Hollow Man (2000)
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
Genetic code; Genetic research; Mutations; Thriller
A team of scientists discover how to alter the genetic code of animals to cause them to become invisible, but when the lead researcher tests the experiment on himself, things go dangerously awry.
A team of scientists working for the government have discovered how to alter the genetic code of animals to make them invisible. At the beginning of the film, the researchers are trying to determine how to reverse the process on a test subject gorilla. When they are successful, head scientist Sebastian Cane (Kevin Bacon) and his colleagues, ex-girlfriend Lynn (Elizabeth Shue) and Matthew (Josh Brolin), appear before the pentagon committee that hired them and report that they can successfully “phase shift a human being out of quantum sync with the visible universe.” However, Cane decides to lie about their successful “quantum reversion” because he wants to test the process on himself before the committee takes the project from them. Cane’s “bioquantum phase shift” is successful and the team performs various tests on him. But, when they try to revert him after the allotted period of three days, something goes wrong. Cane remains invisible while the team rushes to find a way to bring him back into the visible world. Soon, Cane’s “God complex” as well as his mounting frustration regarding his condition lead him to begin to play tricks on his co-workers, who can only see him when he is without clothes, mask, hat and sunglasses if they are wearing heat-sensitive goggles. Eventually, Cane begins to lose his mind and the film becomes a cat and mouse game as, placing the lab under lockdown, Cane begins to kill each of his fellow scientists. Ultimately, Lynn and Matthew escape through the elevator shaft while Cane is killed and all of their findings are destroyed.
Director Paul Verhoeven’s film is a modern day adaptation of H.G. Well’s Invisible Man (1897) set in a government funded science lab in America rather than throughout a series of small towns in late nineteenth-century England. Wells’s text is more focused on the details of the science of invisibility while the film is largely dedicated to special effects and thrill-ride chase scenes. An affinity between the two works is the central idea that the genetic alteration of the physical form leads to mental deterioration: madness, irrational violence, and so on.
Evaluation: Neither Verhoeven film, nor Wells’s source text from 1897, go into great detail as to the genetics behind the transformation from visible to invisible. Both works are more focused on the dangerous repercussions of such scientific experimentation.
– Lauren Wood Hoffer