To wrap up the summer movie season, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to a wide-release film from the last few weeks. From August 19: one of the specific things that the particular species of bipedal apes commonly known as "humans" have been most perfectly calibrated to fear in all of nature is a hungry, hostile lion, a fact exploited to the hilt by Beast. There have been plenty of killer lion movies over the years, but only one I can name that's also trying to be a prestige picture.

The ghost and the darkness who are at the center of 1996's The Ghost and the Darkness are a pair of unusually (even unprecedentedly) aggressive male lions who were historically responsible for the deaths of anywhere between 28 and 135 workers on a railway bridge across the Tsavo River of Kenya in 1898. The best scenes in The Ghost and the Darkness are the ones that depict lion attacks. The best performance inThe Ghost and the Darkness is given by executive producer Michael Douglas, who jumped in late in pre-production to play the invented role of Charles Remington, a cheerfully and briskly arrogant Great White Hunter type* on the classical Hollywood swashbuckler model, who spends most of his screentime pleasantly ruminating on how much he enjoys fucking up lions.

The film has a core competency, in other words - being a meat-and-potatoes thriller about killer lions - and as such, it's kind of frustrating how much time it spends not doing that. In truth, The Ghost and the Darkness is a real mixed bag, both in the "it's doing a ton of different things" sense, and the "parts of it are really good and parts of it are really bad" sense. It's a movie whose writer and instigator, William Goldman, and director, Stephen Hopkins, both vocally expressed their disappointment in how it turned out fairly quickly after it was finished, both of them noting that Douglas reshaped the material quite a bit in post-production to give himself a bigger and more conventionally heroic role (he also got top billing despite very obviously not being the lead; I'm not even 100% sure he gets the second-most amount of screentime). Maybe the version they had in mind (and I don't know that they both had the same version in mind) would have been better, and undoubtedly it would have felt more cohesive. But given that my favorite stuff here is when it is most fixedly being a bloody-minded killer animal flick, I do not know that I would want to take that risk.

Regardless, while I might not have immediate gone to "neither Goldman nor Hopkins liked it" based solely on the content of the film itself, that bit of knowledge makes a  whole lot of sense given the evidence on screen. This is a very scattered movie, slapped together from a competing mass of incompatible or barely compatible theories of history, storytelling impulses, and artistic considerations, and not in the exciting, generative "this is a giddy mess of too much inspiration all spilling out in fascinating puddles" way. In the "please, for God's sake, pick one thing and do that" way.

The basics of the story: the British Empire has a vested interest in completing a bridge from Uganda to the Indian Ocean very quickly in order to beat Germany as part of the greater Partition of Africa, and Sir Robert Beaumont (Tom Wilkinson) is the main financier of that project. Anxious to make sure that the project goes as quickly as possible, Beaumont hires Anglo-Irish engineer Col. John Henry Patterson (Val Kilmer) to oversee the construction and finish, if at all possible, in five months. Patterson is all of six months away from the birth of his firstborn child, so he happily agrees to this timetable, but when he arrives in the Tsavo region, he discovers that the land is a bit more unyielding than he had expected based on his experiences in India. Also, two lions show up and start eating the crew. Their behavior is in all ways so altogether un-lionish that the locals refuse to believe that they're lions at all, but some kind of embodied demonic force. Perhaps, even, a demonic force that serves as a metaphor for the violence and rapaciousness of European colonialism. Indeed, could it not be argued that Patterson and Remington (when he arrives) are themselves sort of the Ghost and the Darkness?

Sure, why not. A lot of things could be argued. Goldman's script, insofar as it has been faithfully transmitted by the final cut, has more different ideas for how we could understand the colonial project in Africa than it knows what to do with. Beaumont, in his first scene, is presented as such an outlandish cartoon bad guy that we're obviously meant to hiss and boo him, while cheering Patterson's more measured and respectful idea of how to treat the natives. Except that sometimes, Patterson himself is presented as a clueless imperial stooge willfully and foolishly endangering lives because he's mucking about in a place he doesn't understand. These two possibilities are exchanged throughout the movie; they are sometimes exchanged over the course of an individual scene. I don't think we can say that this is The Ghost and the Darkness being "ambivalent"; I think it's more that it's not sure whether to pick one of these options, attempt to square them up with each other, or merely blaze through the story at top speed in the hopes that we won't notice.

