Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Good concept, poorly executed.

best movie i've ever seen.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

When this movie first came out, I was a kid, and to me it was pretty interesting and eye-opening. Certainly compared to doing homework and my paper route in the suburbs, this kid was pretty lucky to get kidnapped by "indians". He got to hang out and swim with naked girls, hunt animals, and fight. There's definitely some wish fulfillment and some fantasy in the film, which presents itself as a sort of "heart of darkness" tale of the encounter between civilization and nature. That's a good starting point, perhaps, for the problems with the film. We have basically 2 tribes, and one of them likes to take lots of drugs and have lots of sex, while the other one is brutal and cannibalistic. This neatly ties the 2 dominant ways that white colonists tend to look at indigenous cultures into a concrete dichotomy: the noble savage vs. the cannibal savage. Also interestingly, the film shows the father figure (Powers Boothe) as a would-be white savior, but his attempts to blow up the dam with dynamite are preempted by the magic of the noble tribesmen. Regardless of the political appeal of this conclusion, the film doesn't really offer any kind of answers for what is to be done to save the rain forests or the indigenous peoples or, more importantly, to help them save themselves by any means other than frogs and magic. It's just, like "Medicine Man" and other films of this type, using the "jungle" and its inhabitants as a means of drawing the audience in and giving us a fantasy version of indigenous life. The cast in the film is notably poor, especially Boorman's son Charley, who plays the kidnapped boy as an adolescent. To be fair, the script demands an awful lot of Charley Boorman, but he can't really deliver much of it. Meg Foster barely registers, and the film in general has a very paternalistic and patriarchal tone, almost totally concerned with the relationship between men who are fathers and sons. If, like me, you have fond memories of this one from your childhood, perhaps it's best to just leave them there. The film is very well- photographed, but all the scenes with "wild" animals look like somebody put the animals right there to be photographed. It suffers very greatly compared to, say, Herzog's films like "Fitzcarraldo" where instead of inserting tropical animals just to provide some momentary visual interest, the jungle even in its dangers is allowed to become "normal." We feel as if the tribes in Boorman's film live within a vacation destination or a zoo.It's also well-directed, but in the sensational way that Boorman seems to only know how. If you look at some of Boorman's other films, like "Zardoz" and "Excalibur", you'll see that he sort of lets actors do whatever they want, resulting in the more experienced actors totally dominating all the film's energy (arguably, in "Excalibur", that's part of the design of the film). Here, we have no real actors. While Boothe has a nice low-key demeanor, that only makes it more ridiculous when he grabs a machine gun and starts killing the "bad" natives like he was your average 80s action hero. It's somewhat of an admirable effort, considering how many other films you could see in the 80s that didn't offer the sort of escapist adventure, nor any of the message of this film -- however, it's deeply and intrinsically flawed and does not make up for in drama what it lacks in realism.

A definite source for The Emerald Forest is the book, Wizard of the Upper Amazon, by F. Bruce Lamb. The story is a second hand account of Manuel Cordova's kidnapping when he was a teenager working for rubber cutters in the Amazon in the early 1900s. He was taken by a group of Indians to a very remote, primitive Indian village. These Indians were of a fierce independent disposition, and had fled into the interior because they refused to exist in the subservient situation imposed on them by the rubber barons of that time. Cordova was incorporated into their tribe and describes a life strikingly similar to the one depicted in The Emerald Forest. The similarities include the adversarial tribe, the reason The Invisible People moved further into the Jungle, and the tribal ceremony with the hallucinogenic.

DVD rental from Netflix, the video is very nice, the sound is only Prologic for this older movie.It is best to say this movie was "inspired by" real events, but certainly does not closely represent what actually happened when an US Engineer in charge of building a dam in the Amazon lost his young son who was about 7 at the time. He learns 10 years later that the blonde boy was actually taken by the tribe who call themselves the "invisible people" because with their green-based markings make themselves almost invisible in the Amazon forest.Powers Boothe is the Engineer, Bill Markham. He never gives up and over the 10-year construction of the dam finally locates his son, who has grown up as a member of the tribe, embracing their ways and his new father and mother.The Tommy of 17 is played by the director's son, Charley Boorman. His tribe calls him "Tomme" which is derived from his birth name. Tomme has reached the age where he must go through the ritual to become a man, then take a young girl as his wife. His chosen one is pretty Dira Paes as Kachiri, a resident of the neighboring friendly tribe. Dira was just an ordinary girl who grew up in the Amazon, and according to her IMDb information was about 15 during filming in this, her first movie. I see she has gone on to a nice acting career, and photos show she grew into a very attractive woman. She has a great smile and reminds me of Jennifer Lopez.The drama starts when owners of a brothel bargain with some hostile natives, known as the "fierce people". For a machine gun and ammunition, if they will bring in some new young ladies. They end up raiding the village, killing some, and kidnapping a dozen or so young ladies, including Kachiri, and forcing them into prostitution. Tomme searches for and finds his original dad again, to get his help to defeat the fierce people and get their women back. Another interest is conservation of the rain forest, and in the end Tomme prays for frogs, because when the frogs sing it rains. An unexpected flood tears down the almost complete dam and that area of the native forest is safe for a while.Good movie, and probably fairly authentic since the director lived with a native tribe for a while to get a feel for their ways. There is of course a lot of natural nudity, but it seems authentic rather than erotic. Much like what is in "The Bounty" with Mel Gibson.

"The Emerald Forest" is a beautiful, somewhat touching tale of a child's abduction by aboriginals, and a diligent ten year search for the missing son by his father. The rain forest location photography is stunning, and the story actually believable for awhile. Beyond the half way point however, things deteriorate quickly. A film that started out as possibly based on fact, suddenly shifts gears into the realm of fantasy. Tall buildings are scaled with ease, visions locate people, and Powers Boothe goes into "Rambo" mode. Then, to top things off, comes an ecological message that is supposed to be taken seriously, even after the nonsense that precedes it. - MERK