Directed by:
Joel SchumacherScreenplay:
Andrew Kevin WalkerCinematography:
Robert ElswitComposer:
Mychael DannaCast:
Nicolas Cage, Joaquin Phoenix, James Gandolfini, Peter Stormare, Anthony Heald, Chris Bauer, Catherine Keener, Jack Betts, Amy Morton, Norman Reedus (more)Plots(1)
Nicholas Cage plays Tom Welles, a straight-laced surveillance specialist. His innocent, naive world begins to unravel when he is hired by the widow of an industrialist to investigate what she has shockingly discovered in her late husband's safe. It appears to be a snuff film of a young girl being murdered. In order to discover the truth, he must enter the city's seedy underworld, guided by porn-store clerk Max California (Joaquin Phoenix). (official distributor synopsis)
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Reviews (12)
Watching the film, one finds it incredible, but it is the realization of a reworked script that its author Walker distanced himself from because he felt it was fundamentally watered down, something he had experienced since the production of Se7en, where Fincher had nonetheless stood up for him so his vision could remain intact. Here, Walker didn't accept the Dick Tracy-style notion of the private eye, who in his script is supposed to be more of a small-town bumpkin who spends his weekends bowling, and he didn't like the use of the voice over of the murdered woman, the unmasking of the main villain, or the deliverance letter at the end. All of these rewrites were the work of Schumacher, returning from his Mexican sabbatical where he had retreated out of exhaustion from the production of the last Batman. He was given the script to edit out of trust that he would give it a softer tone. Except that Schumacher returned from Mexico not only refreshed but also with a certain bitterness, so while he destroyed Walker's vision of the average suburban yuppie's inability to look into the abyss without being destroyed for life, he rebuilt it into a thesis about the elusiveness, irrationality, and ubiquity of sheer evil. With most of the film being spent searching and delving deeper and deeper into the sewer of illegal pornography, the structure of that evil is also created, with it being represented in its pure form by the Machine, who is used by director Dino Velvet to further his artistic ambitions, and exploited in terms of sheer mammon by Eddie Poole, who is followed by a host of other fish with the same motives. The awesome Elswit-esque grimness and faded shots of this autumnal tale, combined with a look at the declining pornographic landscape due to the advent of the internet, the constant presence of the ending (the empty giant house of a dead tycoon, the leaf-strewn grey home of the protagonist at the end of the street, as well as the main villain's home, which is even adjacent to a cemetery), and the setting of most of the film in the depopulated areas of New York or Los Angeles, closes the 1990s in a way. Everything is slowly shifting to computers, streets are being depopulated, meeting places are becoming desolate, old structures are breaking down, and everyone carries some scars from these wild years that they hope never to be reminded of. PS: 8mm was my childhood VHS classic that I used to watch about twice a week back in the day, and with the BluRay edition, some details I didn't understand at the time were finally explained, the most significant of which was that because of the cropping, it was impossible to see how The Machine actually kills Max. The shot itself was cut off for the sake of the rating and couldn't be seen on the video at all. Another mystery I can check off
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Joel Schumacher psychologically brutalizes us and the resulting effect is excellent. However, it would have been even better with a more elaborate screenplay with more questions and unexpected twists. Even so, this is a formalistically excellent inducement to depression with brilliant performances by everyone involved. Mentally unstable viewers should avoid 8 MM!
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A gloomy and relatively rough (within Hollywood standards) film showing the dark alleys of the metropolis, mentally disturbed perverts, murderers, deviants, and a traditionally clumsy Nicolas Cage. It's not inherently bad, but his acting simply doesn't dazzle and it even the Breitlings he wears most of the time can’t help. There were several scenes pleasantly twisted my nerves and digestive system (the final scene with the music is brilliantly tense) and the decently atmospheric depiction of that underworld with all its filth and tragedy is good. It's not groundbreaking, but on the other hand, Joel Schumacher has already directed several first-class crap, so let's be glad this film turned out like this.
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Everything bad is good for something. Joel Schumacher knew this well when, after the colossal failure of his big-budget Batman films, he turned his attention to more modest, psychologically solid projects in the late 90s, crowned by this famous depressing thriller. The plot, however simple, powerfully draws the viewer into the sordid world of perverted pornography, underpinned primarily by the perspective of the shocked main character, portrayed more than convincingly by Nicolas Cage still in his golden era. The pacing is perhaps a little too brisk given the seriousness of the premise and the psychological ambitions, the production design could occasionally push the envelope in terms of darkness and violence, and there are a few cheesy motifs (Cage finds immediately a diary that the police have been searching for in vain for God knows how long), but the atmosphere is nonetheless suffocating from the opening moments to the last shot, and the terrific actors (especially Phoenix and Stormare) raise the authenticity and sense of revulsion to highly satisfying heights. The ending admittedly dissolves that authenticity in favour of action satisfaction (this is the most significant difference from Se7en, also by Andrew Kevin Walker), but fortunately it doesn’t feel overstuffed and the filmmakers surprise with ideas that you simply won't see anywhere else (Cage's phone call and request for permission)... Definitely one of the most interesting and ultimately best thrillers of the nineties; where are those golden times…
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Unlike some reviews, I don't think Joel Schumacher wanted to make a film about snuff, but rather a film about the fascination and obsession with death and its brutality. The snuff 8-millimeter with the murder of an unknown girl, whose identity private investigator Tom Welles is about to investigate, is merely a means of descending into the darkest corners of the human soul, a hell of brutality and inhumanity that eventually devours for a moment even the man who comes into it as a law enforcement officer. Nicholas Cage is amazing. The transformation from a curious investigator to an obsessive and eventually a crazy avenger is masterfully executed. Finally, the positive hero finds himself facing the inevitable questions of "why are they doing this?", "what do they like about it", which, while aimed at murderers, are designed to shed particular light on the growing darkness in his own soul. Something we all have within us. Schumacher is an excellent director, he is able to do things without unnecessary explicitness and visible brutality, yet the atmosphere of 8MM is only slightly less dense and raw than in Fincher's Seven, and it escalates as the end approaches. As a spectator, I found myself in the shoes of Tom Welles, who is disgusted and horrified, but also unable to stop. The question of "why" is too corrosive... This film is simply not a documentary about one of the scariest film genres, but the embodiment of “why" with all the consequences that come with it. An excellent embodiment... It does not give an answer, but it is the basis for (self)analysis.
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