Product Description

A renowned big game hunter joins forces with an engineer to kill the lions which threaten completion of a bridge in 1896 East Africa.
Genre: Feature Film-Action/Adventure
Rating: R
Release Date: 29-DEC-2004
Media Type: DVD

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1765 in DVD
• Brand: Paramount
• Released on: 1998-12-01
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Letterboxed, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, French
• Subtitled in: Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 109 minutes

Amazon.com
Val Kilmer stars as Lt. Col. John Patterson, a 19th-century Irish engineer drafted by Britain's railroad bosses to build a trestle bridge over an African river, thus expanding the empire a tiny bit more. In Tsavo, Patterson is instantly hailed for killing a man-eating lion that had been making life hell for native workers. But morale sinks when a pair of unstoppable big cats devour more men and destroy the project. Along comes an Ahab-like, expatriate American hunter (Michael Douglas) to help Patterson face the almost preternatural powers of the two killers. The script by William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) is based on fact, though the film owes more to Spielberg (specifically to Jaws) than history. There are also suggestive echoes of Kipling and Conrad in the material and characters, and there are hints of emotional complexity and psychological nuance that make one wish this could have been a great film instead of a merely fun one. --Tom Keogh

From The New Yorker
Michael Douglas, who produced, has hideously miscast himself as a great white hunter in director Stephen Hopkins's attempt at an African adventure. The screenplay, about two lions that have been devouring the African workers at a British bridge-building camp in late-nineteenth-century Kenya, was written by William Goldman in a style reminiscent of such great colonial trash epics of the fifties as "Elephant Walk" and "The Rains of Ranchipur." But all that Douglas can think of to do while the mystical declamation and the body count both soar is swagger around like Iron John. It doesn't help that he's teamed with Val Kilmer, who, as the bridge's chief architect, faces danger with an upper lip as stiff as Stewart Granger's. Mediocre camerawork and flashy editing combine to spoil any thrill of the hunt; the fake environment of "Jurassic Park" invited greater curiosity. -Bruce Diones
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Nice try
I rented this movie and was not too impressed. Then I read _The Man-Eaters of Tsavo_, by J.H.Patterson, and rented the DVD again to compare it to the book. Unfortunately I think the film missed the real story. Patterson was not a struggling weakling who had to be saved by an American hunter; he was an accomplished hunter, he stopped the rebellion himself (and it was really a murder plot, not a riot), and he killed both lions himself. Michael Douglas' character never existed and Douglas hammed it up a bit too much, anyway.

The true story was the terror of the nightly raids. Patterson felt helpless as he sat in trees night after night, hoping for a shot at the lions, but then only to hear terrified, agonized screams coming from other parts of camp. Instead of this nightmare, the film focuses on the tension of the hunting expeditions. Val Kilmer mentions 30 dead before we even know the lions have raided that much.

The lions themselves were bigger and more frightening in the book. They were over 9 1/2 feet long, and had no manes so they could crawl through the tight, thorny bushes covering the land. They jumped over 9-foot-tall barricades and dragged their victims around by the throats. The Indian and African workers called them "the demons", so it's a wonder why the screenwriter chose the fictitious names for the film's title.

The killing of the second man-eater is the most realistic because in truth, it took at least a half-dozen shots to take down these beasts, while they were charging at the men trying to kill them. Also the last human death in the story is realistic, because in the book Patterson tells the story of a man who was killed instantly in his bed when a lion bit through his temples and dragged his body out of the tent.

Overall, I wish the screenwriter had focused on the terror of the nightly raids, though it may have been too graphic for audiences. Instead we're left with a mediocre action movie, with a couple of average-sized lions as the antogonists. Nice try.

