Review of The Doors

On his first lesser outing as director, Oliver Stone's disjointed biographical music film centres on the rise and fall of The Doors, one of the more successful genre-bursting rock bands of the 1960s, but in actuality targets their larger-than-life frontman, Jim Morrison, and therein lies the first of many missteps in the attempt to maximise on such a wealth of material. An opportunity wasted, in my opinion, whereby subtlety falls victim to the pursuit of pretentious self-indulgence and bombastic flair tailored for the MTV generation. Stylistically staid and historically inaccurate, Jim Morrison's early life is barely explored, with Val Kilmer's showy, disconnected performance failing to capture any component of his true personality. Instead of the sensitive poet he probably was, Jim Morrison is portrayed as a sociopathic hypocrite who appears to initially embrace the 1960s counterculture lifestyle before becoming an amoral, uncouth and puerile drunkard. Scarce essence of either the band or its driving force is felt, with Stone foregoing the intricacies of their personal interplay and unified creative output to dwell on convoluted hallucinatory motifs and the unfavourable personality traits of the band's iconoclast. Biographical dramas should endear rather than alienate their intended audience, and "The Doors" is a turgid recreation of actual events, with its fallacy-laden depiction of a rock star poet and overblown, cliched composites of real accounts and persons within a fictionalised cartoon atmosphere. Frankly, the film's script is too restricted to fully communicate or deliver its point, thus failing to achieve its lofty ambitions or even capitalise on its basic conceit, but it is worth a look if you can ignore its vast shortcomings, i.e. a weak, uninspired narrative and flawed characterisation.