Rating: 
Summary: Much To Take In.
Review: I avoided this movie when it first came out, and I avoided it for about 10 years afterward, because I heard that it was such a travesty. Recently, I received the DVD as a Christmas gift. Out of respect to the person who gave it to me, I decided to watch it at least once. I was very pleasantly surprised... and physically and emotionally exhausted by the movie's end. True, Oliver Stone's version of the Doors' legend isn't dead-on accurate, but I think the realism and accuracy were only sacrificed in order to make a greater visceral and artistic impact, which I believe is something Jim Morrison might have understood. The whole point of this movie is to revel in its excesses, and on that point, the movie scores everytime. And remember that this is the story as filtered through Stone's own perception, not a docudrama. Kudos to Val Kilmer, whose portrayal of Jim Morrison was just as uncanny as I'd heard. (Where's his Oscar?) I really dug this movie, even as a Doors fan who knows the true history as heard from the band. And if you can experience it as the Bacchanalian epic it's meant to be, and just take in all the sights and sounds, then you'll really dig it, too.
Rating:
Summary: Good movie!
Review: I remember being twelve years old back in 1991 when the movie was beginning to first open out at the theaters. Back then I remember seeing the preview on T.V. and I was suddenly interested. And I didn't even know a thing about The Doors or who they were. When the movie first came on cable and when I finally had a chance to see it, I was hooked on the movie that every time it came on T.V., I would watch it. It also made me wanted to learn more about the rock group, well Jim Morrison especially. My brother just gave me the Special Edition DVD for Christmas because he knows how much I love the movie. After reading the other reviews I didn't know the movie was not true. But I do remember watching "The Road of Excess" documentary on the second disc and I remember the people who knew Jim Morrison saying something like the way he was portrayed in the movie, he was not really like that in real life. But so what. True or not true, The Doors is still one of my favorite movies of all time, and I can never get tired of it.
Rating: 
Summary: Floaters of Romance
Review: I've listened to the music of the Doors for many years now. So when I first heard about this movie back in 1991, I was excited! How could the creator of "Platoon" do wrong? TWO AND HALF HOURS LATER: I wished I'd gone for a drive instead, maybe even buffalo hunting too. Something, anything. Oliver Stone's "The Doors" TRIED to come across as a trippy, mind-blowing, spiritual, somewhat erotic, tragic & even a strangely sentimental movie. For me, it was none of these things. I remember reading a criticism stating this movie should have been called "Jim Morrison". I guess. It should have been called "Shakey" - Val Kilmer stumbled around like he was always drunk or had a nervous disorder. And for all the cinematic tricks, over-cooked images, uneven acting & poor writing that made-up this monstrosity - I was floored by the pointless-ness of it all. Jim Morrison was no God, not by a long shot. Charismatic, yes. He had a beautiful voice; coupled with a rebel & eclectic mind to give that voice some real burn. Throw in three top-notch musicians to provide the perfect raft to keep the little party afloat - we get a band for the ages. So why a movie that simply rehashes the junk we've all heard before? Nothing really new about the Doors is learned, no revelations. Who was this guy? If this movie was designed as some kind of seance, to re-connect a paying audience with James Douglas Morrison, then someone should have turn the lights back on after ten minutes. There's obviously no way to discern much of anything regarding the Doors, regarding Jim Morrison, thirty something years after the fact & I'm unsure what the point of this particular film was? The tragedy of the artist. The exploration of a generation through the life of one of its "representatives". The effects of drugs and self-abusive behavior on the body and mind. The deterioration of the spirit. Triumph of the will? Who knows. Fortunately, the music is still here, still fresh & that's all I need.
Rating:
Summary: Completely Mind Blowing Experience
Review: Although Kilmers fantastic portrayal of singer, Jim Morrison, was outstanding, it wasn't true. Jim was not always a drunken, stoned idiot all the time. He was a smart, intelligent poet. But beside the fact, the movie was excellent, one of my favorite. This Special Edition comes with a second DVD that has interviews, documentaries, and more. It is really excellent. If you love The Doors music, then see this. This is stunning.
