It perplexes me, seeing people give this film ten out of ten ratings. I generally trust the opinions of people who do so to the extent that if they told me the sky was blue, I would look out the window and see for myself. Because no matter how you look at it, The Lawnmower Man was a film with a terrible script, based on some terrible ideas, trying to trade off the name of an author who was at the peak of his commercial success. Said author, one tall American by the name of Stephen King, liked the idea of his short story being used to bolster the bleak commercial prospects of this film so much that he took the producers to court and demanded they stopped using his name. Having read Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man for myself, I completely understand why. Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man is a surreal terror story that twists suburban convention in a manner that only Stephen King can. Brett Leonard's The Lawnmower Man has not an original or well thought out idea anywhere in its little head.
Part of the problem stems from the basic story of the film. The central story involves a scientist attempting to use virtual reality to train simpler minds such as those of monkeys to perform tasks that any normal human being would regard as complex. When our bold scientist meets a man who is, to put it bluntly, quite retarded, a light goes on in his head. What if the virtual reality simulator could be used to accelerate the functioning of this gardener's brain to the point where at least nominal calculations are no longer beyond him? And therein lies one of the problems most critics never pick up on. The human brain is demonstrably more complex than an electronic board or an engine, and accelerating it or repairing it is a much more complex process than this film gives credit for. When you add to that the fact that if Albert Einstein had been born around the same time as I was, he would have been diagnosed with High-Functioning Autism, this film's conception of the difference between simple and god-like becomes very shaky indeed.
Not helping matters any is the apparent lack of research or planning that permeates the screenplay. In one memorable scene, we are told by the supposedly brilliant Doctor Lawrence that Jobe has mastered the Latin alphabet in a matter of hours, whereas it took him a year. This prompts the question of who is really retarded in this scenario, given that the Latin alphabet is something every child in the English-speaking world learns between their fifth and sixth birthday. At other times, the script seems to have been written by a twelve year old who has been listening to Black Sabbath songs like Iron Man a little too closely. Jobe's proclamation about how he will take over every computer system in the world being the best example. But the worst parts come when the script paints the characters into corners that they have no possibility of escaping, so the writers shoehorn in a convenient device. The writers here clearly had no idea of what a security backdoor is or how it works in the real computing world.
Fortunately, Hollywood productions tend to have at least one strength they can fall back on when all else fails. Since the Hollywood system attracts some of the best actors money can buy, it stands to reason that The Lawnmower Man would have some commendable performances in spite of the terrible screenplay. Jeff Fahey's performance as Jobe easily rings the truest in this entire film. Pretending to be retarded is enough of a challenge for an actor. Pretending to be retarded, then suddenly gifted with mental faculties that would make Newton or Tesla envious, then given over the megalomania, is quite an acrobatic act. That Fahey pulls it off so well in spite of the script he is working from is a credit to him. Pierce Brosnan is no slouch, either, even though his performance as a scientist has little to discern itself from his performance as a secret agent. Somehow, this matter-of-fact, questioning portrayal really suits the scientist a lot better. Brosnan's performance as the man wondering where he went wrong is the only real anchor this film has.
Much has been made of the virtual reality environments around which some of the plot is based. In 1992, simulating a self-contained environment within a computer was a frontier, and someone in the studio obviously thought this would be a good trend to cash in on. What they did not anticipate was that computing was becoming a very monolithic market, and a lot of the fantastic dreams we had about the future of computing were about to fall by the wayside. At the same time, the ability of computers to splice funky effects into films was growing at an exponential rate. A year prior, a little film called Terminator 2 had dazzled audiences with a combination of very simple computer-generated effects and practical effects that made the villain of the piece seem almost invincible. By comparison, the attempts to convince an audience that our characters had found their way inside a computer system were so half-hearted that it left audiences wondering if this were some kind of joke. Sadly, the end result has that Ed Wood touch of broadcasting a failure to think things through.
As a result, this production of The Lawnmower Man ends up being a classical one out of ten film. Film school students can look at it for examples of when an ambitious effect or series of effects are not done well.
Part of the problem stems from the basic story of the film. The central story involves a scientist attempting to use virtual reality to train simpler minds such as those of monkeys to perform tasks that any normal human being would regard as complex. When our bold scientist meets a man who is, to put it bluntly, quite retarded, a light goes on in his head. What if the virtual reality simulator could be used to accelerate the functioning of this gardener's brain to the point where at least nominal calculations are no longer beyond him? And therein lies one of the problems most critics never pick up on. The human brain is demonstrably more complex than an electronic board or an engine, and accelerating it or repairing it is a much more complex process than this film gives credit for. When you add to that the fact that if Albert Einstein had been born around the same time as I was, he would have been diagnosed with High-Functioning Autism, this film's conception of the difference between simple and god-like becomes very shaky indeed.
Not helping matters any is the apparent lack of research or planning that permeates the screenplay. In one memorable scene, we are told by the supposedly brilliant Doctor Lawrence that Jobe has mastered the Latin alphabet in a matter of hours, whereas it took him a year. This prompts the question of who is really retarded in this scenario, given that the Latin alphabet is something every child in the English-speaking world learns between their fifth and sixth birthday. At other times, the script seems to have been written by a twelve year old who has been listening to Black Sabbath songs like Iron Man a little too closely. Jobe's proclamation about how he will take over every computer system in the world being the best example. But the worst parts come when the script paints the characters into corners that they have no possibility of escaping, so the writers shoehorn in a convenient device. The writers here clearly had no idea of what a security backdoor is or how it works in the real computing world.
Fortunately, Hollywood productions tend to have at least one strength they can fall back on when all else fails. Since the Hollywood system attracts some of the best actors money can buy, it stands to reason that The Lawnmower Man would have some commendable performances in spite of the terrible screenplay. Jeff Fahey's performance as Jobe easily rings the truest in this entire film. Pretending to be retarded is enough of a challenge for an actor. Pretending to be retarded, then suddenly gifted with mental faculties that would make Newton or Tesla envious, then given over the megalomania, is quite an acrobatic act. That Fahey pulls it off so well in spite of the script he is working from is a credit to him. Pierce Brosnan is no slouch, either, even though his performance as a scientist has little to discern itself from his performance as a secret agent. Somehow, this matter-of-fact, questioning portrayal really suits the scientist a lot better. Brosnan's performance as the man wondering where he went wrong is the only real anchor this film has.
Much has been made of the virtual reality environments around which some of the plot is based. In 1992, simulating a self-contained environment within a computer was a frontier, and someone in the studio obviously thought this would be a good trend to cash in on. What they did not anticipate was that computing was becoming a very monolithic market, and a lot of the fantastic dreams we had about the future of computing were about to fall by the wayside. At the same time, the ability of computers to splice funky effects into films was growing at an exponential rate. A year prior, a little film called Terminator 2 had dazzled audiences with a combination of very simple computer-generated effects and practical effects that made the villain of the piece seem almost invincible. By comparison, the attempts to convince an audience that our characters had found their way inside a computer system were so half-hearted that it left audiences wondering if this were some kind of joke. Sadly, the end result has that Ed Wood touch of broadcasting a failure to think things through.
As a result, this production of The Lawnmower Man ends up being a classical one out of ten film. Film school students can look at it for examples of when an ambitious effect or series of effects are not done well.