BITE-SIZED REVIEW: The Relic (Peter Hyams, 1997)

Something is prowling the floors of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. 

It eats brains. It falls to a sceptical scientist (Penelope Ann Miller) and a superstitious cop (Tom Sizemore) to hunt it down before it turns visitors and staff into cervelle de veau (brains).

I am not the biggest fan of Peter Hyams’ work. Mostly because I can barely see what is going on in any of his movies.

I like that he wants to create an atmosphere by using a lot of darkness and shadows in his compositions, but he is too dark. There are scenes in his movies where I just cannot see anything and the mood dissipates. 

That being said, I think his aesthetic mostly works for this particular outing. There is an overlit quality to a lot of late nineties genre movies, and The Relic feels like a response to this trend.

That being said, I wish he was a little more judicious in how he deployed it. Once the third act got going, I noticed more over-cutting and a lot of key scenes were composed mostly of close-ups, which made it even harder to figure out where people were in relation to the beast.

The creature itself is a nasty customer - a combination of animatronics and computer-generated imagery, it is legitimately terrifying. Hyams’ obsession with shrouding the frame in darkness is an asset for the CGI.

In its favour, the movie manages to build tension for roughly the first two thirds - while the script is nothing special, in terms of setting the stage for the beast's final rampage, it is pretty effective. The cross-cutting between the opening of the exhibit and the police searching through the building to find the creature is one of the best sequences in the film.

While it works as a monster mash, the movie does have a certain coldness that I have been trying to figure out. It is an issue I have with Hyams' movies. While the movie has characters, I never care about any of them, or their deaths. It always feels like figurines being moved around a board. That hollowness makes the film's uglier elements stand out more: the big one is the minor antagonist Greg Lee (Chi Muoi Lo) - he is the only Asian member of the cast, and he is just a greedy, cowardly stereotype. 

The movie has gained a cult following, and it is easy to see why. With its familiar plot mechanics and very archetypal characters, it reads like a monster movie template from an earlier era - for better and worse.

Viewed through the prism of 2021, it is refreshing to see a genre movie set in a lived-in location - the museum and underground tunnels are great, if under-lit - and the judicious use of CGI means the movie's horrors remain tangible.

The Relic is not great but that is okay. It has modest aspirations, and mostly succeeds at achieving them - you just need to up the brightness and draw the curtains if you want to see them.

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