Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau

I remember seeing the movie this is about and thinking "what a batshit insane thing that was". Over the years, I'd heard stories about difficulty in the shoot, especially since it had two notorious, prickly people in Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer. But this? WOW. This was a TRAIN WRECK of epic proportions. Lost Soul is the story of the making of the movie, starting with original director Richard Stanley, who had the idea from a very young age. After two hit cult movies, he managed to find backing at New Line to get his remake of Island made. A remake, he envisioned, would hew closer to the book than any other, and feature the greatest menagerie possible. Right off the bat, one flaw with this doc is it assumes you're familiar with the Island Of Dr. Moreau. I don't know that anybody's been brave enough to watch it more than once. It's a god-awful mess of a catastrophe of a movie. To watch it more than once might get the nearby authorities called on your behalf for a mental health check. So, this doc's casual tossing around of role names and plot elements, without any context, is somewhat off-putting Still, it does a fine job in portraying how, from day one, Richard Stanley's vision for this movie was doomed. Bob Shaye, the head of New Line, wasn't really enthused about the project. The original casting for Moreau was totally blown over in favor of getting Brando, and the lead protagonist was changed twice -- once because Bruce Willis had to bow out due to his impending divorce, and once because Val Kilmer just didn't want to spend as much time shooting. Then a personal tragedy keeps Brando away for weeks, forcing the shooting schedule to be re-arranged. Then a hurricane. With every passing moment, the shooting spirals out of control, and the documentary charts every bit of it, until the inevitable -- Stanley is fired from his own production, and is replaced by a director known for wrangling tough egos. He fails miserably, and the shoot gets even worse. It's almost hard to believe all the problems the shoot faced. It feels preposterous, but it isn't. This was just a movie God or nature or whatever did not want to happen, and the doc records every little piece of it in exhaustive detail. That, in fact, is to its detriment, because of the 98 minutes this movie lasts, 93 of it are about the shoot. In the last 2 minutes, it slams ahead to the movie bombing (which gets maybe 2 minutes) and the last 2 are portraying Stanley as this broken human hiding in the mountains in France. Nothing about post-production and how this dumpster fire movie was assembled, nothing about the fallout from the failure and what became of the replacement director or the actors involved, and nothing about Stanley in the 20 years between Moreau and the time of this doc besides "moved to France". It had this great story to tell -- an almost farcical disaster of a movie shoot -- and then, at the end, decided there didn't need to be an end. Because of that, it ends on a dull note. You want a little more, not to revel in someone's misery, but to know the epilogue, and Lost Soul isn't interested in that. It's a fine documentary about the movie shoot, but the whole package is a bit of a missed opportunity. Kind of like the doc's subject.