A Life Through Film #035: The Ghost and the Darkness
I'd be lion if I said that Val Kilmer's last big starring role was all that impressive
Release Date: 10/11/1996
Weeks at Number One: 1
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!
The end of Apartheid in South Africa was one of the last great historical events to occur before my birth. I have never lived in a world where that country violently enforced legalized segregations of its many races, though to this day the nation is still clearly grappling with the long fallout of the whole institution. Still, between 1990 and 1994, the country worked to actively dismantle Apartheid, which had been in place since 1948.
Though it didn’t end racism in South Africa, the election of former political prisoner Nelson Mandela as president in 1994, the result of the first free and open election in the country’s history, went a long way to healing decades of wounds, even though the scars still remain.
If you can believe it, a system of openly racist government that was condemned by the United Nations limited South Africa’s prospects as a place for many countries, including the United States, to film big movies. That said, it’s not like this is a Vancouver situation where the shooting location could stand in for many other places thanks to visual anonymity. Like most other places on the continent, South Africa has a distinct look in both its geography and architecture. When combined with the great distance between it and other filming hubs like Hollywood or New York, there are plenty of reasons why American studios would be reluctant to film in South Africa, even after the fall of Apartheid.
Inevitably though, a production would come along that would necessitate the newly freed nation as a filming location. Americans love a good adventure movie, and the wildlife preserves in South Africa offer chances for cast and crew to film incredible flora and fauna safely and accurately. So what ended up being the first major Hollywood production to shoot primarily in South Africa?
The Ghost and the Darkness is a 1996 adventure thriller starring Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas that’s directed by Stephen Hopkins. It retells the (mostly) true story of the man-eaters of Tsavo, a pair of male lions who terrorized the building of a Kenyan railroad for months during the late 19th century, as well as their eventual slaying at the hands of Irish engineer John Henry Patterson (played here by Val Kilmer). Patterson himself went on to write the book this movie was based on, so I’m sure he was posthumously happy to get a fully accurate adaptation of his incredible story.
Right?
Well here’s the thing. I don’t know if you know this, but the American film industry is chock full of inflated egos. Those big heads can get in the way of a lot of things, and have been responsible for the dramatic modification or even cancellation of many a movie production. When the final goal is entertainment and profit, one thing that can be struck in the service of soothing egos and moving the project along is any necessary commitment to the truth.
This was especially true before mass accessibility to the internet allowed for instant fact checking from freaks like me. So long as the end result is a sated power broker and a movie people pay to see, who cares if the final product is not fully accurate to its own true story?
Some of you might know where I’m going with this.
Even by the start of 1996, Val Kilmer’s reputation as a difficult actor to work with was well known. Despite being core to massive hits like Top Gun [3/5] and Heat, the youngest actor ever admitted into Juilliard was already in the process of tanking his industry reputation only a decade into his run as a top star. Now though, it wasn’t just producers whispering rumors about the actor.
Kilmer’s chaotic undermining of The Island of Dr. Moreau was so publicly known that you’d think it would have driven more people to go see that hunk of garbage. Not helping his reputation was his decision to hang up the cape and leave the role of Batman after only one film, 1995’s Batman Forever. The actor upset both fans and Hollywood with that one. Kilmer walked away when the filming of sequel Batman & Robin interfered with the making of a project he was more interested in called The Saint [3/5]. Batman Forever (and previous column subject A Time To Kill) director Joel Schumacher had this to say about the actor in a ‘96 Entertainment Weekly piece:
He was badly behaved, he was rude and inappropriate. I was forced to tell him that this would not be tolerated for one more second. Then we had two weeks where he did not speak to me, but it was bliss
Dr. Moreau directors Richard Stanley and John Frankenheimer were also unflattering in their depictions of the star, though if I’m being honest only Stanley really has any real right to gripe. Kilmer was the one who got the director fired from his dream project, after all. The Entertainment Weekly piece is so brutal a takedown, even getting a quote from Kilmer’s estranged brother, that part of me wonders if Warner Brothers paid the publication to run a smear campaign against their former star. Some, like The Saint director Phillip Noyce, had nothing but good things to say about the actor. By his account, Kilmer was a sweet guy who was easy to work with.
No person is ever just one thing to all people, so the truth about Kilmer in the mid ‘90s is likely this: he resented having to do anything he wasn’t interested in and took it out on the people around him. Going through a divorce with the mother of his two children probably didn’t help, even if it did allow him to shack up with Cindy Crawford for a time.
