This film has an undeservedly terrible reputation, with almost everybody overly keen to criticize and condemn it.  Yet, there is much in it that is truly fascinating as a perverse vision of societal collapse and disintegration.  Indeed, Brando’s status amongst his “children” assumes a religious dimension as he represents the supreme Patriarch as absolute monster, hiding behind his supposed benevolence.  Whatever his just proclamations for scientific advancement, he lauds Godlike over a quasi-society of unstable half-human, half-animal creatures.  The plight of these creatures makes for a sobering assessment of the human condition as a clash between instinct and reason, an unstable mix in which the inevitable madness represents the inherent yet properly anarchic and base solution.  An animal is driven mad by the gifts of reason and communication for they seek to repress instinct in the name of “law” (religious or otherwise).  In a perverse way thus, the film explores a terrible, malfunctioning patriarchal socialization process, with Frankenheimer enamored by the subversively anarchic potential of the final rebellion.  Thus, he finds surprising pathos in the hyena-man, unable to deal with his human ambitions and finally succumbing to that arrogant perversity of reason that makes humanity aspire to be God: ego.  In the evolutionary psychosis that ensues, there can be only chaos.

There is much that is tantalizing about this film, including the unfortunately suppressed connotations of sexual aberration, of which the sly homoeroticism between Kilmer and Thewlis says much.  Indeed, the film’s humor becomes ever more evident, especially in the unrated director’s cut, which from the outset casts the supposed hero in a very ambiguous moral light, making his disdain and outrage rather hypocritical.  Indeed, the hyena-man emerges as the most sympathetic character, his descent into psychosis the epitome of the unique tragedy of his evolutionary predicament.  Significantly, his insight – the discovery of the implants – is treated as a kind of wounding and self-mutilation very much in keeping with the notion of such as a kind of purification in this director’s work, though here paradoxically amounts to a descent into anarchy.  Humanity’s bestial drive to destroy and debase itself is an irrepressible part of its makeup, the attempt to tame this through genetic research or behavioral modification bound to backfire.  Patriarchal law, rather than preserve order, only makes a paradox of the human condition.  Thus, Frankenheimer uses the film’s evolutionary transgression to reflect on the genetic ambivalence of humanity – the clash between reason and instinct as the inherent human identity crisis with all culture and society hence perhaps a doomed attempt to mediate the irreconcilable. read more