Summer of 1995: Congo
Best enjoyed with a strong green drop drink.
One of the reasons I enjoy these retrospectives is because you can see a film much differently when your expectations are in check.
In June of 1995, there were few movies I was looking forward to more than Congo. This was just two years after Jurassic Park, which had quickly become my favorite movie and turned me into a Michael Crichton nerd. I read his 1980 novel on which this movie was based, and I couldn’t imagine this wouldn’t be the greatest adventure of the summer. It had it all: Killer gorillas! Hungry, hungry hippos! Warlords! Lava!
I saw it one summer afternoon with my mom – who was also a Crichton reader – and we both left disappointed. What I’d hoped would be a rousing adventure with state-of-the-art effects felt silly and cheap. Where was the sense of awe that I got from Spielberg’s dinos? Why wasn’t I clutching my armrest in suspense? Why was Tim Curry speaking like that?
Thirty years later, Congo hasn’t changed. It’s a silly B-movie with a preposterous plot, iffy special effects and actors devouring the scenery. The difference is that I no longer expect director Frank Marshall to be Steven Spielberg, Amy the Gorilla to have the grandeur of that T-Rex, or the adventure to blow me away. Congo is ridiculous, but what I saw three decades ago as deficits now give the movie its charm, and even if I can’t really defend it, I had fun.
Laura Linney stars as Karen Ross, a tech worker sent to the remote regions of Africa to search for her ex-fiancé after he disappears on a mission to recover diamonds that could revolutionize communications. She’s accompanied by primatologist Peter (Dylan Walsh), who is trekking into the Congo to reunite his beloved gorilla, Amy, with her tribe – Peter is renowned because, using sign language and computers, he’s taught Amy to speak. They’re funded by a mysterious adventurer with one of the great movie names – Herkermer Homolka (Tim Curry), who is seeking King Solomon’s Mines and believes Amy might hold the key. Guiding them through the jungle is the intrepid Monroe Kelly (Ernie Hudson).
Jurassic Park transcends its sci-fi trappings not just because of Spielberg’s unparalleled directorial skills but because it’s a movie about something. We continue to grapple with its themes of pursuing progress without a thought to its consequences, and the results of turning discovery over to corporations. Congo isn’t about anything. It’s a throwback to the days of old adventure serials and expedition movies; before it was a novel, Crichton originally wrote it as a screenplay with the intention of placing Sean Connery in the Ernie Hudson role.
And as nothing more than an adventure, Congo kind of works, although its effects and story are a bit small scale for a summer blockbuster. This feels like the type of movie that might have played better in the doldrums of February or early April; it’s something that you’d be disappointed spending $10 on, but it’s exactly the type of empty escapism my friends and I would have easily paid $1.50 to see multiple times at our local second-run theater. It’s Dante’s Peak, not Independence Day.
The script – from noted playwright and director of Doubt and Joe Versus the Volcano, John Patrick Shanley – moves fast enough to paper over the stupidity. Karen is sent to the Congo because her boss – the recently departed Joe Don Baker – wants the diamonds and, perhaps less importantly, because the missing employee is his son. We get the requisite Crichton technobabble of Peter explaining his communications research with gorillas, and we gloss over any hints of political instability in Africa (our heroes dodge exploding cars and missile attacks, but they’re waved away). Once in the jungles, Shanley’s script hits the standard adventure beats – mysterious tribes, ancient tombs, erupting volcanoes and angry wildlife. If it seems familiar, that’s all on purpose.
As a teen who didn’t know better, I thought Crichton was a genius, weaving in hard science alongside rip-roaring plots. Now, I appreciate how Crichton took science that was highly speculative and fairly unrealistic and used it to put new spins on well-worn genre tropes. What is Jurassic Park – which I have recently re-read and is still fantastic – but King Kong with a high-tech, capitalist gloss? Sphere is Jules Verne with better tech. Timeframe is a classic time travel adventure with a quantum physics sheen. That’s not a criticism – the sci-fi approach Crichton took to familiar genres helped remove any sense of guilt from enjoying them.