And yet, his continued ability to draw at the box office meant that Kilmer still had pull behind the scenes, no matter how badly he was behaving. He altered the entire trajectory of Dr. Moreau by getting Stanley fired, and who knows if something like The Saint would have moved forward without his presence as the lead? In fact, it was Kilmer’s interest in The Ghost and the Darkness that enabled this week’s movie to be made at all.
Screenwriter William Goldman had held onto the original story of the Tsavo man-eaters since first hearing about it in the ‘80s, but it took him a while to finally get his idea down. He was quite a busy guy. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid [4.5/5], The Stepford Wives, All The President’s Men, The Princess Bride [4.5/5], Misery, all Goldman scripts. This is a dude who can capture all sorts of eras and moods, so if anyone could bring the already dramatic legend of 1898 Tsavo to life, it was him.
Quick historical catchup about the man-eaters. In the late 19th century, the English government was building a railroad between Kenya and Uganda as part of their colonization efforts in the region. John Henry Patterson, an Irish railway administrator and lieutenant colonel in the army, was tasked with overseeing the building of a stretch of that railroad in the Tsavo region of Kenya.
While he was there, the workers, mostly locals, were repeatedly set upon by a pair of maneless male lions. The animals broke from the usual nature of predators and began actively hunting humans, eventually killing somewhere in the ballpark of three dozen railroad builders.1 Patterson, determined to not let the railway be stopped by a couple of big cats, took it upon himself to hunt the beasts. In the end, after weeks of hunting, he finally was able to bring down the lions.
You can now find the pair as a stuffed exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago. Modern science has confirmed that the two lions were brothers and were likely unable to hunt tougher prey due to jaw injuries making it difficult to chew. Squishy humans were simply more convenient for them than buffalo.
One hundred years later, Goldman’s script, titled after names supposedly given to the killer lions by the terrified local rail workers, had found both a powerful producer, academy award winning actor Michael Douglas, and a director, thriller veteran Stephen Hopkins. However, without a hot star to carry the movie, The Ghost and The Darkness was at risk of stalling out in perpetuity. This is where Kilmer, interested in the subject matter thanks to his own travels in Africa, stepped up and not only gave the movie its star but financing from Paramount Pictures as well.
There was another problem though. As part of adapting the true story into something more compelling for a large audience, Goldman had added a new major character that was fully fictional.
In the dramatic narrative of The Ghost and the Darkness, the old hunter Remington is meant to be a mentor figure to Patterson, someone who could pass on lessons to the protagonist about hunting and life in general before dying right before the climax to ramp up the stakes. Not fully accurate to the true story, but a classic piece of dramatic escalation. Sean Connery had played a similar role in The Usual Suspects [4/5], so it makes sense that he was originally the frontrunner to pick up the role of Remington here.
But Connery couldn’t commit, and soon the production was having trouble filling this secondary yet important role. After a stressful period where Anthony Hopkins also declined to play the role, producer Michael Douglas stepped up and decided that he would be the hero the movie needed. A star like Douglas also being prominently featured would only be a boon for the movie’s financial prospects, so the script was rewritten to make the formerly enigmatic figure into a much more concrete, established character.
Filming on location at the Songimvelo Game Reserve in South Africa brought myriad difficulties for the cast and crew. John Rosengrant, the project lead on the lion animatronics courtesy of Stan Winston Studio, says that the stunt lions they had around got free of their handlers with some frequency, leading to panicked rushes for everyone to get away from the animals. Stephen Hopkins himself also mentioned that they all had to deal with ticks, hippos, scorpions, and…wait, hold on, read this quote from the director:
We had…cars getting swept into the water, and several deaths of crew members, including two drownings.
Excuse me?!
The Ghost and the Darkness has a plural body count?!
I can find no other reporting on this. If the New York Times ever decided to publish a story about how the first major American film produced in South Africa had led to multiple horrible deaths on set, they have yet to archive that story on their website. In recent years, especially after the Rust tragedy, there have been a few pieces published on sites like Cinemablend that highlight fatal accidents during movie production, but none ever bring up The Ghost and the Darkness.
