On G List of Movie Reviews
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The Ghost and the Darkness (1996)
Rate:
9
Viewed:
8/04, 10/19
10/19:
Compelling stories make great movies, and that's the case with The Ghost and the Darkness.
Val Kilmer is an underappreciated actor, and when given a difficult role, he manages to rise to the occasion. It
doesn't hurt him any to have terrific-looking hair. All the kidding aside, Val carries The Ghost and the Darkness
very well despite having been recently beleaguered during the filming of
The Island of Dr. Moreau which is impressive if I think about it.
Michael Douglas, showing up late to the party, is a treat, and I'm surprised to see his character be killed near the end.
Speaking of death, the sequence involving Patterson's wife is a perfect example of using a dream to highlight fear.
For almost two hours, The Ghost and the Darkness, that's mostly shot on location at Songimvelo Game Reserve in
South Africa, does feel twice as long because of the myriad trials and tribulations which are excellent, mirroring
what people face in real life. There's no display of superhero behaviors or anything that can be considered
as extraordinary. When the second lion finally appear for the last battle, the ensuing action is unexpected by not turning
it into huge duel, resulting in an ordinary kill which is impressive enough.
After the narrator declared the story positively true, I had to look it up on the internet to see for myself. The events
actually took place, only that Remington didn't exist and John Henry Patterson wasn't an engineer but an overseer of the
railway construction. It took months for him to kill the lions, finally bagging the first one on December 9, 1898, and the
next one twenty days later. He claimed in his book the lions killed up to 140 people, but in reality, it was between 25 and 30.
The pair of dead man-eating Tsavo lions, which were first used as rugs at his house for 25 years, are now in display at the
Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois.
All in all, The Ghost and the Darkness has everything anyone can want in a rousing cinematic adventure that
takes place in Africa.