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Synopsis:
The children of Manhattan are struck down by the virulent Strickler’s
Disease, which leaves crippled the few it does not kill. Unable to
combat the disease’s carrier, the common cockroach, Dr Peter Mann
(Jeremy Northam), Deputy Director of the Centre for Disease Control,
turns for help to entomologist Dr Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino), who
devises a plan to create a biological control. The plan is a success. At
a triumphant press conference, Peter announces that – along with the
cockroach itself – Strickler’s Disease has been eradicated before it
could escape Manhattan. Peter then introduces Susan, who is now his
wife. Susan explains to the reporters the creation of “the Judas Breed”,
a genetically engineered insect carrying termite and mantid DNA.
Released to infiltrate the cockroach population, the Judases produced an
enzyme that, once taken up by the roaches, increased their metabolism to
the point where they simply starved to death; while the Judases
themselves, designed to be sterile adults and to have a limited
lifespan, died out also. That evening at home, Peter watches the press
conference on TV, smilingly observing that his and Susan’s fifteen
minutes are now over. Despite her seeming triumph, Susan is subdued,
worrying over the possible consequences of her actions, until Peter
distracts her with a suggestion that it might be time to start thinking
about children of their own…. Three years later, a minister operating a
refuge is pursued onto the roof of his own church, from where he falls
to his death; an event observed by a young autistic boy, Chuy (Alexander
Goodwin), who lives opposite the church with his shoemaker grandfather,
Manny (Giancarlo Giannini). Chuy watches impassively as the minister’s
body is dragged into the basement of the church by a tall figure that is
making an odd clicking noise, which Chuy imitates. The next morning,
Peter is summoned to the church by his assistant, Josh (Josh Brolin),
who tells him that people have been found locked inside the church, and
have since been kept confined there for fear of a communicable disease.
Josh also points out a peculiar phenomenon: a large faecal deposit on
the ceiling of the church. Seeing that the building sits directly above
the subway, Peter worries that any disease present may already have
spread. Arriving at her job at the museum, Susan finds two streetwise
young boys, Ricky (James Costa) and Davis (Javon Barnwell), waiting for
her, wanting to sell her their finds of dead insects. Susan humours
them, sending them on their way with a few dollars and a collection jar,
but quickly sobers when she inspects the boys’ prize find, a strange bug
as big as her hand, which they found in the subway. Susan is amazed to
discover that the bug is actually still alive – and even more, when she
realises that it is only a juvenile. Without warning, the bug latches
viciously onto Susan’s hand. She pries it free, and swiftly pins it to
an examination board. As it lies there struggling, the insect begins to
release a white viscous secretion. A terrible fear gripping her, Susan
goes to her office to re-examine her own research notes – while outside
the building, a tall figure stands motionless, watching her windows.
Meanwhile, the squirming insect continues to chirrup. From her office,
Susan hears the sound of breaking glass. She rushes in to find the bug
gone and the window wide open, and is suddenly aware that she is not
alone….
Synopsis:
Mimic was the second film, and the first US production, of the
Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, who had previously made a name for
himself on the arthouse circuit with his imaginative and visually
arresting re-working of the vampire mythos, Cronos, and who has
since developed into one of the more interesting directors working in
the genre field today. Mimic is certainly recognisable as a
sophomore effort. Compared to its freewheeling predecessor, the film is
very formally structured. There is a sense throughout of a reigning in,
an unwillingness to take risks – although that said, there are a
couple of shock scenes you wouldn’t expect to find in an American film –
and the screenplay is rather unimaginative, particularly considering the
talent that worked upon it, credited and otherwise. As for its story,
Mimic could hardly be more traditional: the film is essentially a
classic 1950s Big Bug movie, with that standard fifties bugaboo,
radiation, replaced by its equally standard nineties equivalent, genetic
engineering; an old-fashioned, tampering-in-God’s-domain,
monsters-on-the-rampage science fiction movie. Am I complaining? I am
not. I always love a monster movie, be it good, bad or indifferent; and
it is as a monster movie that Mimic works best. Although the main
body of its action takes place almost entirely in the murky recesses of
New York’s subway system (and the film has attracted some criticism for
its relentless darkness and gloom; but where would you expect a battle
with giant cockroaches to be taking place? – on the beach?), this is not
to disguise any shortcomings in the special effects department. On the
contrary, this is one movie that has no need to hide its critters in the
shadows: the bugs are simply fabulous. The other aspects of the
film are, unfortunately, less remarkable. The acting is solid without
being particularly memorable; while the production design and the
cinematography are spookily atmospheric, but restricted by the setting
of the action (and truth be told, there is rather too much light
in those subway tunnels, “seven storeys down”). But it is at the script
level – specifically, alas, in its science – that Mimic
ultimately disappoints.