That goes beyond the film's philosophical relationship to history, and includes such simple matters as what it feels like to watch the damn thing. Wilkinson introduces Beaumont as an almost literally cackling villain, who has a line of dialogue that literally goes "I'm a monster. My only pleasure is tormenting those people who work for me." There's a way to play that as dry or ironic, but it's not what Wilkinson's doing. So anyway, he's hulking like a Saturday morning cartoon villain back in London, while the film's portrayal of Kenya (which is mostly played by South Africa) ranges from ethereal exoticism to boisterous adventurism to physically anchored realism, based on what particular element of the editing (by Roger Brown, Steve Mirkovich, and Roger Bondelli), cinematography (by the master Vilmos Zsigmond), or the music (by the legend Jerry Goldsmith) we feel like we want to attend to. Within the film's aesthetic, only Goldsmith's score feels like it's almost always doing basically the same thing, providing a sweeping, romantic feeling of a classic movie epic with African-esque filigree, and only shifting into "tension" music  when it absolutely must; otherwise it's pretty much just throwing a bunch of ideas out.

This isn't always a bad thing. Each of the main lion attacks is staged, shot, and cut in a different way, generally to move us from horror movie-style mystery and shock towards suspenseful tension and alertness towards action movie violence and brutality. Because, again, when The Ghost and the Darkness is working, it's almost entirely working as an adventure-suspense movie about two vicious lions. Generally, though, the film feels like it's just trying stuff, matching Kilmer's unbearably flat Patterson (for which his character work seems to have consisted solely of getting his mild Irish accent to be the same in every scene against the gorgon-like Beaumont, a thoughtful doctor played by Bernard Hill (after Douglas, my favorite performance), a nervously over-idealised and under-personalised Wise Native in the form of the foreman Samuel (John Kani), a shticky embodiment of British Can-Do enthusiasm, project supervisor Angus (Brian McCardie), Patterson's insipid, endlessly smiling wife (Emily Mortimer, whose feature film debut finds her being horribly abandoned by her director), and of course Douglas's charismatic asshole American. Not a single one of these performances feels like it's lined up with all the others (except maybe Hill and McCardie, which I think is because they're both idling in "British prestige drama" mode), and as Kilmer leadenly sets himself against each of them, it feels almost like the film is trying desperately to figure out which option is "right". And the same goes for its different approaches to cinematography - gorgeous postcard shots of sunsets? harsh contrasts between the thick blue sky and the brown earth? foggy horror movie nights? - as well as everything else.

Maybe we can blame this on Douglas meddling to showcase himself. I don't want to let Hopkins off the hook, though; it's a confused film in a way that had to have started earlier than post production, and I'm not inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to a man only seven years removed from directing A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child - the worst of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies! - by assuming he had some kind of vision that was slaughtered in the editing room. Most likely, it's just a wobbly, woozy film with no identity that was provided one by an egotistical producer-star who correctly observed that by shoring up the elements where he got to play action hero, he was also making The Ghost and the Darkness work, albeit intermittently, as a handsomely-crafted and genuinely thrilling "man vs. nature" thriller. That's at least something, though even Zsigmond's somberly handsome images and Goldsmith's grand score aren't really enough to make this stand out as a particularly memorable or good entry in the crowded annals of killer animal films in the 1990s. But there are worse ways to watch a couple of lions fuck some shit up.

Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.

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*If I'm being honest, I'm not sure how much it's the case that Remington is himself cheerfully and briskly arrogant, and how much it's just that Douglas really doesn't have any other mode, especially when he had as little time to prepare as he did here.