Films: 1990s
(1997) Mimic
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Mimic
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Release: 1997
Guillermo del Toro wrangles with screenwriter Matthew Robbins' script from a short story by Donald A. Wollheim, producing not the textured and layered dark fantasies for which the director would become known, but a writhing half-squashed bug on the floor of a cheap New York subway set.
"Mimic" opens with promise. A disease sweeps Manhattan's child population, and as the illness kills, scientists wrestle a solution from genetics.
Introducing a new bug to the New York underground, entomologist/geneticist Dr. Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino) becomes a hero. The bug secretes enzymes, disease-carrying cockroaches die, and the world is able to sink back into its dull cognizance of work, TV, and whatever else.
There is, of course, a price. The bug is supposed to die off in a few hundred days. It does not. Instead it mutates, evolving over the course of generations to simulate human beings - reemerging from the muck impossibly large, with a kind of man-mask built into its front appendages. It then preys upon the city's ghetto dwellers and subway-tunnel homeless.
Tyler's associate, Dr. Peter Mann (Jeremy Northam) is called in by local authorities to analyze evidence of the killings in a church, while Tyler's urchin bug collectors come out of the tunnels with an infant insect of the kind she was designed.
Rather than call in the Centers for Disease Control, Tyler and Mann enlist the aide of a grizzled New York subway cop (Charles S. Dutton), and a good-hearted colleague (Josh Brolin). Their half-baked descent into the disused sections of the subway system falls apart once the fully-grown bugs get organized and attack. The group hides out for most of the remainder of the film in an abandoned train car, dissecting the critters and rewiring the old station to provide the juice they need to escape.
"Mimic" is fraught with all the clichés and drawn-out sequences for which Ridley Scott and James Cameron drew up the original (and fresh) templates in "Alien" and "Aliens." It's a laborious exercise of connecting attack-of-the-monster-horde dots.
Which is too bad, because the subtexts of "Mimic" are interesting. There's the obvious: That man should not tamper with nature lest it unleashes forces unknown. A bit done to death (and a bit overdone here, with handfuls of del Toro's gratuitous religious imagery in the plastic-shrouded crime-scene church"), but "Mimic" at least provides a valid balance between the urge to do good-cure disease-and the result of doing bad, creating a mutation that eats the very people one hoped to save.
Not so obvious is the concept of oblivious humanity. All of the horror of "Mimic" happens to people far removed from normal, everyday, economically stable lives in New York. The reaction of the city to its white, wealthy children suffering disease is to mobilize national resources. But the subway dwellers, the back alley families, and the dispossessed-threatened by the carnivorous products of the effort to save mainstream America-these people have to fend for themselves.
Well, not quite.
"Mimic" does posit that the officers of science have a soft spot for the lesser folk.
Sorvino's bug doctor maintains a symbiotic relationship with the underprivileged, because they come from, or they're willing to go into, the dirty places where her test subjects crawl. Whether or not she's doing anyone a favor by paying five dollars to grimy tunnel kids, and telling them to go find the egg sacs of the vicious bugs she's built, is a question for debate - but she's doing something other than ignore their fate.
But del Toro's film-while artfully photographed, beautifully designed (except for the painfully painted abandoned subway station set), and possessed of convincing monster effects-never achieves the kind of hard-bitten cynicism needed to drive home this point. It devolves too quickly from highbrow Frankenstein-ism to the formula of its aforementioned influences.
To be fair, del Toro blames Dimension and Miramax, claiming producers at the wheel drove the film into a different garage than the one he built. Whatever the root cause, "Mimic" is diminished.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Mimic, 1997
Sorvino's bug doctor maintains a symbiotic relationship with the underprivileged, because they come from, or they're willing to go into, the dirty places where her test subjects crawl.