There are probably few
creatures on the planet that people find more naturally repulsive than
the cockroach. Even those of us affectionately inclined towards the
members of the
Class Insecta generally rarely have anything good to say
about them. In this sense, roaches are a natural to play the bad guys in
a Nature-Strikes-Back film – and yet few productions have ever tried to
exploit their natural unpopularity. There was Creepshow, of
course; and The Nest, which offered up flesh-eating roaches (oh,
those wacky scientists!); and Damnation Alley, which very nearly
succeeded in making giant roaches cute; but on the whole, for an insect
so universally loathed, the cockroach has won comparatively little
screen time. And when you stop and think about it, it really isn’t too
hard to figure out why. Cockroaches, after all, don’t actually do
anything. Oh, sure, they’re gross. They scuttle, and swarm, and
scavenge, and lay eggs and poop all over the place, and one day, as we
all know, they’re going to inherit the Earth; but still, they don’t, you
know, do anything. They don’t bite. They don’t sting. They don’t
suck. They don’t hunt, or rend, or dismember. So while the thought of
giant cockroaches is probably enough to give most people the
skin-crawls, the roaches themselves just aren’t sufficiently
threatening. And this, clearly, was the dilemma that confronted the
writers of Mimic – one that they signally failed to solve. At the
press conference where Peter announces the eradication of Strickler’s
Disease, Susan is invited to explain her work to the press. It is here
that we learn that in the creation of the Judas Breed, DNA from both
termites and mantises was somehow employed. The camera pulls back here,
and Susan’s voice fades out, so we never do get to hear the
“explanation” for this tactic. Nor is it justified later on, when Susan
is confronted by the catastrophic side-effects of her work. Of course,
once we see the giant roaches in action, the “reason” is all too clear:
it’s so that they can hunt and kill like praying mantises, and have a
vicious soldier class, like termites. This is an outrageous cheat. I
mean, how hard could it have been to throw in a few lines of dialogue to
cover up this manoeuvring? To suggest, perhaps, that the enzyme with
which the native population of cockroaches is infected by the Judas was
derived from mantids, or that the secretory glands of the termite were
required to disperse it? That the writers didn’t even bother to try and
disguise their central contrivance is just an insult.
And it doesn’t stop there.
There is one deliciously absurd moment, for instance, when Susan is
trying to convince Peter that the Judases have indeed survived, and
tells him of a pH test – conducted with a basic litmus strip, no less! –
that she performed on the juvenile bug brought to her lab by the two
young boys. “I did a pH test, and there are only two species that match
what I found!” she avers. Oh, so you’ve conducted a pH test – with
pieces of litmus paper, presumably – on every species of insect in the
world, have you, Susan? Well, why not? There are only, oh, about thirty
million of them, after all! Give or take. More seriously, it is left
totally unclear just how Susan’s biological control is supposed to work
in the first place. During that pointedly truncated press conference,
Susan mentions that the Judases’ secretions contain an enzyme that is
supposed to send the cockroaches’ natural metabolism into fatal
overdrive. An enzyme? How exactly are the roaches supposed to be
infected by an enzyme? Do they take it up through their
exoskeletons? Is it sexually transmitted? Do they eat it? And how
do we even know that the roaches will come into contact with the
Judases’ secretions in the first place? Do they contain some sort of
chemotactic factor, or are we just relying on dumb luck? And even
supposing the roaches did take up the enzyme, how is it supposed become
a part of their metabolic function? Perhaps the legendary resistance of
the cockroach to just about everything dissuaded the writers from just
having the Judases carry bacteria or a virus, even though those agents
could be far more believably manipulated; but the use of an “enzyme” in
this context makes little sense.