The way I see it, there are two options here. One, Hopkins is lying. Making up the loss of crewmembers in order to promote your movie would be straight up evil, but at least no one would have been actually dead. The second, sadder option is that no one cared enough about the loss of these possibly local workers to report on it. I hope for the moral sake of everyone involved in reporting on movies in the ‘90s that this is just a case of a director trumping up the danger of the shoot in order to put butts in seats.
There’s also motivation for Hopkins to lie about this. It’s entirely possible that the director was trying to torpedo his own movie’s chances at success because of the nightmare creating it turned out to be. Unfortunately, those issues extend onto the screen and lead to The Ghost and the Darkness failing to live up to its own potential.
Val Kilmer is an actor who, in the process of going back and watching movies from around the time I was born, I’ve yet to wowed by. I can tell by watching him that he can be a serious actor, but there are limits to that skill. In a 2020 New York Times profile, Kilmer admits to years of frustration at his Hollywood success.
He was a young, classically trained actor who was ready for countless performances of Hamlet live in front of New York crowds. Instead, he was discovered and pushed into a life marked by blockbusters like Top Gun and The Doors. A resentment against this life built quickly within the actor, meaning that if he found himself on a project he wasn’t really interested in, he wouldn’t even try.
Kilmer does try in The Ghost and the Darkness. His Irish accent is questionable, but his commitment to the character otherwise feels legitimate. Patterson is, primarily, a pragmatic and stoic man. He’s going to kill those lions, and then he’s going to finish a bridge. The hunter/engineer isn’t without his charms, but his moments of levity around a campfire are earned through consistent weeks of good work, not nightly guarantees. Kilmer isn’t doing a super flashy performance here, but I enjoyed having him on my screen, handling worker disputes and hunting man-eaters.
The actor elevates the character from the boring writing. Patterson as written basically has no flaws. He’s a put upon cog in the machine of British Colonialism, but despite being Irish, he seemingly has no qualms with that role. He has a pregnant wife who he wants to get back to before she gives birth, but the colonel doesn’t despair when lion struggles keep him in Africa as the delivery date comes and goes. Patterson is almost annoyingly competent, able to be the frontline defense against the lions so easily that you wonder why he can’t just go ahead and compromise the man-eaters to a permanent end right away.
But come on, this is Val Kilmer in the mid ‘90s. His reputation speaks for itself, and I already told you that the director had a bad time making this movie. What diva antics did the former Batman pull while on location in South Africa?
Here’s the twist: Kilmer was not the issue on The Ghost and the Darkness. Sure, Hopkins admits that the first few weeks of dealing with the actor were tough because Kilmer had just come from the fiasco that was the Dr. Moreau set. But once he was given a chance to work on his character and get in the right mindset, Kilmer was, by Hopkins’s own admission, not too much trouble to deal with.
The real problems came with Michael Douglas.
The actor/producer’s character, Remington, was originally supposed to be enigmatic and vaguely impressive, a lack of focus rooted in the fictitious origin of the old hunter. But after Douglas took the role, Remington suddenly became a much more important figure within the narrative. The American hunter commands a troop of Masai warriors, conducts native African rituals with them with ease, and can perfectly track the man-eating lions at the drop of a hat. I thought Patterson was too perfect a character in the first leg of The Ghost and the Darkness, but Remington makes him look like Fredo Corleone.
The movie falls over itself to get over how cool Douglas’s character is, even though he only shows up nearly an hour into this 110 minute film. A full 10 minutes are spent explaining his backstory and putting over his credentials as the most badass hunter who’s ever lived. There’s hardly a moment where Remington isn’t onscreen for the rest of the movie, and if he’s just barely offscreen it’s because he’s busy executing a perfect plan to track the lions. The older character has no room to grow, but also doesn’t seem all that willing to pass his knowledge on to Patterson. Their dynamic sees the actual protagonist of The Ghost and the Darkness as fully subservient to the ideas and strategies of this new, entirely fictional character.
This twisting of the true story behind the movie hits its nadir when [SPOILER] Remington is responsible for killing one of the lions because he has to shoot it to save Patterson. In my eyes, that is unforgivable creative overreach. This character that didn’t even exist steps in to take credit for the actions of a real figure who is now his sidekick because the producer of the movie decided it needed to be a bigger part. Absurd.
