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This column originally appeared Aug. 17, 2000
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 Scientist Kevin Bacon dissolves into invisbility in 'Hollow Man' as project team members look on in awe. |
Verhoeven's film was hit unfairly by critics hung up on H.G. Wells' 'Invisible Man'
By
RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
NEARLY
EVERY every initial reviewer of Paul Verhoeven's new horror shocker
"Hollow Man" ended up judging it by H.G. Wells' "The
Invisible Man" and the celebrated 1933 film version James
Whale made for Universal.
Okay, fair enough. "Hollow Man" IS about a scientist who discovers the secret of invisibility, then goes berserk from the ravaging effects the experimental chemicals have on his brain. So is "The Invisible Man."
But Verhoeven's film hasn't been knocked just for paying homage to a time-encrusted plot. Most critics also have gone on to call it a "mindless" and cynical horror movie without redeeming values, a thriller that's just a dazzling display of special effects trickery with no more meat on its bones than leading man Kevin Bacon has in those scenes where his flesh slowly disappears, followed in short order by sinews and skeleton, too.
Well, I think it's time for the second wave of critical opinion to roll in and start washing away some of the rhetoric that's already being ignored by the moviegoing public, which has turned "Hollow Man" into a huge box office hit to spite the critics once more.
In the first place, since when do we ask our horror movies to do anything more than scare the bejesus out of us? Think back to your initial gut reaction to James Cameron's "The Terminator" in 1984. Was it: "Wow! What a freakin' roller coaster ride that was!" Or was it, perhaps: "How rewarding! Wasn't that a spiritually-stirring, intellectually-engaging experience!"
That's right, I don't remember being mentally uplifted by "The Terminator" either. But I do remember having bitten off what was left of my fingernails long before the killer robot rose up from the flaming ruins of that gasoline tanker to give us the mandatory "just one more time" event of the film.
And, oh, yes, shall we talk about a cynical film? This was a picture that forecast a future Earth where the last remaining humans scuttled around like rats in the wreckage of their cities while machines ruled the planet.
Yet "The Terminator" is generally acknowledged today as a classic of horror or sci-fi, whichever category you want to put it in. And its director, James Cameron, went on to do "Titanic," taking home the Oscar for direction and more money than any human being could ever spend in three lifetimes.
No, I'm not forecasting "Hollow Man" will be remembered as a classic on the scale of "The Terminator," but I am saying it's a bangup horror film that really delivers the shivers -- and it does have a brain, no matter what your favorite critic may have been telling you.
Here are some clues: It's not called "Hollow Man" just because we can see through the guy. Think about T.S. Eliot and his "The Hollow Men" for a minute or two. Then go back to the Sebastian Caine character that Kevin Bacon plays and start thinking about all the other ways this guy might be described as hollow.
For me, "Hollow Man" was always a horror film, but it also can be looked upon as a parable for the soulless modern corporate ethos. Think about the guys who run giant pharmaceutical companies -- the ones who authorized the foreign marketing of hazardous drugs that were banned from use in America. That's genuine cynicism. I remember watching a TV forum in the 1990s where several business school deans anguished over the fact that a majority of their students thought there was nothing wrong with "dumping" cancer-causing drugs in other countries where there's no counterpart to the Federal Food & Drug Administration. They thought it was bottom-line good business.
There's a similar underlying theme in "Hollow Man." It's best expressed by invisible Sebastian Caine in the film's most important single line of dialogue, the one where he explains it's amazing what a guy will do "if you don't have to look at yourself in the mirror every morning."
That's a powerful thought. It's also a powerful metaphor for invisibility: The ability to hide yourself not only from others, but also from yourself.
Sebastian is a man without conscience, social or otherwise, long before he becomes invisible. He and his team of scientists are working on a secret government program, seeking the secret of invisibility for military purposes. They want to spy on everybody without being seen, to sneak up on the enemy without being detected, to assassinate leaders of enemy governments and get clean away with it. Sebastian has no trouble with this in terms of ethics.
Sebastian doesn't go crazy with power or become a vicious killer just because those poison chemicals are leaching through his brain. This guy is an evil man when first we meet him. Long before any chemicals enter his system, he's a peeping tom, longing to fondle the good-looking lady in the apartment across the way. So why are we surprised that he sees invisibility as a way to hurry up his agenda?
The film makes sure we understand Sebastian isn't alone in behaving that way. Though most of his scientific colleagues seem to have at least residual traces of souls, he does have one assistant, played by Greg Grunberg, who drools over nude centerfolds on the late shift and thinks even the far gone Sebastian is cool. You can imagine what this stiff would do if he were invisible. (It's amusing to remember that Grunberg plays the gentle Sean on TV's "Felicity," who's always trying to become a corporate commercial giant with his wacky new consumer product inventions.)
What "Hollow Man" is telling us is that our society is loaded with people like Sebastian and his lab assistant, who couldn't be trusted to handle a scientific breakthrough in responsible fashion. At a time when we're already wrestling with similar moral and ethical problems over genetic engineering and cloning, we need to remember not to let people like this run rampant without government supervision.
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In sharp contrast, the 1933 movie invisible man was an honorable man with a girl who dearly loved him. He had no screws loose before he ingested the chemical "bleach" formula that turns him power-mad and makes him dream of conquering the world. In "Hollow Man," the chemicals just remove Sebastian's last inhibitions. Given time, he probably would have done most of the bad things he does in the movie with or without the formula.
Too many modern film critics insist that horror films be peopled with principled characters that "we really care about" and issues that stimulate the mind. When a filmmaker can put those pieces together, more power to him. But no film is really going to scare you like "Hollow Man" does in its livelier scenes unless you have at least a minimal concern about the people in jeopardy, in this case Sebastian's former girl friend and research associate, played by Elisabeth Shue, and her new love, the researcher played by Josh Brolin. Frankly, I don't think I needed to like them any more than I did.
As for the high level of cynicism in "Hollow Man," I agree it's there in triplicate. All I can say about that is that I think Verhoeven may see today's world a little more clearly than James Whale saw the world of 1933. These are cynical, morally-bereft times, not the happy ending times Whale gave us when his invisible man expired and the gods returned him to visibility with a benign smile on his face, even though the world of 1933 was just emerging from a terrible economic depression and a man named Hitler had just come to power in a place called Germany.
© 2000 by Ron Miller. The photo from "Hollow Man" is © 2000 by Columbia Pictures; photo from "The Invisible Man" is © 1933 by Universal Pictures.
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