But all of this,
disappointing as it is, pales into insignificance beside the central
premise of Mimic: that the Judas breed has not merely survived,
but evolved into a huge, highly developed, savage predator capable not
just of threatening mankind, but of infiltrating and eradicating it. The
truth about the Judases is revealed only gradually. Susan first
recognises that the bug brought to her lab, large as it is, is only a
juvenile; an incompletely developed adult, about three feet long, which
Dr Gates (a cameoing, and essentially wasted, F. Murray Abraham)
identifies as belonging to a soldier caste, is fished out of the sewers;
while the adults are about seven feet long (high?), with a wingspan of
perhaps ten feet. Throughout the film, we have seen tall, apparently
human figures lurking in the shadows in the periphery of the story. As
Susan waits for Peter at a deserted railway station, while he searches
the tunnels below for proof of what they both fear, she becomes aware of
a slender, motionless figure at the far end of the platform. One of
Mimic’s truly great moments follows, as the figure reveals itself
first as humanoid, a crude but satisfactory copy, then as totally
inhuman, as it unfurls wings and claws and jaws to swoop through
the air and carry the terrified Susan off into the darkness. Still more
is to follow. Late in the film, Susan, Peter, Leonard Norton, a railway
cop reluctantly drawn into the enterprise, and Manny, who has entered
the subways to search for the missing Chuy, become trapped in an
abandoned subway car, pursued there by a Judas which they finally manage
to dispatch – although only after Leonard empties two clips into it, and
it is cut in half by the sliding doors of the car; and even then
it doesn’t go without a fight. Susan tentatively turns the upper half of
the bisected insect over, and discovers that her greatest nightmare is a
reality: the creature has lungs.
And this, of course, is
where Mimic really blows it. The film’s premise is that the
Judases, presumably under the biological influence of that metabolic
“enzyme” they were carrying, have undergone a rapid course of growth and
evolution, finally emerging as a species capable of challenging Homo
sapiens for dominance. But evolution doesn’t work like that. You
don’t just “evolve” because you feel like it; and you certainly don’t
just “develop” lungs. It’s not as if a Judas was poking around one day
in the chest cavity of some dismembered mammal and said to itself, “Gee,
those look like fun, think I’ll try ’em!” Evolution of any kind, and
certainly something as profound as the emergence of lungs, could only
happen under the most extreme of environmental pressures – none of which
are being exerted upon the Judases. On the contrary, there is a
beautiful, empty, inviting niche down there in the darkness, one just
waiting to be filled: that previously occupied by the cockroaches for
whose demise the Judases are responsible. Nature, as they say, abhors a
vacuum; and the most likely outcome for the Judases was simply to take
the place of their predecessors. They might have been a bit bigger, a
bit faster, a lot meaner….but there’s no reason why they should
have developed into something so wholly alien as the creatures we see
here. Now, I suppose the inference is that metabolic enzyme was
responsible for all this; but that still leaves us with the mystery of
why that enzyme should have wiped out one species of roach, but turned
another into SuperBug. I guess we just chalk it up to “SCIENCE” and move
on.
That said, we can’t
really move on until we examine Mimic’s final, crowning blunder:
the blatant error in the speech that gives this film its title. The
“mimicry” to which it refers is the development in the Judases of two
sections of the carapace which, brought together, take on sufficient
resemblance to a human face for the bugs, wrapped tightly in outer wings
that give the appearance of a full-length coat, to pass as human,
at least for so long as they remain out of the direct light. There are,
of course, numerous instances of mimicry in the natural world; and Susan
uses that to explain the phenomenon, arguing that the Judases have
evolved (there’s that word again!) this way of eluding their natural
predator: mankind. Except, of course, that we are not the
Judases’ predators. How can we be? – we don’t even know that they
exist!! So what are we supposed to think, that the Judases are
displaying anticipatory evolution? Please! This is not only ridiculous
in itself, but there was a perfectly obvious alternative to this
argument that would have both allowed the film to keep its title, and to
be much, much more frightening: that the Judases are using
mimicry not as a way of eluding their predators, but of getting close
to their prey. Us.
