I have been kind of busy the last few days. So I'm just not sure what subject to cover on my blog. Then I thought, how about another essay from the vault? The essay below is titled, 'Animals' based on the movie, 'The Island of Dr. Moreau'. Directed by John Frankenheimer and released in 1996. The movie was based on the book of the same title penned by H.G. Wells, the author of 'The War of the Worlds' and 'The Time Machine'. This was an essay I wrote for the Film Philosophy class that I took back in college. Please keep in mind that these are copyrighted works of mine, if you wish to reprint or republish this somewhere else, please ask for my permission before doing so.
Animals
In this essay, I will discuss the topic of animals. What is an animal? What are we? Who are we? Why are we this way and not something else? What is the difference between human beings and animals? And more questions to be explored. Examples will be taken from the movie that we watched earlier this week, “The Island of Dr. Moreau”.
From the directory of American Heritage, it is an animal organism other than the human beings, especially a mammal. From a different source, an animal is a creature that thrives on instinct and is unable to reason. Now, that would give off some vibes on why we, human beings, share the same traits in some ways, and more about it will be said later in the essay.
Animals, they are living things, and we can see that in the movie. Some of the animals, especially the Hyena-Man and Dog-man that were genetically mutilated human beings, displayed some brutal manners. All of the animals that live on the island are human beings, but they have animals inside them too as well. But you can see the animals inside real human beings too, but this movie was just to show you that human beings are still animals, no matter what they are because we all thrives on instinct and unable to reason at times in our lives. The movie clearly shows that human beings show the behaviour of being superior to the mutilated human beings/animals, because we are the ones who dominates the world. The animals felt intimidated by us, therefore making them nervous whenever they see the “Father” coming. Simply because Dr. Moreau harms them with a special equipment that makes painful sound waves that stops the animals from acting out in a violent act. But since the animals were also human beings in a way, they had the intelligence to beat the human beings at their game by removing the implant making them unafraid of the so-called superior species. Dr. Moreau tried to play the God and died for it simply because he was an animal too as well. Montgomery tried to step into his shoes and the results were the same as Dr. Moreau’s. They both tried to not be animals and played the superior role of being the God. Animals, they are all the same, only they’re different in a lot of ways. The animals tried to take over the island, which was the same thing we did thousands of years ago, only the difference is that we took over the world. They merely took over an island, but somehow, the movie demonstrated that we aren’t really that different. Nobody is superior; the only difference is that we dominated the world, which made us think we are actually superior to the other animals.
Some people would try to say that we are superior to the animals, but I don’t agree with that. Of course, we may be civilized and have made so many advances in technologies over the years. But the movie clearly showed that animals were able to dominate the island in a very short period while it took us thousands of years to take over a merely few areas in the world. Now, we dominate the world, but we are also destroying it because we basically believe that the world doesn’t belong to anything else but us. Human Beings are very capable of acting out in such a bestial manner. We kill our own people. Animals may do that, but they don’t do it for nothing. In the animal kingdom, they have their own laws. We do, but the animals are better off because they are not corrupted like we are. Human Beings, in my honest opinion are the most imperfect species on the face of Earth in comparison to most of the other animal species. We feed off everything in our paths. Human Beings may be superior in domination, but we aren’t even on the top of the food chain. If you took away our tools and sophisticated weapons and left us in the wild, we would not survive long; other animals, higher up on the food chain would quickly reduce our numbers. The movie showed the animals killing human beings while none of the human beings ever killed any animals, except for one man.
Animals are Animals, and we are not completely capable of keeping our animal instincts inside ourselves. It is a natural instinct and we’re not always able to control it. People can be murderers, rapists, crooks, greedy, lustful, and many more nasty words that the society frowns upon. The movie proved it all; we are not superior to animals and we can never play god because it would be violating the laws of nature even if there is no God. That, however, would require another essay.
Written by Paul Moreau
Copyright 2003 Paul Moreau. All rights reserved.
