The Mosquito Coast (1986)
Directed by Peter Weir
An inventor spurns his city life and moves his family into the jungles of Central America to make a utopia.
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What critics compared The Mosquito Coast to
In this regard he has more than a little in common with Harrison Ford’s idealistic father in The Mosquito Coast , whose half visionary, half crazed utopian idyll ended in disaster.
Anderson’s interest in landscape as metaphor recalls the films of Peter Weir, who explored the spiritual implications of wilderness landscapes in Picnic at Hanging Rock , The Last Wave , and The Mosquito Coast .
For all of his bold (and, in my opinion, justified) critiques of contemporary capitalism — which remind me of Allie Fox, the half-mad prophet of Peter Weir’s The Mosquito Coast — Will exposes, at times, a sense of helplessness and grief, a knowledge that he has lost the way back to balance and wisdom.
But this isn’t “The Mosquito Coast” or even “Captain Fantastic,” the off-the-grid approach that Will has adopted isn’t guided by a political philosophy, or, frankly, any philosophy that is identifiable.
In film, previously, we saw such finesse at work in “The Mosquito Coast” (1986), a Paul Theroux adaptation in which Harrison Ford plays an inventor who moves his family to Belize to start a new life . . .
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His shoes are filled by Mark Wahlberg as Cade Yeager, a can-do “garage inventor” with a passing resemblance to Harrison Ford in The Mosquito Coast, a somewhat creepy obsession with the virtue of his leggy teenage daughter (Nicola Peltz), and a passion for discarded machinery that leads him to rescue Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), noble leader of the Autobot race.
While it thumped along, I had plenty of time to ponder the other and better movies that it reminded me of: The Mosquito Coast (1986), The Deer Hunter (1978), and Apocalypse Now (1979), as well as William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies.
While taking a Korean perspective on the much fabled “American dream”, it also evokes memories of bittersweet and torrid tales as diverse as Field of Dreams and The Mosquito Coast , where one family member is seemingly risking it all in pursuit of a goal that maybe they alone believe in.
I think immediately of " Aguirre, the Wrath of God ," and " Fitzcarraldo ," two movies by Werner Herzog about crazed eccentrics who pressed on into the jungle, driven by their obsessions.
Like "Fitzcarraldo" before him, Fox is transfigured by the tropics, a stranger in a stranger land.
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They’re all having a tough time adapting to their dad’s rural fantasy, which is somewhere between the comic idyll of “Green Acres” and the survivalist mania of “The Mosquito Coast.”
There are also hints of The Mosquito Coast to be found in The Lost City of Z , the questions of what happens when the outside world invades established, unexplored cultures.
Gray’s script, written with Ethan Gross, is like a broodingly sincere outer space mashup of Solaris , Apocalypse Now , The Mosquito Coast , The Searchers , First Man and Mutiny on the Bounty .