I’m not just assuming all this about Michael Douglas, by the way. Hopkins allegedly spoke about his frustrations about the movie to FX magazine in 1999, though the only transcript of this interview can only be found in an old forum post, so perhaps take it with a grain of salt:
The real problems started when Michael Douglas came on board. He really was unbearable. A disaster! And as he was a producer of the movie, there was not much I could do. Our relationship was tense from the get go…Michael Douglas cut out the scenes that were not important to his character, for him to have more screen presence. In the end, the mystical and magical movie I worked on for seven years turned into a middle of the road adventure one. Very far from the original script's wealth.
This disjointed feeling is extremely noticeable during the second act, during the bulk of Douglas’s presence on-screen. As an actor, he’s doing decent work as Remington. But I still find his presence and what it represents to be disruptive and frankly unlikable. This isn’t like Up Close & Personal where the recently departed had her life totally changed to make it more palatable for a Hollywood movie, but it’s not much better. It would be like Brad Pitt producing a movie about the Lincoln assassination and deciding he wanted to play John Wilkes Booth’s good twin brother who catches his killer brother and brings him to justice.
It’s really a shame, because Kilmer’s performance isn’t the only good thing about The Ghost and the Darkness. The beautiful scenery of the South African game preserve leaps off the screen in the many wide shots and sweeping pans that we get. Some viewers might think there are too many shots of tall yellow grass swaying in the breeze, but they’re worth it for the moment of realizing that something’s moving within it, stalking its way closer to the camera.
The supporting cast are generally alright. I like John Kani as local foreman Samuel. He’s got both good comedic timing and a comforting aura about him. His presence unfortunately represents the movie’s “Eh, what can you do” sentiments towards European colonization of Africa, but the performance itself is good. It’s a shame they had him do some very unnecessary narration though, especially the bald faced lie at the beginning of the movie that everything we’re about to see really happened.
Then there are the lions themselves, the best part of The Ghost and the Darkness. The crew used a combination of real trained animals and unbelievable animatronics from Stan Winston Studio to capture the beasts, and the final effect is excellent. During the lion attack scenes, clever editing and shockingly good compositing put both real and faux lions into the frame with the actors, increasing the sense of danger through the roof. Sometimes, they even just had the actors do stunts with the lions, such as for one terrifying extended shot near the end where one chases Val Kilmer up a tree.
The movie attempts to sort of explain why the pair of lions begin to attack humans, but they’re not exactly scientific explorations. The characters describe the creatures as specters of the landscape, manifestations of nature’s pushback against the invading white man. At some point, Remington straight up calls them evil (which the screenwriter confirmed is his view on the matter). Obviously, animals like lions can’t be placed on the human scale of morality. But watching this movie, you might start to believe.
I strongly suspect that the final decision to greenlight The Ghost and the Darkness had at least something to do with the incredible financial success of The Lion King [4/5] in 1994, but these lions are not friendly Disney creatures. Their stalking and surprisingly grisly attacks remind more of Jaws [5/5] than anything else, in the best way possible. The moments when they finally attack, revealing their true terrifying might, are some of my favorite scenes I’ve watched for this column in a while.
It’s a shame they’re surrounded by such an uneven package. The Ghost and the Darkness has a few strong points that it should be proud of, but it’s tough to recommend as a whole. I’m into Val Kilmer’s performance here, but he might be too uptight for you. I find Michael Douglas insufferable but you might think he brings much needed fun to the proceedings. I hope you like the lions, they’re objectively great, and if the movie wanted to convey the beauty of South Africa’s nature preserves, it did a wonderful job.
But that’s another problem. Shooting in South Africa as a substitute for Kenya isn’t a super problematic decision, especially since it seems there were tax breaks involved. But so much of The Ghost and the Darkness is characters talking about the magic of Africa. Not Tsavo, not Kenya, not even East Africa. Just the entire massive continent as a whole. Characters will talk in broad strokes about the country and its mysterious beauty even as we only ever see about three square miles of it. In one particularly annoying moment, Samuel talks about how Remington travels all around the world for adventure, but always returns “here,” meaning “Africa.”
This lumping of all corners of the African continent together into one package by (usually white) westerners really rubs me the wrong way. The way that characters like Remington and Patterson talk about the landscapes around them is fetishistic, like they’ve been fantasizing about the savannah their entire life. The reasons behind this and our own main character’s lifelong dream of visiting Africa are never explained beyond “It’s beautiful there.” The movie does a good job of showing us that that is the case, but this is such a stupidly simple take on an entire continent.
