well , what are you going to expect ?
it 's a movie about a big snake that eats people .
that 's what i should have been thinking when i viewed this film , because maybe then i would have enjoyed myself more .
instead , i ended up wishing a giant snake would come along and eat me , too .
anaconda is about a documentary film crew sailing down a south american river .
led by anthropologists dr .
steven cale ( eric stolz ) and terri flores ( jennifer lopez ) , the crew is attempting to locate a lost tribe of natives .
along the way , they find poacher paul sarone ( jon voight ) , and become unwillingly embroiled in his quest to capture the elusive anaconda .
to simply say that this is the world 's largest snake would n't be doing it justice , since the anaconda in this movie is at least two feet wide .
if this is n't a good reason to avoid picking up hitchhikers , i do n't know what is .
at the beginning of anaconda , we find that flores and cale have had some kind of relationship in the past , but that seems to be more or less over now .
i expected that fact to play a key part somewhere down the line , but it ended up being a set - up for nothing .
cale chokes on a deadly wasp ( do n't ask me how that happens - i do n't know ) and is put out of action , relegated to being the person whom the rest of the film crew must get back to civilization for medical help .
this minimally helps to add a sense of urgency for the plot , since this goal now comes in direct conflict with sarone 's plan to capture the snake .
however , this is negated by the fact that cale seems to get better by himself about halfway through the film , and in any event still results in zero payoff from the relationship angle .
most bad characters are either annoying or stupid .
in this movie , they 're both .
since this description applies to all the characters except sarone , it 's hard to find someone to root for .
you 're supposed to back the good guys , but you really end up cheering for sarone because he 's smarter than everyone else .
or maybe he 's just not as dumb as everyone else .
at times , i almost found myself rooting for the snake .
there are no standout performances here .
everyone seems to be reciting lines written for stock characters .
even voight appears to be doing his best impression of christopher walken for some reason .
no matter , as in most monster movies , the snake is supposed to be the real star anyway .
in most of the scenes , the snake is computer generated , and the effects crew did a decent job of making it look real . however ,
the realism is thrown off by some pretty unrealistic occurrences .
sometimes , for example , the snake just moves too fast .
it catches a guy jumping off of a waterfall , for crying out loud .
then there 's another scene where the snake eats one of the characters , and we see the snake 's skin drawn so tightly over its prey that we can see the victim 's pained expression from within the snake 's belly .
absolutely ridiculous .
a testimony to the film 's bad direction is the inclusion of a scene early on the in the film , where we get to see just how dangerous the mighty anaconda is .
in a scene totally unrelated to anything else , we are witness to the big snake winning a showdown with a panther .
the anaconda wraps itself around the powerful feline as if it were a stuffed animal and squeezes it so hard , one of the panther 's eyeballs pops out .
eeeewwwww .
above and beyond the sick factor , however , this scene surprised me because it actually showed the face of the snake before a quarter of the movie had even passed .
in films like these , a sense of mystery surrounding the monster must be maintained .
if the characters are reacting to something they fear more than see , we as an audience must experience that feeling along with them .
to show us the monster early on is to let us in on something the characters do n't know about , and therefore allow us to get used to the danger before the pivotal moment when man and beast have their climactic showdown .
in a case like that , the showdown just ends up being a letdown .
when i saw the snake for the first time , i decided to give the film the benefit of the doubt and assume that the snake i saw was n't the real danger .
this one was just a decoy , and there was actually a bigger snake waiting to make its appearance just when everyone thought they were safe .
no such luck .
okay , maybe anaconda is actually a decoy , and there 's really a better movie waiting to make its debut .
Output: N