Movie Review: Anaconda (1997)
Synopsis: A team of documentary filmmakers, led by aspiring director Terri Flores, embarks on a boat trip down the Amazon River in search of a long-lost tribe. When they come across a stranded snake hunter, Paul Serone, they offer him a lift and accept his offer to help them find the tribe. However, when one of their own gets injured and needs medical attention, Serone uses it as an opportunity to take control of the boat and force the crew to help him capture a giant, man-eating anaconda.
Who's in it? The movie stars Jennifer Lopez, Jon Voight, Ice Cube, Eric Stoltz and Owen Wilson.
Review: Despite Anaconda coming out when I was still in college and the movie having a remake come out nearly 30 years later, I realized I had never seen the film in its entirety. So, when I came across it on one of my movie channels last night, I decided to finally correct that.
As it turns out, this movie was considerably better than I thought it was going to be.
One of the reasons I never made much of an effort to see the film was, from the bits and pieces I saw, mostly involving CGI snakes, it seemed like something that was going to be more corny than entertaining. Well, I'm not too proud to say I was wrong about that.
The thing that impressed me about this movie was how it was much more of a people-based thriller than a killer animal thriller. The film may have been named after the snakes, and they had a role, but they were more background characters.
I especially liked the real villain, Serone (Voight). He was the perfect combination of callous, obsessed and unpredictable, making him a great villain, even during moments when he seemed like he might be a good guy, such as when he saved Dr. Steven Cale's (Stoltz) life, even though he was the reason Cale almost died in the first place.
What I especially liked about him was how he always seemed to be at least a couple steps ahead of everyone. Whenever it looked like Terri (Lopez) and her team were gaining the upper hand, Serone seemed to have a perfect counter. The fact he was deceptively athletic added to that.
At the same time, it did feel like Terri and the others needed Serone if they wanted any chance of survival, especially after their ship captain, Mateo (Vincent Castellanos) was killed, and they were trying to get back to civilization with a very limited knowledge of the river and the dangers it possessed.
The snake scenes were, as expected, a little on the corny side. This is both because of the 90s CGI and because the snakes themselves seemed to be taking things a little too personally, choosing to stay and kill rather than the logical choice of escaping whenever they came close to being caught.
Since the snakes were worshipped by the tribe they were seeking, it was possible they were supposed to be gods, but that was never made clear so all I can say for certain is they weren't behaving the way I would expect a snake to act and instead were behaving the way a movie snake would act.
Final Opinion: It's a film I took a long time to get around to watching but it ended up being a movie that exceeded my expectations and was entertaining from start to finish. I'll probably take less time to watch the reboot, though it does have some big shoes to fill.
My Grade: A
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Here are some reviews of other movies from 1997:
Movie Review: Vegas Vacation (1997)
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