Want to hate it, but it's the Doors

Rating: 2/10 (18 November 2007)

Visually this is a great film, musically it's a better film, authentically it sucks. I like Oliver stone's style, his rapid and intoxicating sweeps intended to not just entice you, it enshrouds you. But as with JFK, he takes dangerous license with real people and events. Val Kilmer's Morrison was spot on, that is before Stone got through with him. The Doors is told through the perspective of Morrison, but in this film Oliver Stone makes him out to be a dysfunctional poet in a cloud of perpetual haze, so stoned, so drunk, so wasted, he can't even stand up straight. That's not the real Morrison. It was a part of him, but the film makes it about him. Jim Morrison was much more cogent and functional than Stone's caricaturization. The entire movie, in fact, became more about Morrison's drug induced neurosis than about The Doors. I felt Stone was pushing too hard to deliver his message through a prism of false perception and amplified through a distorted, almost irritating, cosmic psychedelia. It lacked anchors and believable people. The film is a buffet of hyperbolic drivel punctuated with some really good scenes and awesome concert footage. The Navajo were quite cool, however. Overall I can stand this movie in segments, as a whole I think it does a great disservice to one the best American bands ever.