Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Over the top psychedelic collage, where fiction meets fact., 29 Jun 2006
The Doors is a bizarre and at times uneven film that seemingly tries to mix the real-life story of the legendary band with the mystical and metaphysical influences behind their enigmatic front man, Jim Morrison. As a result, it begins with a scene of Morrison as a boy, driving through the Navajo desert with his family and witnessing the site of a car crash in which a group of Native Americans have been severely injured or killed. The key song, Riders of the Storm, plays in the background, as director Oliver Stone (in collaboration with cinematographer Robert Richardson) uses colour effects and digital manipulation to create a hauntingly surreal landscaped, bathed in blood red light and lost within a wavering sense of heat and claustrophobia. The scene becomes the axis on which the subsequent story will pivot, managing to establish and convey Morrison's various obsessions with shaman culture, mysticism, the desert and death.
From here, the film adopts a (brief) sense of normality, showing us how the original line-up of the Doors came into effect, and how they managed to find an audience through constant gigging in and around downtown Los Angeles. However, once the band have become established and a general chronology of events has been put into place, Stone goes off on a tangent, showing Morrison engulfed by rock and roll excess, fighting his demons and still coming to terms with the lone spirit of death (a vision that was seemingly there from the start, cradling a dying man on that lonesome stretch of desert road).
The visual style of the film is purposely psychedelic throughout, with Stone developing an approach to mise-en-scene in which the camera is rarely stationary, using a great deal of Stedicam and Technocrane work so that the camera is able to swoop and circle the actors from a variety of wild and bewildering perspectives. He also begins refining the combination of 35mm footage with the use of both 16mm and even 8mm film stock... a technique that would become more prominent on later films like JFK and Natural Born Killers. Here, the device is used more traditionally - footage of the band at the height of the mid-60's free love revolution is captured on 8mm and then blended seamlessly with archive footage from the same period - whilst an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show uses 16mm or video to create a more believable Sullivan style performance. As with his political films, specifically JFK and Nixon, Stone plays fast and loose with the facts surrounding the actual events; taking only a percentage from the true biography of Morrison and The Doors and crafting his own film around it. This isn't so much a problem for those of us who come to the film as a fan of Stone's previous or subsequent work, though it will no doubt alienate those who approach the film from the perspective of someone enamoured with the work of both Morrison and the band.
It should also be stressed that although given the title, you would expect the film to focus more on the creation of the group, their music and the interplay between the FOUR band members, but instead, this is pretty much the gospel according to Jim Morrison as seen by Oliver Stone.
Another problem with the film is the ultimate characterisation of Morrison. Although Kilmer's performance is outstanding (managing to look and sound like the late singer... or at least, to my ears he does), the interpretation of Morrison as a self-infatuated, pretentious, drug addled, sex mad buffoon will no doubt appal the people who fell in love with the man through his poetic words and music. Of course, many music critics and biographers at the time stated that the real-life Morrison, although prone to all of those singular traits, was in no was as childish, boorish and obnoxious as he comes across here, so it is perhaps best to allow Stone the benefit of dramatic licence and, like him and his collaborators, allow yourselves to be carried along on a tidal wave of sex, drugs and rock and roll.
Another problem that I had with the film was the pacing. As mentioned before, the film jumps from one scene of excess to the next. One minute we have a pre-fame Doors making a legendary appearance at the Whiskey A-GO-GO club, where Morrison uses the F-word whilst performing The End (one of the best and most fascinating scenes in the film), and the next minute we have the band as superstars, p*ssing off Ed Sullivan and indulging themselves with Nico and Warhol. I would have liked to have seen more development of the band throughout the film, maybe even giving time to mention some of the other bands exploding onto the LA scene around the same time, in particular Love, who were very much a part of the wave of psychedelic garage rock that the Doors had helped expose. That said, the film is still a great deal of fun, with Stone creating a beautiful film that rolls from one scene of self-destruction to the next, whilst the recreation of the concerts are fantastic, particularly the outdoor event that descends into an LSD trip, where naked revellers and the spirits of Native Americans dance in the metaphorical flames on stage.
Stone creates a number of scenes that stand out amongst his best moments (the hospital scenes in Born on the Forth of July, the Delay Plaza recreation of JFK and the prison riot of Natural Born Killers are all equally worthy), in particular, the penultimate scene in which Morrison zones out at a children's party and has visions of his younger self being comforted by the always present figure of death, here dressed as a weeping clown. The Doors might not be a masterpiece, and it certainly isn't a great document of the band at their peak, but it is, nonetheless, an interesting film that, like the majority of Stone's work, seems tailor made to provoke debate and discussion. Any one with the vaguest interest in the 1960's, the hippie era, the films of Oliver Stone or psychedelic rock in general should defiantly give it a go.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
One man's drink is another man's career., 26 Oct 2004
Oliver Stone's fascination with Jim Morrison may be in part due to their similiar backgrounds. Both were voracious readers from comfortable, middle-class families who rebelled against their conservative fathers (Morrison's an admiral, Stone's a stockbroker). Morrison, like Stone, was also a film graduate and it is this common social background that seems to make Stone believe that he and Jim are 'Dionysion' brothers bonded across time and space.Stone had done credible research before the making of this film, he conducted interviews with over a hundred people and the sets and concert shots are scruplessly detailed. Instead of a straight ahead biopic, Stone used the Doors' songs themselves as the foundation of the story. The film would become a poetic depiction of Morrison's life. Stone has used this technique before, in many of his movies, characters are too often representative architypes (Elias & Barnes, Gordon Gecko), rather than 3-dimensional real people. Through these architypes Stone can then rather symplisticly proclaim his views about the time and era we're looking at e.g. the 60's. Again we see Stone's MTV-style shooting technique where images come thick and fast in contrasting styles. This is supposed to represent the flashes of insight Morrison was prone to. Even the lighting and colour of the film get progressivly darker as we follow Morrison's obvious death obsession, another trait Stone believes he shares with Morrison. In fact Stone identified with Morrison so much that during the making of the film, he drank heavily and even indulged in peyote. Ray Manzerak must find the royalties he's made from the movie hard to stomach.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Awesome!, 24 Jul 2006
This film is one of the best films i've ever seen, Oliver stone captures the true rock and roll spirit of Jim Morrison and The Doors brilliantly. The characters are superbly cast with Val Kilmer giving the performance of a lifetime as Jim. There,s rarely a dull moment as you get to see the collosal rise to fame The Doors had and the profane effect it had on Jim Morrison's life. If you are a fan of the band or love rock biopics then you have to see this film, you'll definately want to watch it again it's an absolute must see.
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