RAPA NUI
A film review by Raymond Johnston
Copyright 1994 Raymond Johnston
Dir: Kevin Reynolds Starring: Jason Scott Lee, Esai Morales, Sandrine Holt Produced by Kevin Costner
The premise for RAPA NUI is a promising one. Easter Island (known to the natives as Rapa Nui) is a microcosm society on the verge of apocalypse. The last of their forest is in peril of being cut down. Overpopulation means more work for less food. The failure of the local gods to provide has forced a religious crisis. But the premise put forth in the tightly edited and lushly scenic trailer is not what Costner's Tig Productions delivered. What is on the screen is instead ROCKY in a hula skirt, or KARATE KID goes coconuts. It is a big sporting event competition film. The sport in this case is, appropriately enough, an Easter egg hunt.
The first sign of trouble is the first scene. The local chief, called "Birdman" points to a rotting corpse and bemoans the fact that he has nobody to swim for his clan's team in this year's event. The painful and painfully slow machinations around the egg hunt swim fill up much of the multi-pronged plot. The rest concerns a group of neo-Marxist stone cutters called the "Short Ears." The utterly simplistic class conflict between the "Long Ears" (the haves) and the "Short Ears" (the have-nots) takes the place of any development of threads of religion, culture, ethnography, or tribal ritual.
Not much is known of true Rapa Nuian practices, but instead of an informative film based on similar cultures, writer director Reynolds (with the assistance of co-writer Tim Rose Price) make the worst paint by numbers coloring book level fable. Esai Morales, a fine Hispanic actor (BAD BOYS) is totally miscast as the Marxist-atheist rabble rouser who spouts on about religion being the distractor of the masses as if a premature copy of "The Communist Manifesto" had washed up on the beach. Other dialogue ranges from incredibly modern, to stultifying inane. Birdman extols at one point to his Basil Rathbone-esque aide "I don't have time for this now, Priest. I have entrails to read." Birdman then stands by while the lowly Short Ears confront him with their list of labor disputes, which is then repeated endlessly throughout the film in case anybody missed that it was plot development time.
Another major disappointment is the quick way in which the carving of the stone monoliths is glossed over. People seem busy, but we never really see how they are carved. Instead, the scene plays like bad out takes from the pyramid scene in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. All of the epic crowd scenes all resemble a bunch of disoriented people being told by somebody off-camera to "now look busy."
While I am cataloging the failures in this dismal failure of a film, let me also add that the love story, the one element you can always count on in a South Sea Island film, is also mishandles completely, with the third-billed Sandrine Holt hardly being in the film at all. Her story, is the most ludicrous.
I had read complaints about the cross racial casting and was willing to dismiss them as another case a PCism, but the casting of American accented leads and Aussie accented minor characters, with whites in heavy make-up as extras, blew away any remaining sense of credibility this well intentioned misfire might have had.
Kevin Costner produced but does not appear in this New Agey tale of native life. During the requisite Island Festival scene I thought a better title for this farango might have been DANCES WITHOUT WOLVES.
On a serious note, people interested in the topic of Pacific island life would do better to rent F. W. Murnau's TABU or trying to seek out John Ford's impressive THE HURRICANE. Other hard to find gems include WHITE SHADOWS IN THE SOUTH SEAS and THE PAGAN, both directed by W. S. van Dyke. A little further East and into Thailand, CHANG from the directors of King (Cooper and Shoedsack), still ranks as one of the finest ethnographic films ever made.
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