MIMIC
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: Guillermo del Toro needed a better
story, but his visual style and his offbeat
direction make this a horror film that gets the
viewer where he lives. This is certainly the
scariest giant insect film I remember ever seeing.
Mutated six-foot (and six-footed) insects live in
the depths of the New York Subway System. Rating:
low +2 (-4 to +4) 7 (0 to 10). There is a small
spoiler following the review as I discuss a premise
point.
Guillermo del Toro was an unknown new director in 1994 when his CRONOS played the arthouse circuit. It turned out to be a fresh and arresting take on the vampire film. Mexican horror film to that point had a reputation for shoddy production values. Del Toro brought a fascinating no-holds-barred morbidity to his work that made the film rich and memorable. He is back with his second film and he proves to be just about the only filmmaker in the world who could have pulled off a giant insects in the subway plot and turn it into a film worth watching.
Three years ago a deadly disease carried by cockroaches was killing and crippling children. The approach to kill all the cockroaches was to create a sterile cross between a praying mantis, a termite, and a cockroach that would kill off cockroaches and then die off itself. Dr. Susan Kyle (Mira Sorvino) was the entomologist who created the new insect. The approach seemed to work perfectly, but now Kyle is seeing signs of a new insect in the subway tunnels that could be more dangerous than the original disease. But there is something else going on. Strangers seem to be running around the city furthering the ends of the insects. They are shady characters who seem to inhabit the dark corners of the city. And they have a special interest in Dr. Kyle.
This is an odd role for Academy Award winning Sorvino. At base this is an overly familiar story. Science has created a monster and now a few people have to fight it. Sorvino could certainly have chosen a film with a more original and less cable-fare-like plot had she wanted. But in this second film del Toro shows us exactly what his strengths and weaknesses as a filmmaker will be. He does not have really original plot ideas. Here he takes a short story by classic science fiction writer Donald A. Wollheim, but still turns it into a familiar plot. But the only film with a comparable style is his CRONOS. He has a marvelous way of keeping secret that this will be a story that has been done before. His telling is atmospheric and not quite linear. He creates perhaps too many characters, certainly at the beginning, but the major characters are fairly unique. Most interesting is a small boy who may be a genius and who may be retarded, but we are never sure which. Del Toro has carefully distorted color to heighten the ominous atmosphere. He plays with light and darkness preferring the latter. If the obvious is inevitable, at least del Toro keeps it at bay for a good long time.
If del Toro's work is to be compared to any other filmmaker, I would choose film producer Val Lewton. He makes terrific atmospheric B-pictures that are better than most of the A-pictures around. Both take the familiar and imbue it with a sense of real dread. I would give this second effort a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
SPOILER WARNING:
The who premise behind the title sounds like one that would come from Donald A. Wollheim, but it is faulty. It is true that insects and other creatures with a short generation time mimic their predators. But this is only with frequent contact with the predators. It is not a mystical process, but natural selection, a form of evolution. We would have had to been killing off a lot of six-foot insects in the subways before by chance some would look like humans and that would render them some protection. There is a lake in Japan where the crabs have backs that look like masks of humans. After a great battle was fought on the lake fishermen who pulled crabs from the lake would throw back the ones whose back look vaguely like human faces, thinking them to contain the souls of those killed in the battle. Over hundreds of years the only crabs that were safe were those that had really good renderings of masks. A species whose predator did not constantly select for resembling itself would not come to resemble its predator.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
Copyright 1997 Mark R. Leeper
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