gorillas, a possibility that he argues is only in the realm of pulp fiction and goes against the species’ gentle nature. Amy is an example of the “good gorilla” that is their true representation—which we know because her computer child voice tells us she is over and over again—while the pack of flesh-rending monsters in Zinj were made by humans to be that way, a fact that Elliot is quick to emphasize when they find it written out with pictographs. Contrary to the pulp adventure stories Congo is based on, gorillas aren’t dangerous by nature—but since this is a jungle adventure story in the pulp mould, you still need some evil apes around to spice things up.
It is at least mildly novel to have a silly movie like this engage in some gorilla discourse, at least partially ripped from recent events. Critchton’s novel and this movie both obviously base the character of Amy on perpetual headline-maker Koko the gorilla, who probably helped a lot more people realize the intelligence of our fellow Great Apes and diminished the misunderstandings that powered the sensationalist portrayals seen in so many of the ape-based monster movies I’ve covered. All the stuff with Amy, which probably felt especially relevant in the particular mode of Eco-consciousness common in the era (that she paints multiple pictures of her jungle home while in captivity, along with symbols that Curry’s character thinks come from Zinj, seems pulled from true life stories beloved by animal rights types), is often cloyingly sentimental in a way that probably seemed similar to the the awe-inspiring moments of Jurassic Park, but in this case feels more tonally jarring when placed next to to all the bloody violence. It probably doesn’t help that Peter is pretty much the only one there who cares about gorillas at all, where Jurassic Park gave us multiple dino experts all expressing the same sort of complicated wonder the audience is also feeling—all the treacly “world” music from Jerry Goldsmith as Amy cavorts in her home territory can’t sell the emotional core in the same way. Finding the balance between the pulpiness and the emotion is a tough needle to thread, and even with all the time Frank Marshall spent working with Steven Spielberg, he is not a Steven Spielberg-level director.
If anything, the well-meaning but confused themes concerning our attitude towards gorillas is representative of the film’s approach to adventure narratives as a whole—it wants to put some parts of the jungle peril tropes under the microscope, but it refuses to revise the whole thing entirely (which also encourages them to, say, portray a Central African nation with a superficial understanding of its modern situation, just enough to create some action set pieces.) Enough of the spirit of older writers like Haggard must persist for this to be a proper homage, but in a world where more people understood the behaviour of animals like gorillas, you can’t just have another batch of killer apes menacing explorers like it’s a 1940s serial. So, you compromise—you have the “realistic” gorillas and then you also have the old-timey scary gorillas, an awkward meeting between our new sensitive vision of the animal and the monster we long made them out to be.
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