After all this, it may come
as a surprise to some of you that I retain a lot of affection for
Mimic. Unsatisfactory as its science may be, I wasn’t thinking about
that at all – and neither will you be, I assure you – just so
long as its six-legged co-stars were on the screen. As I said before,
the roach effects in Mimic are really excellent: imaginatively
designed, well executed, repulsive, and scary. For some people,
the sight of giant cockroaches might be quite repellent enough; but
Mimic doesn’t stop there. Anyone who ever stepped on a real roach
and recoiled in disgust from the resulting mess might want to steer well
clear of this one, which delivers an almost non-stop shower of goo. From
the first moment that a bug appears, things ooze, and burst,
and squirt, and splatter; dismembered bodies, animal
and human, decorate the landscape; while at one point, three of the
characters wander through a literal forest of shit. When the surviving
humans become trapped, Susan wards off an impending attack by dragging
out the guts of the bisected roach and smearing its secretions all over
herself and her companions; and later, after a close encounter, Peter
gives himself another coating, whipping a roach gland out of his pocket
and rubbing it all over his face and hands. For anyone who ever squirmed
through the alien autopsy sequence of John Carpenter’s version of The
Thing, it will come as no surprise at all to find Rob Bottin’s name
on the credits of Mimic. Indeed, I can think of few films since
The Thing that took quite as much pleasure in grossing its
audience out with its bodily fluids as Mimic does. Of course,
biology is very much about bodily fluids; it’s really not a profession
intended for those with weak stomachs. Watching Mimic takes me
back to my undergraduate days, and to the lecturer who one year walked
into our first prac class, gave everyone a big, beaming smile, and
announced, “By the time this course is over, you’re all going to really
love mucus!” Well, perhaps it’s too much to say that I loved
it; but I did progress to the point where I could put my bare arm into a
barrelful of dead slugs floating in a bath consisting primarily of their
own extruded slime without getting too freaked out by it. So when I
watch Mimic, my main reaction is not to cry out, “Oh, gross!!”
but rather to give a gleeful chuckle, knowing that on some strange
level, I’ve come home….
Hmm. Okay. Sorry for the
personal digression. I guess the question now is, is there
anything in Mimic for people other than terminal nutcases?
Well, yes, I think so – although not as much as there should have been,
had the script been better developed. One of the main criticisms that
has been levelled at Mimic over the years concerns its handling
of its child characters. Of course, there are those who feel – and who
are perfectly entitled to do so, of course – that when it comes to
onscreen endangerment, children should be off-limits. This is not a
stance that I necessarily agree with. There are ways and ways of doing
everything, and no matter how you feel about the decisions taken by the
writers of Mimic, it must at least be acknowledged that the
film’s use of children is not at all gratuitous, but rather a reflection
of the film’s unexpectedly serious underlying theme. With all of its
wandering about in the dark, and its battles with hideous insectoid
monsters, Mimic tends to dismissed as yet another rip-off of
Aliens; the scenes late in the film, when Susan appoints herself the
protector of the boy, Chuy, even at the risk of her own life, only
strengthen the argument. (In order to save Chuy, Susan deliberately
injures herself, using her own blood to draw a roach away from the boy
and towards herself. Another Dr Susan – McAlester, that is – could take
lessons from this Dr Susan in how to employ this tactic without,
shall we say, going overboard.) But in truth, the resemblance
between the two films – or rather between Mimic and the Alien
series as a whole – lies rather in their mutual fascination with
reproductive themes and gynaecological imagery, and with their wars
between species for the right to endure. The children of New York are
Mimic’s first casualties (oddly, few of the people who criticise the
film over its child characters mention the sequence that describes the
ravages of Strickler’s Disease; apparently it’s okay for thousands of
children to die, just as long as it’s offscreen), and children remain at
risk throughout, even as juvenile Judases are instinctively crushed
underfoot by repulsed human beings. Meanwhile, Susan’s professional
activities form an ironic counterpoint to her private desires, the
ability of the supposedly sterile Judas Breed to reproduce itself
contrasted with Susan’s own apparent inability to conceive. Echoing its
most obvious progenitor, Them! (the granddaddy of all Big
Bug films, and easily the best of the lot), Mimic is, in the end,
about some pretty fundamental facts of life: the instinct to breed, and
to propagate; and ultimately, to survive; all of which applies to the
human race just as much as it does to, say, the cockroach.
