Flasz On Film

Congo was released thirty years ago, in the summer of 1995, and even at that point it was a movie nearly two decades in the making. Although it was officially adapted from Michael Crichton’s 1980 novel, its genesis reaches even further back because that book wasn’t supposed to be a book. Congo originated as a movie.  

In fact, Crichton’s entire literary career is closely tied to cinema in many ways. After all, only after the adaptation of The Andromeda Strain, his first novel written under his real name, became a modest success, he both made the decision to abandon writing under an alias and decided to have a closer look at the world of movies. He split his time between writing novels, which lent themselves towards cinematic treatment quite readily, and trying his hand at screenwriting and directing himself. He wrote and directed Westworld and Coma and then followed up by adapting his own book The Great Train Robbery into a 1979 movie starring Sean Connery. Which is where Congo has its beginnings.  

Crichton wanted to make a movie in the style of King Solomon’s Mines where he’d be able to cast Sean Connery in the lead role and direct a traditional-looking adventure romp of the kind he most assuredly grew up watching, but also grounded in the kind of techno-reality that tickled his fancy.  Folks at Fox liked the idea and handed Crichton a pile of money on the basis of his pitch alone and gave him permission to write a book, adapt it into a screenplay and then have a crack at directing it. Long story short, the way I see how events unfolded was that Crichton talked a major movie studio with a lot of money to burn (after all, they had just made unimaginable amounts of money on the back of Star Wars) to adapt a novel that didn’t exist.  

The book was published in 1980 and became a bestseller and Crichton decided to give it a whirl after completing his work on Looker. However, this is where his involvement with adapting Congo into a movie ended because apparently the studio would not allow him to use a real gorilla, which I presume he intended to teach to use sign language for the purposes of the movie. After Crichton’s departure, the movie was offered to Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter, but the project eventually began rotting in the depths of development hell.  

The reason why the Congo adaptation saw the light of day is likely because Jurassic Park reinvigorated Crichton’s brand in 1993. Suddenly, he was the talk of the town again, what with being one of the minds behind the biggest movie ever made. In traditional Hollywood fashion, movie producers were much more open to the idea of seeing Crichton’s work adapted into a movie, even if only because the phrase “from the visionary mind behind Jurassic Park” was a solid guarantee of box office success. Thus, the 90s saw a slew of Crichton adaptations, such as Disclosure, Sphere, The 13^th Warrior, The Lost World (which Spielberg himself begged Crichton to write, allegedly) and, of course, Congo. There’s also Rising Sun which was released a few weeks after Jurassic Park, so it’s a bit harder to infer its influence, but it’s quite possible that the word-of-mouth marketing had something to do with the movie’s success.  

Apart from Sphere and The 13^th Warrior, all those ‘90s Crichton adaptations ended up making money at the box office. In fact, as a total aside you could also speculate that the ‘90s was a great decade for adapting bestselling novels as in addition to Crichton, John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Anne Rice, James Ellroy and others were responsible for some of the decade’s box office juggernauts. It only goes to show that if there ever was a time to adapt a book like Congo into a high-profile Hollywood movie, it was in the ‘90s. Because if you wanted to pitch this movie on the back of its story—a movie about a bunch of people going to Africa with a gorilla who communicates using sign language to discover an ancient diamond mine and having to use lasers to fight deadly gorilla-human hybrids trained and bred to kill trespassers—nobody would touch it with a ten-foot pole. This was a movie that could only come together because it carried that “from the mind of that guy who wrote Jurassic Park” slogan tattooed right across the poster and even with this guarantee of box office traction, the movie was going to be a bit different than your average blockbuster you might encounter in the wild. 

The Paramount execs presiding over this production instinctively knew that they needed to do two things to make sure Congo had a fighting chance at the box office: take the source material seriously and lean into its many idiosyncrasies and to ensure the movie would convey the sense of Spielbergian scale without having to hire the man himself (who was then likely busy concurrently putting together The Lost World and Amistad). Frank Marshall, an Amblin stalwart and a producing guru, ended up taking the mantle and stepping behind the camera to make Congo his third official directing job after Arachnophobia and Alive. And in fact, just having these two movies on his resume would have been enough to make sure his adaptation of Congo would look the way it needed to: a combination of a serious-looking adventure underpinned by drama and a camp thriller with potent comedic overtones.  

