I loved Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, and then suddenly I didn’t

This movie has brilliant world building, an extremely involving beginning, and feels as deep and mysterious as the jungle itself. I was really excited. I was going so well for quite a while in and then suddenly it changed.

It started with the hunter, or, maybe it started before but I didn’t notice. He was white. This struck me as odd to begin with. While I have only read the first book once, I have picked various things up from online videos, and have seen illustrations. The hunter is meant to be Indian, and the chief hunter in that village. And when you think about it, what’s this white guy doing in India in the middle of nowhere anyway.

Okay, if you think about it deeply you could probably work out an explanation, he’s a trophy hunter, yadda yadda yadda. But even so, it doesn’t feel right. But what really doesn’t feel right is that no-one ever race-bends a coloured character into a white character. And they changed his name too. Something was up.

After a while, I understood. The film was not only being deliberately political with an anti-hunting agenda, but it was also being actively anti-white. And going out of its way to be. Yes, it is meant to be another political bent supposedly – anti-colonialism – but funny how colonialism never comes up and is never mentioned once. And the villagers are perfectly happy with his being there too. 

But there's another point there. No matter what politics one has (or how misguided), is it really right to go out of your way to adapt someone else's work and give it the exact opposite political bent than the author themself held? It would be simple enough not to adapt any of the more, shall we say, old-fashioned concepts. It could easily have been adapted with no political influence or agenda at all.

But that isn’t the only reason why I suddenly didn’t like the film. No, there was a shift in tone that reminded me of how Oliver is portrayed in the BBC adaptation of Oliver Twist. Oliver here is basically an active revolutionary being angry and defiant about the treatment of the lower orders. This is basically what’s happening with Mowgli here, except it’s the jungle animals instead.

At the beginning of the film you get the impression Mowgli is destined to bring peace, and you suppose, after the tiger is dealt with, this peace will be brought about, well, peacefully, perhaps Mowgli enabling the villagers to have a better understanding of the jungle creatures. There is a problem with their expansion, that could have been addressed, for example. The thing is though, Mowgli just turns into an aggressive, horrible, and arguably barbaric person, at least character-wise. So, the message here is of peace being brought about my war. And that’s not all.

Mowgli effectively becomes the worst of humans and animals, perhaps even what the two species do have in common, their animal instincts. The other thing is that the humans always did stay out of the jungle, and only enter to hunt the tiger when he breaks jungle law by taking their cattle. So, are the humans really doing much wrong in the first place as far as the movie is telling us?

Also when it comes to Lord Thingy-whatsit – oh, I know it’s not the same actor as Lord Asriel in His Dark Materials, but come on, even his visual ticks are the same. Anyway, the hunter has either has been there for years, or literally just arrived. There is no way it can be anything in-between. If he’d been there for years the villagers would have given up on him. As he’s been pestered, he must have been there a while, but the timelining still doesn’t feel like it lines up. If it actually does, then the film isn’t communicating the passage of time very well.

As you might expect he is presented as impossibly sadistic simply because he happens to be a trophy hunter. It would be really impactful except you are too busy being taken out of the film by all the politics.

Anyway, that’s all I got to say for now. Tune in next time. I plan to be talking about a film each week. If I don’t watch a film, or have nothing to say about it, I will post different content that time, complaining about something else.