Oh my, this film characterizes my most intrinsic fantasies and inclinations. It
sucks, oh god does the film suck, and the only thing that makes it more bearable than the original
Blue Lagoon is that
Milla Jovovich plays the (shudder)
Brooke Shields part. Oh yes, she was gawkish, and largely criticised for her voice to the extent she went immediately afterwards to a
dialect coach. But these horrid peculiarities can never,
never overshadow Milla’s most fundamental magnificence and loveliness.. even at the age of 15. Her name was Lilli, she
acted like a lily, she danced around in carefully fashioned torn sheets, she had this
celestial tan, swimmy
hair,
oceanic eyes.. she was juvenile and
ingenuous.. very
simple.. but that’s the appeal of the island. It’s
Edenic, and good
god I was furious when that
ratty toothed,
oily, ginger haired man was
perving on her bathing in the sprinkly sparkly waterfall and tried to
rape her and steal the special
pearl that
Richard(
Brian Krause) gave her as a
prize for collecting the most
Easter eggs. I revered the fact that they didn’t know what guns were, I loved their innocence towards
civilized life, although it might be supposed that they were merely
stupid, or uneducated. The truth is neither, they are simply
unsullied and beautiful. They get to read and sing and eat fruit with carefully constructed sea shell
crockery, touch silver streaking fish and climb
banana trees.
I want a Blue Lagoon! (Although, can I take my laptop and have satellite internet?) The part which bothered me most? When Richard had some lame ‘
duel’ with the shark, and insisted upon throwing ‘insults’ at the thing: “
You stupid sea slug!” Ahem.
They waited over ten years to make a sequel to the first Blue Lagoon, you know. And that in itself was a remake of a 1949 movie. The reason they waited so long? So no one would remember how awful the original was. This angers me. These films are cute, okay, and I know that very word lowers its credibility, but its just delightful. Well, what can I say; I am a sucker for utopian visions okay? Anyway the storyline basically follows the anticipated procession of: the original couple sail off the island (we see only see their jettisoned bodies); their son (Richard) is saved by a passing boat with a young woman and her baby daughter(Lilli) on board, and a rash of cholera among the crew sees the young mother and two children are put off into the big bad open sea where they wash up on the same damn island. The mother educates them, we have some enlightening child footage, some romps in a stream, some ‘cowry shell’ references (female genitalia, for the ahem, unenlightened), and then it’s straight to, oh yes, the onset of adolescence, baby. The mother dies, and there is some essentially incestuous cavorting that then ensues. Oh, but they marry. It’s all very moralistic. Then a British ship rocks up, tries to civilise them, to their delight, but after guns and pretentiousness and some English rose trying to steal Lilli's man, they decide that island life is really for them after all.
All in all, a bunch of frolicking, a lot of naïve nakedity, skin, sun, and luscious mangoes.
And oh yes! Flameboy has visited the actual island where this film was shot!