Unfortunately, while this material is certainly there in Mimic,
it is never really comes together as it should. Much as I enjoy the
film’s yecch factor, I am compelled to admit that it would have
been a much stronger work had it put a little more effort into its
screenplay, and a little less into figuring out how to gross the
audience out next. Then, too, it must be conceded that the central “war”
never amounts to very much. There are a number of aspects of Mimic
that disappoint, but none so much as the fact that the giant roaches
never escape their subway world and go for a proper rampage through the
streets of New York. Now, that would have been worth seeing!….and
after all, if the budget for your monster movie won’t stretch to staging
the obligatory rampage, maybe you shouldn’t be making one….
Unusually, perhaps, for a
film so rife with scientific and biological themes, Mimic is also
rich with religious imagery, which is where director del Toro is finally
able to make his presence felt. Those eerie plastic-swathed statues from
Cronos make a reappearance here, in the boarded-up church that
forms the setting for the beginning of the story proper. (The “Cronos
Device” itself, come to think of it, is very much like a mechanical
cockroach….) Crucifixes flash in the darkness as the characters fight to
overcome their unnatural enemies; a rosary plays a critical role in the
closing scenes; and Dr Gates accuses Susan of wanting from him, not
advice, but “absolution”. Del Toro also plays the name-game again here,
putting the fight for mankind into the hands of Dr Peter Mann and
Manny the shoemaker; while the weaknesses in the writing and the
handling of characters in Cronos that finally undermined some of
the film’s many virtues, are also evident here. There are a painful
number of contrivances manifest in the plot of Mimic as it
struggles to get all of its central characters to the same point of the
abandoned subway system in time for the final battle. We can accept that
in the absence of any solid evidence, both Peter and Susan would want
confirmation of her fears before they go public – although Peter’s
involvement in the enterprise feels more like it stems from a desire to
cover his wife’s butt than anything else – and also that the Deputy
Director of the CDC could get the permits to inspect the subway; but
didn’t anyone – anyone connected with the railways, for instance –
wonder why he wanted them? Then, of course, there’s the fact that
this clearly dangerous expedition is undertaken without any safety gear,
still less any climbing gear (and yes, it’s a piece of falling
scaffolding that strands Peter and Leonard deep underground); and what
are we to make of the total absence of any communication devices?
– no mobile phone, no walkie-talkie, no police radio? I mean, come on!
And the way that Susan ends up in the subway - !? Sadly, in the course
of the film both Susan and Peter are handed Death Battle Exemptions©
of absolutely groan-inducing magnitude – as, in a sense, is Chuy,
although the film does deign to provide a reason why the roaches
might not have killed him. (Our only consolation is that, even if
both of them survive the final showdown, Peter and Susan will ultimately
be facing a damage bill comparable to that handed to Carl Denham at the
beginning of Son Of Kong….and be facing a New York City in a
similar mood.) The final third of Mimic is well-staged and
suspenseful, granted, but I can’t help but wonder if the New York
railways and the Power Company are really that indifferent about
disconnecting unused electrical systems….
In terms of character, I
suppose that the most contentious additions to the cast of Mimic
are the “special” Chuy (I’m assuming autism) and his grandfather, Manny;
I confess to finding both of them rather irritating. On the other hand,
the arrival of Leonard the railway cop lends a welcome spice to the
proceedings. (Leonard is played by – who else? – Charles S. Dutton. Yes,
folks! Here at AYCYAS, it’s all Charles S. Dutton, all the
time!) I particularly like the various clashes between Leonard and Peter
(Peter, being himself not entirely guiltless in respect of petty tyranny
and arrogance, is most indignant when he finds himself receiving some of
his own treatment from Leonard, who he promptly accuses of having a
Napoleon complex); and the way that, in the face of danger, all
bickering ceases, and the protagonists become simply “Susan”, “Peter”
and “Leonard” to one another. But underlying all this drama is the
relationship between Peter and Susan. Now, this is not to say that their
relationship forms the major, or even a major, component of the
plot. It doesn’t: that’s what I like about it. Their marriage is
sketched in the lightest of strokes. They meet, they fall in love, they
marry, they stay devoted to one another – most of it offscreen. So many
science fiction films feel compelled to build themselves around either
Cliché A (the initially hostile pair who inexplicably fall in love) or
Cliché B (the estranged couple reunited by a crisis), that anything else
is rare enough to seem remarkable. Jeremy Northam does rather well with
what he’s given here – and his accent is dead on – but considering what
kind of film this is, Peter simply isn’t the focus of the story.