This blind reverence for Africa comes off as heinously ignorant whenever the movie reminds us that the only reason we’re there with Patterson is to help the British colonize it. European presence on the continent between the 18th and 20th century was, to put it mildly, horrifically disastrous to the different regions and groups that they ran across. For The Ghost and the Darkness to focus so much on the natural beauty of its setting without interrogating what good a British railroad would do to that beauty is just bad writing.
You could have made a movie about Patterson coming to grips with that disconnect as the man-eaters acted as physical rebukes from the land around him. Instead, what we’re left with is an occasionally great adventure movie that’s dragged down by its own poor creative decisions.
This movie’s 51% on Rotten Tomatoes is the definition of mixed reviews. On one end of the spectrum, we’ve got Roger Ebert, who, citing a stupid script and unconvincing performances, gave it a half a star out of four and named it one of the worst movies of the year. That’s harsh, but it’s not like the positive reviews fall over themselves to defend the movie. Neil Jeffries from Empire magazine says that the movie “falls short on almost every level,” which I agree with. The Ghost and the Darkness is a movie that’s more fun to imagine the perfect execution of rather than actually watch (except for the lion attacks).
Audience interest in Val Kilmer and/or lions was enough to get The Ghost and the Darkness to debut at number one with a weekend gross of about $10 million. That’s nowhere near what The First Wives Club was pulling in the previous few weeks, but still a respectable return to the overly macho. Box office receipts dried up by more than 25% the next week, however, and the film lingered in steadily fewer and fewer theaters for months.
Just as it looked like the lions were to be put out of their misery, however, the film snagged a surprise Oscar nomination for Sound Editing. The studio used the opportunity to push it back to a few more hundred theaters, where it made more money than it had since November. Finally, the movie dipped from theaters in early February, a month and a half before it won that Academy Award.2 The final domestic box office gross was about $38 million, which isn’t amazing considering the film’s $55 million production budget. The international release pushed that total to about $80 million, still too little to justify the film’s ambitious shoot.
I didn’t realize this until just now, but this is actually Val Kilmer’s final box office topper as a leading man. He’ll have a few more hits between this and the new millennium, but past 2000, the man’s filmography is filled with mediocre dramas and plenty of direct-to-video junk (the second time in a few weeks we’ve seen that career progression).
I’m hesitant to blame that on The Ghost and the Darkness though. The movie didn’t do great, and it followed the even worse bomb The Island of Dr. Moreau, but Val Kilmer did have big movies after 1996 that just didn’t quite crack the top of the charts.
The true story is that his reputation caught up with him. A difficult star is sometimes worth the hassle because the end result will be so lucrative. Once those movies stop making money, though, fewer people are willing to put up with your bullshit. The roles and productions start getting smaller, industry money makers no longer able to justify paying you lucrative sums to harass and annoy the cast and crew around you.
In the mid 2010s, Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer. A hesitation to seek medical treatment led to a tracheotomy that now prevents the actor from speaking without a voice box. In that 2020 New York Times piece, he seems like a much calmer guy than he was back in the ‘90s, but even though he’s been in remission for years, Kilmer’s health issues mean it’s unlikely he’ll get the prestige comeback tour that former industry pariahs like Brendan Fraser have gotten recently. I hope he stays healthy and happy moving forward. Maybe one of these days I’ll finally watch Heat and find one of his good roles.
The Ghost and the Darkness barely meets my qualifications as an enjoyable movie. It’s a film of surprisingly high highs and disappointing lows. The production of the film was doomed once an ego like Michael Douglas’s came in and shifted the final version of the movie to better serve his character. The pursuit of truth is never the highest priority in these big Hollywood productions, but the narrative choices made here are just egregious. A solid Kilmer performance and great lion attacks aside, I can’t say there’s a ton here to justify seeking it out. I imagine it’s a solid Saturday afternoon watch on TV though, if it happens to come on. Just don’t believe that opening narration about it all being true.
Rating: 3/5
Next Week: Drama. Heartbreak. Trauma. Narration. A prestigious swing at a probably made up story makes me want to take a nap, despite its impressive cast. We’re talking about Sleepers in the next edition of the column.
See you then!
-Will
The movie itself uses an early estimation that put the fatality count at about 130, but more recent estimates are more conservative