Altered States (1980)

Emily Jessup: "You think madness is simply another state of consciousness?"

By Ken Russell
With William Hurt, Blair Brown and Bob Baladan

Altered States is another movie I came across while reading the Wikipedia for Body Horror. To me it didn't seem too horror driven as far as the plot goes, but I decided to give it a shot anyway. I think it's an interesting topic to try to film, the psychedelic and altered states of consciousness.

The movie starts off with Eddie Jessup in an isolation tank with his friend Arthur Rosenberg monitoring him. We quickly learn that Eddie is researching psychedelic drugs and happens to be testing on himself. Eddie, through his hallucinations, seems driven towards finding the meaning of life. A lot of his hallucinations involve God and hell, they also involve the death of his father and his powerlessness in the face of it. Eddie meets Emily, a brilliant scientist in the field of anthropology, and a few years afterward they are married with two daughters. This is when Eddie goes to Mexico to visit old Indian tribal rituals. The rituals involve a very powerful and toxic mushroom that induces furious hallucinations. In his scientific quest, and with no regard to his own health, Eddie starts testing this drug on himself more and more but it might prove more dangerous to him than it would to anyone else.

The first half of the movie was one of the most interesting I've watched. The dialogues about the human mind were really good and mind puzzling. I thought the hallucinatory scenes were really good and while they were very bizarre and trippy and compelling, I think this is how it has to be if a director wants to convey a hallucinating state of consciousness to an alpha viewer. I loved them. It is hard to read all the symbolism into them as they flash quickly, but the scene with two people turning to sand and the sand being shaped away slowly by the wind was really amazing.

The psychedelic scenes reminded me of The Doors (1991) which is a good thing and the fact that a song by them was featured never hurts either. Another thing I was surprisingly reminded of is the TV Show Fringe (2008-2012), possibly because Blair Brown who plays Emily here, was also Nina Sharp in Fringe, but also because of the way Walter wanted to experience more, beyond science through the use of psychedelic drugs and in particular a few episodes where he'd use an isolation tank to do so.

Sadly, I thought the movie took a fairly poor turn of events when it started including genetic regression and how the hallucinations and drugs effect would carry on in Eddie's life and have him change radically. I think the movie could have been more powerful through the use of hallucinations and the research done through them, rather than have the main character change because of what happened inside his hallucinations.

The use of CGI is well done considering this is one of the first movies to include it. Nevertheless, the last scene felt very weak to me, despite being visually stunning. In fact, we realize that we've gone through the whole movie searching to discover something but we reach no such thing and we are left with just a man and his feelings. This isn't to speak of the cast, however, as William Hurt is quite a talented actor and even though this happens to be his first movie role, I was pleasantly impressed. Blair Brown did a good job too.

I liked: The hallucinations. Scientific drug tests. Good dialogues.

I disliked: The whole search for creation. A weak attempt at being a coming of age movie.

64/100
An excellent premise that was poorly executed. It reminded me of The Fly (1986) and Videodrome (1983) both by David Cronenberg and both superior to this.