Mira Sorvino’s casting as a
“brilliant entomologist” is, to say the least, rather off-beat; but she
does surprisingly well. (Her willingness to – literally – get down and
dirty during the second half of the film is particularly commendable.)
Predictably, there comes a moment when someone – one of the young
bug-hunters, as it happens – asks Susan, “How come you like bugs so
much?” What follows is the standard “necessary exposition” scene:
nothing Susan says here fails to come into play later in the film, from
the behaviour of soldier termites, to the dietary habits of the species
(this bit is supposed to excuse their failure to kill Susan; it
doesn’t), to the existence of a single fertile male in the colony. But
Sorvino does really well here. There’s no manic over-enthusiasm in her
speech, just a natural and believable admiration for the sheer beauty of
biology in action. (Her young auditors are, of course, completely
unimpressed.) We come away convinced that Susan loves her work for the
very best reason in the world – because.
Having succeeded in
establishing Susan’s credentials, however, Mimic proceeds to
treat her, in my opinion, most unfairly. Once again, we have a “expert”,
a “leader in her field”, apparently knowing less about the correct
applications of her discipline than anyone else in the world. The whole
section of the story dealing with the development and release of the
Judas Breed is deeply suspect, apart from the central idea itself of
engineering a biological control to deal with the recognised carrier of
the disease. There have indeed been numerous instances, not just of
attempts to eradicate or reduce problem pests by genetic means, but
specifically of what we see here, the release of a sterile variant to
break the breeding cycle (in light of this, Dr Gates’ snotty
announcement that he found Susan’s tactics “unforgivable” is fairly
ridiculous); and in some of those trials, mutations did indeed result in
the emergence of a fertile variant. This is why, when undertaking this
kind of work, the engineered population is closely monitored – and why
you don’t, as is implied in Mimic, just stare down at a bunch of
dead bugs and say, “Well, that looks like it worked, let’s go home.”
Least of all do you do that when dealing with cockroaches,
perhaps the most frighteningly resilient piece of biological design even
seen on this planet! I would have expected a project like Susan’s to
have a follow-up period of at least six to twelve months, during which
the release site was closely monitored for survivors. Perhaps, given the
size of the released Judases, it might even have been possible to fit
them with tiny transmitters, so that the movements of the infiltrators
could be tracked and the success or otherwise of the inserted “suicide
gene” determined. (Susan, being the scientist, is naturally the one
“blamed” for the persistence of the Judas Breed, at least by
implication. However, considering the resources at its disposal, the CDC
should and would have been in charge of this aspect of the work.) At any
rate, accumulated experience in the field of released biological
controls renders ludicrous Susan’s whimpered protest, “But it worked in
the lab!” An entomologist of her standing should not have needed
the inevitable reproof from her disapproving mentor, Dr Gates: “But,
Susan – you let them out.”
And this is, finally, where
Mimic rather sticks in my craw. Yes, Susan’s work has spawned
giant killer cockroaches (hey, happens to the best of us, right?) – but,
as the screenplay bewilderingly fails to stress, it has also achieved
exactly what it set out to achieve: it has eradicated Strickler’s
Disease. Something strange happens in the course of this film. The fact
that “an entire generation of children” is at risk at the opening of the
story; that there have many, many deaths already, and that nothing
approaching a cure or a vaccine has been found; that Susan’s actions
have saved countless thousands, perhaps even millions of lives,
ultimately has less resonance than Manny’s hysterical cries of, “How
could you do this!?” and Leonard’s angry – and flagrantly untrue
and unjust – addendum, “Yeah, you tell her, Manny, ’cos she don’t give a
goddamn!” This is not to say that Susan should not be held accountable
for the unseen consequences of her actions, nor indeed that the end
justifies the means; but merely that I think that Mimic could
have put rather more effort, rather more emphasis, into presenting the
case for the defence. |
Director: