The Violent Booze Soaked Story of a Wasted Life...

Rating: 7/10 (20 February 2008)

The Doors, it requires no plot synopsis nor an explanation because the name speaks for itself. The thing that makes this movie hard not to watch is a strange formula; 1 part music, 2 parts music, and 97 parts self destruction.
I just saw this movie for the first time today, and as not too big a doors fan I had to look for something else to like in this film and what I found was a serious of excellent performances and bizarre visual elements that make it very hard to look away. Val Kilmer does a good job as Jim Morrison in the fact that his performance makes it hard to determine whether or not Morrison was a man to be loved or hated and was perfectly countered by Meg Ryan showing how he dragged her down with him. The unpredictability of the lead character also kept me going, how he was joking one moment and going psychotic the next. The depiction of the rock God certainly wasn't very flattering and I think it's better that way because it's honest, Jim Morrison was a drug addled alcoholic asshole on a path to self destruction that no one (not even people he loved) could stop.
The drug sequences are something that I would usually find unique if it wasn't Oliver Stone, he seems to be quite accustomed to that. I did however enjoy the way that it would be manipulated to seem as if time literally stopped in certain moments in the movie, mixtures of sounds and colors or lack thereof peeling the viewer away from what little normality was already there. Sometimes though it took away from the movie itself, there were times where I think I would have enjoyed these particular moments far more if I'd smoked a joint before they happened.
Now for the parts that needed work, I initially had the same problem with this that I had with "Walk The Line". I didn't enjoy the fact that one minute we see Morrison as a kid and the next moment he's a 21 year old acid dropping film student in Venice. I don't like when movies jump to the halfway evolution of a character without explaining how it came to be that way. It jumps too quickly into the success of the Doors as if thew whole thing was overnight. This movie is pretty lengthy as it is I know, but it wouldn't hurt to toss in an extra 10 minutes. Another thing was this movie could have lost at least a half hour if it had cut down on unnecessarily long sequences, in particular some of the concert scenes. I don't care about the music, even the Doors can drag on sometimes. And there were other parts but we won't go into it.
All together it was a well rounded movie about the downward spiral of one of the most vibrant, overrated (by Morrison's own admission), and ultimately too human for his own good artists of the sixties. It was a sad story about a wasted life told through music and drugs and insanity... but it still could've been better...