The Relic (1997)

The Relic arrives from 1997, a monster picture adapted from a bestselling novel by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and shot inside the actual Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago after the American Museum of Natural History in New York declined the honor. Its director, Peter Hyams, insisted that a movie like this has to be intelligent. The film takes him at his word, staffing the cast with an evolutionary biologist and a homicide detective and letting them trade theories about hormones, fungus, and chimeric DNA between attacks. The creature is well made. The museum is well used. The ambition here is mostly technical.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a creature of its decade. Penelope Ann Miller's Margo Green is competent, sharp, and central to the plot, and the director sought a strong, smart female lead, which is a credit to his intentions. The film stops short of any structural argument about women in science. She is simply good at her job, and the story rewards that. Museum administrators and wealthy benefactors push a gala forward while bodies accumulate, a faint gesture toward institutional greed that functions as scheduling convenience for the monster. The supporting cast includes minority performers whose presence goes unremarked. A South American tribe appears as an exotic origin point for the creature, then vanishes. A mentally ill homeless man is shot by police, a beat in the plot and nothing more.

The remaining markers find nothing to measure. There is no LGBTQ content, no environmental theme, no body positivity, no revision of the historical record, no sermonizing. The scientific talk exists to explain why the monster eats hypothalamuses, not to instruct the audience in how to live. Here is a film with no lectures to deliver and no lessons to impart. It wants only to frighten people in a dark room, and on that modest contract it delivers.