What Congo ended up being was the perfect blend of these seemingly competing sensibilities that made the movie look like a bona fide singularity. It is one of those films that looks simultaneously like an earnest attempt at an adventure movie replete with ambitious set pieces and a parody thereof. And because it finds a neat balance between these two orthogonal modalities of storytelling, Congo is a movie like no other: a fast-paced, large-scale spectacle full of adventure, suspense and awe that is as ridiculous as it is ambitious. Crucially though, it is a movie that is fully aware of its own preposterousness and embraces it as though it was all perfectly acceptable and reasonable.  

It turns out that Marshall and friends bypassed what Crichton considered non-negotiable—the idea of hiring a real gorilla to play the role of Amy—and got away with putting a person inside a fake gorilla suit instead. And don’t get me wrong: Amy does not look like a real gorilla. None of the gorillas in the movie look naturalistic enough to pass as the real deal. They all look like men in suits, but the reason why it does not matter one bit is that the filmmakers and everyone involved behaved as though they were working with real gorillas. In fact, this conviction spills over onto all other aspects of the movie and renders its technobabbly nonsensical plot elements involving diamonds, lasers and ancient mines completely believable in the moment.  

Taking a sober look at any and all aspects of Congo simply guarantees that you’d find it ridiculous. From a company boss who swings golf clubs at screens in fits of rage and a know-it-all CIA hacker lady (Laura Linney) who shoots lasers, fires flares at oncoming surface-to-air missiles and provides the team with a number of deus ex machina get-out-of-jail-free cards like escape balloons to a duo of nerds (Dylan Walsh and Grant Heslov) who babysit a fake gorilla with a talking sleeve and a totally over-the-top sleazy Romanian philanthropist Herkermer Homolka (played iconically by Tim Curry), it is downright impossible to see this movie as anything but terminally braindead in the cold light of day. Congo is a full-on exercise in suspension of disbelief that relies on audience participation to fully enable its glory as that camp adventure hybrid with a pinch of techno-thriller seasoning. It’s a movie for believers. For those who sit down to watch movies with hearts wide open and who vibe at camp mid-’90s frequencies. 

This explains exactly what happened to Congo when it was released theatrically. It was hated by critics. Of all prominent voices, only Roger Ebert gave it a positive review. It ended up nominated for seven Razzies. They called it a Spielberg knock-off, a sham, a waste of time and money and completely failed to notice its self-parodic slant. But audiences saw things differently. Sure, that Jurassic Park effect must have had a role in Congo debuting in first place ahead of Casper, but it must have been the word of mouth that carried the movie towards its financial success. Hard as it may be to believe to some who see themselves as serious critics who understand the blockbuster space, but Congo was fun to watch exactly because it was taking its own stupidity seriously while it was busy crafting a genuine adventure spectacle. It was a cult film in the making.  

In the intervening thirty years, Congo has decidedly drifted into that cult movie space, though I don’t think it has ever exerted a large-enough memetic footprint to be widely recognizable outside of its in-crowd of fans and those who remember seeing it when it was new. Maybe now’s the time for this movie to be fully rediscovered as not so much a movie about a diamond mine but an abandoned meme factory waiting to be discovered by daring cult movie adventurers. Between Curry’s Homolka having to spit out sesame cake at Delroy Lindo’s order, ticklish Amy referring to herself as good gorilla while she’s not being given “the banana with the dope inside” and Laura Linney firing lasers at killer apes while CGI lava flies onto the screen with reckless abandon, Congo has always carried incredible potential to flourish as a so-bad-it’s-awesome experience that could only have been made in the ‘90s.  

If Crichton had had his way and managed to put Congo together in the early ‘80s, I don’t think it would have been the same movie. In fact, it would have been likely for this movie to become infamous the way Roar or The Twilight Zone ended up being because involving real gorillas in a movie production like this would have likely invited accidents and even fatalities on set. On the other hand, waiting just a few more years and producing Congo at the turn of the century—when the Crichton currency was still hot enough to make it happen—would have rendered the movie completely different. Amy would have likely been replaced by a mo-cap performance and the overall tone of the film would have been brought closer to the book, which is quite a bit more serious than the movie Frank Marshall directed from the adaptation written by John Patrick Shanley.  

The reason Congo is what it is—a stupefying success of hybridizing an adventure spectacle with its own parody—is exactly because it was made when it was made. It’s the veritable epitome of what the mid-’90s was about: camp, glitz, excess, and the kind of earnest self-awareness you’d be hard pressed to find elsewhere in recent memory. And although advances in bringing its memory back to the cultural forefront have been made already, it’s high time we all reappraised this movie as the amazingly singular oddity that it has always been and placed it on the same shelf of high acclaim leveled at movies like Starship Troopers or Showgirls.