Molokai: The Story of Father Damien (1999)

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Molokai was a good movie. Not outstanding, but still good. It talked very openly about the prosecution and exile of Lepers in that time period. It was an emotional roller-coaster because at first you don't really feel for the lepers, as you have no connection to them. Eventually the more time Father Damien spends with them, the more that the audience starts to sympathise. As the audience is starting to sympathise more and more, then it gets sadder and sadder. Although I don't enjoy watching older movies (even 1999) but the directing in this film was quite forward for 1999 and felt like a modern film with a bad camera. The acting cast was very convincing and you really felt emotionally connected to the characters in it. It was based on a true story and you could really feel the characters come to life.

I have heard of Father Damien, and even think I saw part of a biography on him. He was the "Mother Teresa" of his time.The performances were excellent and the cast was basically all star with actors such as Sam Neill, Alice Krige and so many others that set the tone of this movie. A practically unfamiliar actor of the time, David Wenham, played Father Damien with the strength, kindness and determination that for a while during the movie, you actually believed he was the real Father Damien. His performance was nothing short of excellent as he showed how Father Damien advocated for his people and struggled at time with his faith during a time when Lepers were in some circles thought to be not only diseased, but sinful. Never asking for anything for himself, David Wenham's performance as Father Damien is very true and honest making this movie a must see.I would highly recommend this movie to anyone and everyone. In my eye, David Wenham will always be Father Damien.

This was an almost unrealistically ambitious co-production between Belgium and a whole bunch of other countries, but the many different sources of interference don't hurt the finished product as much as I thought it would. More funding brings more supplies, and that shows. Paul Cox may not be a particularly skilled director, but his country does appear to have a lot of money so it evens out. The visual style to this movie looks really professional, sometimes it'll give you a made for TV-vibe, but that will just be a sporadic feel. The screenplay has some pacing problems, but that doesn't mean it's slow. It just keeps randomly changing in pace, which isn't nearly as exciting as you'd think. There are bunches of scenes where there's nothing happening, but when father Damien ends up contracting leprosy, the movie suddenly looks like it's sick of itself and just takes every possible shortcut to the ending. I do like that very last line though, as corny as it may be, and it is very corny. The biggest plus this movie has is the performance by David Wenham. Hiring an Australian guy to play Damien sounds like the worst idea ever, but he's really authentic. He's pretty much why I kept watching. This movie is fairly well-made, but there's room for improvement.

This is a surprisingly intimate look at some of Father Damien's experiences, but the dramatic structure of the film is often frustratingly fragmented.Scenes of the authorities on O'ahu struggling with how to deal with the amazing man and his demands on behalf of his community seem to have been shot very hastily, and they fit poorly with the more carefully conceived segments from Moloka'i. Even there, the scenes with Peter O'Toole seem poorly integrated into the progression of the story.Despite the participation of many top-flight actors and actual local victims of Hansen's disease, this film offers only fleeting, tantalizing glimpses of what could have been a tremendously powerful drama of the life of a man who may yet become an actual saint. In isolation, the leading performances are very fine, but the package failed to gel and the film is, finally, only a carefully-drawn series of vignettes.