Congo
First screened in June 2025
Director: Frank Marshall. Cast: Laura Linney, Dylan Walsh, Tim Curry, Ernie Hudson, Grant Heslov, Joe Don Baker, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Michael Chinyamurindi, Bruce Campbell, Taylor Nichols, Joe Pantoliano, Delroy Lindo, Stuart Pankin, Mary Ellen Trainor, James Karen, John Hawkes, Jimmy Buffett. Screenplay: John Patrick Shanley (based on the novel by Michael Crichton). In Brief:
I see why this looked good as a studio package, but it so obviously fell apart in every key area. Misbegotten. Vaguely camp.
VOR:①
Striking how Marshall could produce some of the most immortal pop films of the late 20th century and direct some of the most disposable.
I read this novel in the 90s because Crichton was more or less on the national syllabus at that time. I watched the movie last night because we are all, at some level, mysteries to ourselves.
You can understand how the stacked cast coalesced. You get a call from the producer of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the novelist behind Jurassic Park, and the Oscar-winning screenwriter of... well, Moonstruck, and I'm pretty sure you say yes (though Robin Wright didn't, and evidently Hugh Grant didn't, either). Congo, sadly, turns out very much to be the work of the director of Alive and Arachnophobia, the novelist behind Sphere (jesus), and the screenwriter of Joe vs. the Volcano, and maybe at that point you weigh your options a little differently. Unless you are Bruce Campbell and you're only in it for five minutes, or you're John Hawkes and things haven't started happening for you yet, or you're Delroy Lindo and you're invincible, or you're Tim Curry and you've rarely minded being really bad in something really bad.
What's harder to understand is how Congo is the combined enterprise of E.T. but also Harry and the Hendersons cinematographer Allen Daviau, Lawrence of Arabia and Out of Sight editor Anne V. Coates, composer Jerry Goldsmith, and Color Purple production designer J. Michael Riva. The latter is very much in his Goonies groove, but having less fun with it, and seeming to give up on whole, important swaths of the movie that might have been spectacular. Goldsmith apparently has a thing for apes, and maybe he'd been dying to write a song called "Spirit of Africa." (James Newton Howard wrote one called "Village Chant" before he either quit or got fired.) Coates made this between Pontiac Moon and Striptease, so maybe her astrology was all in retrograde in the mid-90s, or maybe everyone she knew needed a new roof. But at least she does have some creative fun with an experimentally slo-mo and frame-skipped gorilla attack sequence. Maybe all that artsiness was covering up a bunch of sins in the footage she got, which the rest of the footage makes easy to believe.
Also, the eight actors with notable screen time but little dialogue, each billed exclusively and interchangeably as "Porter." The poor men.
Also, a talking ape named Amy is a major character and drinks a martini in one gulp, and invincible Delroy gets inflamed about someone stealing too much of his sesame bread, and Tim Curry is ripely and thickly "Romanian," and Laura Linney shoots down incoming missiles with a flare gun from the open fuselage of her faltering plane, which I doubt any of her Oscar-nominated characters could have pulled off. And if you really steam this gal, she might refract a high-powered laser through her giant diamond and detonate your stinking Starlink satellite, so all is not lost. Grade:D+