Suspense light-years beyond Jaws
The Ghost and the Darkness is about the two maneating lions that terrorized the crew building a bridge at a desolate, nowhere place called Tsavo, Africa, circa 1890s, a place that had long been known as an area of active maneating lions. The original account written by Col. John H. Patterson, the engineer responsible for building the bridge and killing the lions (and played superbly by Val Kylmer), is one of the greatest Classics of African Hunting Literature ever written and known very well by legions of non-Bambi outdoor enthusiasts around the world. Subsequent accounts, the best of which is the well-researched wrtiing of 20th Century African hunter Peter Hathaway Capstick in his "Death in the Silent Places" and "The Maneaters of Tsavo" have become nearly as popular.
The movie does take some liberties with events but most of the key scenes in the movie actually happened though perhaps in a bit different context. For example, the movie has the den of the maneaters being found prior to the lions' deaths but it was actually found some weeks afterward. But that wasn't the point in 1898. The cave actually contained (as in the movie) the skeletal remains of hundreds of human victims, so many, in fact, the probability is that den had been used by maneaters for centuries. Not too surprising the crews and locals felt Tsavo was a place of Evil. Adding credibility to the longevity of use theory is the fact that four other maneaters who ran up a score of 50 souls in that same area were killed in a single day by hunter Robert Foran - in 1947. But wait. Professional hunter John Kingsley-Heath killed another maneater there too - in 1965. But wait - Peter Capstick's boss was killed and eaten not too far from Tsavo on Labor Day 1974. That's right - 1974. Where were YOU in 1974?
The African and Indian cultures of the 1890s weren't, and aren't, the United States. The liklihood these two lions would quickly be seen as "more than just lions", as some unstoppable Evil is more like a guarantee. The abject Terror of 2000-3000 African and Indian laborers was a real as Death itself. That Terror is amply displayed in the movie, but is still understated.
The movie's lions, even with their ominous role as "more than lions", act very much like real maneaters did, and do. And when they do it in a joust with unarmed humans, they usually win, bigtime, and assorted gore and human body parts are a consistant by-product of such festivities. I've never never read anything at all about a famous lioneater.
The movie's filming and effects are very good. Michael Douglas, as the ficticious hunter Remington, supports Kylmer well, and with a well-done, darkly amusing style. The "shock" scenes are "SHOCK" scenes, especially one in particular. You will FEEL your blood pressure drop to zero only to be red-lining again in a flash. You WILL hold your breath and you may regain it. Seriously, allowing a young child to watch this is probably not the best of ideas, and not because of the gore but because many of the scenes of the primal, nightmarish Horror these maneating lions deliver take place after dark and "after dark" is already an "iffy" proposition for many kids without the fangs of Hades clashing in their minds. Sweet Dreams.

Excellent movie, bad DVD
I won't go into the movie's worth as entertainment here - suffice to say that I think it's a good historical action movie. But I believe that people who are looking to buy DVDs need to know much more than details of a movie's plot and its artistic value, so in this review I'm focusing on the technical aspects which I feel detract from this DVD.

This DVD (ASIN: 6305181926) features a non-anamorphic 'matted widescreen' transfer which works fine on smaller 4:3 TVs, but which looks awful on larger screen or widescreen TVs. The new generation of widescreen TVs are set to be the standard viewing medium by 2009 (every TV broadcast is supposed to be in widescreen format by 2009), so I think it's important that all DVDs made today should be in 'anamorphic widescreen' format so that they don't look bad when viewers switch to the newer technology. If DVDs are not compatible with the latest technology then I think that the low image quality should be clearly marked in some way by Amazon.com. In the case of this particular movie the 4:3 matted widescreen format results in what's known as 'gutterboxing' (black bars all around the image) when the movie is played on widescreen TVs. Some TVs allow zooming in to fill the screen in cases like this, but then the image becomes very grainy - so much so that it's probably better to watch it in the 'gutterboxed' mode.

So in conclusion, those with the older standard 4:3 TVs under 30 inches probably won't notice any loss of resolution. But for folks with big screen TVs I advise waiting until this movie gets an updated DVD treatment. Alternatively, if you own a good quality up-converting DVD player that can play region 2 discs, the British version (ASIN: B0000579BX available from Amazon.co.uk) is a good quality anamorphic transfer.