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Amazon.com Essential Video
Sigourney Weaver more than earned her Oscar nomination for Best Actress in Gorillas in the Mist, dominating every frame of Michael Apted's biopic about primatologist Dian Fossey. Tenderly mothering an orphaned gorilla infant or terrorizing an African poacher with a staged lynching, the statuesque star is never less than fiercely focused, a glamorous warrior for animal rights. As the amateur scientist who researched and spotlighted Rwanda's endangered mountain gorillas in National Geographic, Weaver is the passionate heart that keeps an otherwise flaccid film alive--whether bracing anthropologist Louis Leakey to forcibly offer her services as census-taker of the mountain gorillas; or hanging out with the noble animals until she becomes the first person on record to make friendly physical contact with them; or waging sometimes-physical war on natives and Europeans who decimate the gorillas for trophies or zoo fodder. Unfortunately, the film's stodgy script and direction simply document Fossey's magnificent obsession, offering no insight into what lonely impulse of the soul led this extraordinary woman to climb up an African mountain to bond so strongly with gorillas. Cardboard characters include an eternally smiling, sexless African soulmate (John Omirah Miluwi), a perfect boyfriend (Bryan Brown) who has to be dumped in favor of gorilla-love, and stereotypical villains. Still, the African scenery is spectacular, and who can resist the cross-species thrill when the huge dark hand of Digit, Fossey's favorite, first rests in her outstretched palm? Gorillas in the Mist will please those who savor Sigourney Weaver's Amazonian fervor and the pure fire of her physical and spiritual passion--and harbor a slightly misanthropic fondness for liaisons between beauties and beasts. --Kathleen Murphy
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great,
By
This review is from: Gorillas in the Mist (Widescreen) (DVD)
I always am on the look out for great movies and was delighted to be able to get this one. It arrived in good time and in great shape.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sigourney Scores,
By A Customer
This review is from: Gorillas in the Mist (Widescreen) (DVD)
Exciting true-life story of Dian Fossey, the American woman who fought to save the mountain gorillas of central Africa from extinction. The film makers faced considerable obstacles in reaching the remote area of Rwanda where Fossey worked and was originally planned to be made prior to Fossey's murder in 1985, but the film--directed by Michael Apted--is nonetheless so fluidly told that most of these limitations don't show on screen. Although the excellent on-location photography is essential to Gorillas' success, the film's greatest asset is Sigourney Weaver's bigger-than-life presence as Fossey. Weaver's tremendous physique--used so effectively in making her a match for the creatures of Alien series--allows her to hold her ground with the huge gorillas. Always a charismatic on film, Weaver meets the heroic demands of the film, whether confronting poachers, communicating with gorillas, mourning their loss, or even--in the least interesting aspect of the film--falling in love with Bryan Brown as the National Geographic photographer Bob Campbell. Probably no other American actress in the 1980s could have risen to this challenge as she did. The all-too seldom seen Julie Harris also has a small part as a Rwandan plantation owner and adds her own luminosity to her few scenes. Rick Baker ingeniously handled the film's make-up, mixing both made-up and real gorillas. As suggested above, the film does have a few drawbacks: much like the relationship between Meryl Streep and Robert Redford in 1985's Out of Africa, the romance between Weaver and Brown feels tacked on, and it is less interesting than her relationship to the gorillas. Also, Weaver's descent into seeming madness (which Weaver's unexplained coughing in the last section of the film suggests may have been prompted by her declining health) occurs suddenly in the sequence immediately following the end of her romance with Brown. I wonder how Weaver's charactermight have been developed at the end of the film had not Fossey's murder occurred while the film was still being planned: would the end of her romance with Brown have been the end of the film, with a conclusion emphasizing the courage of her decision? And, if so, is that why the final mad sequence occurs so suddenly?
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A few things you should know about 'Gorillas in the Mist',
By
This review is from: Gorillas in the Mist (Widescreen) (DVD)
Despite the requisite Hollywood cliches, this is a great film. Dian Fossey didn't know what she was getting into when she volunteered to go to Africa, working for Dr. Louis Leakey in taking a census of the endangered Mountain Gorillas. She didn't realise she was expected to work alone, in a remote mountain hut, and in a country torn by civil war... But she came to love the subjects of her study so much that nothing could prize her from the mountain, not even the (human) man she eventually fell in love with. "When you look deep into a gorilla's eyes," she wrote, "your life is changed forever." The blacks thought she was a witch, due to her reddish hair and fierce glance (captured well by actress Sigourney Weaver, although the real Dian was apparently a bit more shy than Sigourney's character). But this witchlike image actually helped to scare the poachers off. And Dian's work helped prevent the gorillas from becoming extinct. But unfortunately she was murdered by cowardly scum...black poachers in the pay of white animal traffickers. Too often the best are cut down before their life's work is finished... One other thing to note is the incredible beauty of the landscapes, filmed on location in the mountains of Rwanda. The result is a worthy tribute to this wildlife warrior, who is most now probably in Asgard, feasting at Freyja's very table (with a gorilla at her side, no doubt).
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