Director Frank Marshall seems more drawn to old-fashioned adventure than tech, and isn’t afraid to present the film with a layer of camp. The instant Bruce Campbell screams at something offscreen in the opening moments or the vein in Joe Don Baker’s head sticks out when he commands Linney to go get the diamonds, you know what type of movie this is. The film’s depiction of Amy as a jealous, martini-sipping gorilla (along with her declarations that “Amy like green drop drink” – referring to the olives ) is silly, yet endearing; it helps that the gorilla costume designed by Stan Winston is really effective. The movie isn’t a comedy, but it is very funny in a way that I’m fairly certain is intentional.
There’s probably a more serious take on this that could work, but I appreciate its throwaway charm. Marshall was a producer for several big films, including Raiders of the Lost Ark, and while he doesn’t have Spielberg’s chops as a director, he understands the importance of keeping things moving. The movie dashes through set pieces, some of which are more effective than others – a hippo attack that was thrilling on the page looks silly in execution, and while I think the practical work on the film’s lava in the finale is fun, the army of silverback gorillas that attack the gang in the climax is never entirely convincing and too often presented in quick cuts that make it incomprehensible. But we also get a sequence where Laura Linney kills an entire army of evil gorillas with a laser, and how can you hate a movie that includes that?
The movie is wobbly enough that I don’t know that I could justify recommending it. What pushes it over into fun territory for me, though, is the cast, which knows exactly how to play this material. These aren’t deep or believable characters, but the actors dial their performances up to exactly what what movie demands. Congo came out in the early years of Linney’s transition from stage to screen, and while this in no way stands as her greatest performance, she’s having a great time barking orders and playing a bit of a badass (the film suggest that Karen is ex-CIA, but never explores that). Ernie Hudson has said Monroe Kelly is his favorite role, and it’s easy to see why; he’s really good as the dashing adventure hero, every line coated with charisma. Tim Curry plays this as comedy, and he’s extremely funny as the sniveling Herkermer Homolka (he always says his full name), giving the character an exaggerated Romanian accent that exists only in the movies. He’s fantastic. And the film is dotted with great character actors showing up for one or two scenes – Joe Pantoliano’s shady middleman should be a forgettable role, but under Joey Pants, it’s one of the highlights of the film. And, of course, anyone who has seen the film knows that its greatest moment comes from Delroy Lindo stealing the entire movie in one scene by bellowing “stop eating my sesame cake.”
If there’s a weak link, it’s Walsh. I get that Peter is supposed to be a milquetoast researcher out of his element with these adventurers. And Walsh does what’s written. But he gets lost alongside the bigger personalities, and I never bought the burgeoning relationship between Peter and Karen. It would have made more sense to switch Walsh with Bruce Campbell, both because how do you get Bruce Campbell in your movie and waste him in one scene, but also because Campbell’s performance style is right in line with the heightened nature of the rest of the cast. I could also see him playing Kelly or Herkermer Homolka, but Hudson and Curry are so good in this that the movie is lost without them.
Just as I was at risk of portraying Congo as a complete disaster in 1995, I’m afraid this review oversells it 30 years later. It’s not a great movie or a lost classic. It’s a cheesy, quickly digestible bit of fluff, elevated by fun performances and a reminder that we used to be able to do this without computer graphics. It’s shaggy and silly, but it has personality. As I’m fond of saying, if it were any better, it would be worse. I don’t know that I’ll ever watch Congo again, but I’m glad I had this opportunity to give it a second chance.
Thank you for going easy on Congo. I was just the right age (11 years old) to be entralled by this movie when I saw it in theaters and I watched it about a dozen times on video. I felt similarly about Batman Forever, that summer's biggest hit. (What can I say? I really enjoyed campy stuff.) I even went and read the book! I have no intention of ever seeing this again, but I look back on it with fondness. Thank you also for highlighting Delroy Lindo's uproarious line, which I still occasionally think about and causes me to laugh. There's also the part with Grant Heslov's character having a conversation with an African man that's hilariously (but purposefully) awkward.