Hello again and welcome back to the second installment in Guillermo del Tober, an attempt to watch through Guillermo del Toro's filmography before the end of October. Am I behind schedule already? Possibly, but what's the fun in a deadline if you don't procrastinate and cause yourself unnecessary stress down the road?
Todays watch was 1997's Mimic, starring Mira Sorvino as entomologist Susan Tyler, and Jeremy Northam as the CDC's Dr. Peter Mann. It also has a eyebrow raising supporting cast of Charles S. Dutton, Giancarlo Giannini, Josh Brolin, F. Murray Abraham, hell it even has a single scene appearance from Norman Reedus. Mimic appears to make a lot of sense from the outside looking in, a sci-fi horror that pays homage to Hollywood classic giant insect movies, and has obvious influences from 80's and 90's mid budget financial explosions that leaned into their genre and grunge of the time, like Alien and Seven. It's a hard R horror movie being lead by a young new director, and also a credited writer on the film, who has proven they can make a successful project for a small cost.
The cracks in the surface begin to appear when Miramax, the studio behind the production starts getting involved. Based again on the guide on del Toro's career written by Ian Nathan (which is unofficial and unauthorized) it sounds like Robert Weinstein pretty much focused most of his daily efforts into beating directors the studio hired into submission to force out the movie he thought would turn the best profit. If Nathan is to be believed, del Toro struggled massively in making this film, basically rejecting it aside from the lessons he learned from it. From freezing cold shoots in a Toronto winter, to the seemingly daily calls from Weinstein about how awful this movie was, it's easy to see where the behind scenes confrontations leaked into the final product and the movie we have today.
After completing my watch of Mimic, my immediate thought was simply that the script does not function to achieve what it sets out to do. The movie opens with a lingering prologue of how a disease is killing children across the world, being carried by cockroaches, so Susan Tyler and Peter Mann work together to create a new breed of roaches to sterilize and wipe out the infection. Three years later, the children are alive and well, but the new species of roaches has survived and are evolving at an alarming rate. These new insects largest threat being humanity, they have evolved to mimic human kind, growing to human size and developing ways to appear human-ish. By its conclusion, the threads are lost and the movie turns into an attempt at Aliens or other sci-fi grim slashers. It felt held down by the to-do it gives us to check off, but then turns into a mad scramble in its third act that doesn't tie much of it together.
The usage of New York City as a backdrop for a story built around silent threats among crowded streets, never knowing how close you really are to the roach infested underside, and even about how vulnerability is so easily abused in an environment where the helpless are ignored, it's a perfect backdrop. But unfortunately, the realization of NYC here is a single subway station (which has an announcement that it is closing for the night in a scene?) and some endlessly rainy city streets. The city feels remarkably close to the city in David Fincher's Seven from two years prior, which took great lengths to always have rain and gray skies through almost the entire movie, and achieves its immersion more than this film. It's not out of place in del Toro's hands, but it feels staunchly opposed to the underground half of the city that is built out with an entire different atmosphere. The underworld is labyrinthian (an idea del Toro becomes pretty familiar with) and ancient feeling in a way that not a single thing above the ground does. I see a world where this divide could have benefitted the movie, but it instead does more to bring the transitions from one level to the next to a halt.
My most unfortunate takeaway after going back and forth on it for a while is truly just that I don't like the cockroach look. The initial silhouette in the shadows was a very effective image, but once we see the man-sized roaches on full display (in the now conveniently closed subway station) and Tyler breaks down that they really are just big bugs that have barely scratched the surface of mimicking mankind, I felt myself deflate. I was hoping for a more impactful revelation, some answer to how the roaches bred despite the design to die off quickly, did the tapping from the child communicate with the bugs (I do not have the knowledge to dive into how the child presented to be on the spectrum is handled in this movie, but I feel safe saying it's not great,) what was the deal with Chekhov's pregnancy's test, truly anything. But really just the whole design doesn't appeal much. They're giant cockroaches with mandibles that form a human mask, seen in a mix of practical and digital effects. I do have to wonder if the digital element was a limiter on the monster design, it was still 97. I'm also just not a big bug enthusiast as it is, so my feelings are admittedly bias.
In the end, Mimic is a 2/5 for me. It stands on its own legs as a fine 90's monster movie with a stacked cast by todays standards, and just comes short on delivering what I usually expect from del Toro's catalog. I think it's also fair to say, the Weinstein's were menaces to their environments from all reports, and their negative effects are felt in many productions they were involved in. The podcast Blank Check has a running theory on studio director development, and it tracks the pattern of young up and coming directors finding success and then being brought onto large studio productions, only to become overwhelmed and shoved around by execs. This turns out to be a formative experience, a real trial by fire, for many modern directors who go on to learn from the studio model and take what they need for their future projects, and del Toro follows suit. He follows Mimic with The Devil's Backbone in 2001, which I've heard great things about and look forward to checking out for the first time!
If I'm all wrong about Mimic, please let me know. I would love to have my mind changed on a potential rewatch in the future.
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