Rating: 
Summary: It seemed like a good idea at the time
Review: Oliver Stone was apparently planning a cinematic collaboration with Jim Morrison, star of the newly-defunct rock group The Doors, at the time of the singer's death. By 27, Morrison had silently croaked in a Paris bathtub of apparent heart failure brought on by a supernatural consumption of alcohol and drugs. Though he may not perceive it, the truly great director Stone perhaps dodged one Morrison bullet in order to be struck down by a second: the lure of doing a film about him. An early scene in "The Doors" shows what Stone might have had to contend with. The late adolescent Morrison unveils his film school project, which his professor and classmates denounce as openly pretentious and worthless. Morrison's commentary, when called upon to provide his own explication: "I quit." With that, he gets up and weaves his way out of college for good. One has to admire that degree of intolerance and ballsy preciousness in an Angry Young Man, and Stone certainly does. Stone seeks to capture the movement from artiste to artist, a bridge apparently crossed by a single peyote experience in "the desert". There is no denying Morrison's status as an occasionally great poet. As he finds his voice, moving from a surfer to neo-stoner vernacular, Morrison's stream-of-consciousness becomes irreducibly meaningful and exotically beautiful. Morrison was nearly as much about hair as he was about poetry, as he himself appeared to recognize, with his fixation on the iconography of Alexander the Great. A row of cowlicks in lieu of a fringe, dipping with the timeless cool which classicists refer to as "anastole", was Morrison's shared heritage with Alexander. Oddly for a director who makes quite breathtaking use of iconography in "Nixon" and "Any Given Sunday", Stone reflects almost none of Morrison's famous interest in classical mythology, and gives us a single, context-free flash of a bust of the late, great Hellenistic emperor. A few languid references to Morrison's drunk and priapic status as a kind of Dionysus are left to take up the slack. One scene of captivating semiosis shows Morrison meeting Andy Warhol, who is nearly unhinged by Morrison's glamour. Warhol offers the singer a broken telephone he can use "to talk to God". Warhol himself would use it, he explains, if only he could think of something to say. With the curious suavity of the hopelessly stoned, Morrison reaches over and lifts Warhol's sunglasses right off his face, a counter-revolutionary act as utterly shocking as if he had snatched a crucifix from the pope and crushed it underfoot. Andy appears truly wowed. Val Kilmer wears Morrison's hair like a bad toupee, only gradually fleshing his way into it. The film (likely inadvertently) reveals how much of Morrison's mystique depended on his early physical beauty. Jim Morrison at 20 and 21 was already a saturnine beauty, fully-developed, nearly at his peak. Though Kilmer reproduces Morrison's lanky, effete walk, he is a pale substitute for the visual perfection that was briefly a bloat-free singer. ...Urinating against barstools, exposing himself to a Florida concert audience, he staggered drunkenly, sloppily across the stage. One can nearly smell the fat, bearded, and dirty Morrison off the screen. He opens his mouth and a collective groan rises from the band and its hangers-on. In short order, the audience will chime in. The music stops. Drumsticks clatter to the ground. People stamp angrily off the stage, leaning together in mutinous discourse. Why, it's the town drunk, on top of his proscenium soapbox, here to declaim with a microphone the latest insult to his dignity. Not allowed to have unconcealed sexual relations in a public building: what's this? He rants pointlessly about the police, and denounces his audience as "slaves". The stream of women who emerge from the crowd to spin daffily, entirely nude, across his stage, only to be yanked away by angry, disgusted police, shows up the emptiness of The Doors's message. The women protest nothing, communicate nothing, and offer nothing of interest, not even to Morrison himself, who scarcely seems to notice. Rather, a Doors concert was a cross between a sordid keg party and a clapped-out orgy. The music itself was quickly of no apparent interest to anyone other than the three woebegone, backup members of The Doors. The one remotely "political" stance Morrison is shown making comes with his temper tantrum at seeing that the band had licensed the use of "Light my Fire" as an advertising jingle. The reality its composition by the guitarist matters nothing to Morrison, nor does the fact of his constant delinquency from decision-making meetings. In lieu of McLuhan-esque discussion, he hurls a small, cheap television across a recording studio. Where is Vietnam, Dr. King, President Nixon? Where are the Kennedys, the riots and burning of cities? Stone puts together a quick, blurry montage of images which manage to seem somehow exploitative and indifferent at once, less properly iconic than lazily stereotypical. Stone's Morrison demonstrates not a flicker of interest in the wider world. He takes no newspaper, watches no telecast, expresses no retrievable political opinion on any issue other than his right to swill and have sex wherever he wants. Though the younger Morrison is seen posturing shirtless, improbably slouching around clutching a book, his "mature" incarnation of, say, age 24, gives every appearance of swearing off literature and taxing mental activity in order to devote himself properly to drink and drugs. Morrison was openly suicidal, talked deathlessly about expiring, and traipsed across a succession of rooftops and ledges, most notably at the Chateau Marmont in LA, in a scene shot with stomach-churning cinematographic brilliance. Despite knowing in advance what Morrison's eventual fate will be, Stone has Morrison and his sadly silly girlfriend, who earlier states her profession as "ornament", appear to face momentary death-by-splatter. Indeed, if there is a single great riddle in the history of The Doors, it is how the lurching, sprawling Morrison managed to escape that particular ledge intact. Morrison's legacy seems unduly slight. It is hard not to remark upon the absence of any song with the harrowingly pointed message of "Sympathy for the Devil". Nor does Morrison ever produce the splenic, witty rants of John Lennon. Who knew that sex, drugs 'n rock-n-roll could be so vacuous? "The Doors" has the paradoxical effect of utterly demystifying the very subject it hopes to mythologize. Observing a gaggle of druggies talking is like listening to a symphony of single-handed clapping. How did it happen that Stone accidentally cut down the very man he sought to render ten-feet tall? Intimations of the later, truly great auteur Oliver Stone appear here and there in "The Doors". A Morrison family drive across the West's deserts passes a car wreck which has left a Native American family spilled in bleeding agony along the highway shoulder. A sepia-tinted woman screams, loudly, then mutely, as the Morrison car rolls on: haunting for the tiny child Jimmy Morrison. Haunting for us is Morrison's lifelong hallucination of the figure of a Native shaman who stares with the flat-eyed foreboding of Death.
Rating: 
Summary: Some tinkering with the facts, but worth watching...
Review: In his song, "Morrison," David Crosby sings (and I'm paraphrasing here, folks), "I've seen that movie (referring to The Doors), and it wasn't like that." Crosby, who undoubtedly crossed paths numerous times with Jim Morrison and company may have his own insight into the Doors. But even before his death, Morrison took on the legacy of the debauched, misunderstood poet, so it's inevitable that any film about him is going to reflect what collective wisdom considers the legacy of Jim Morrison. Oliver Stone, no stranger to controversy, does an admirable job here capturing the period, and Kilmer deserved an best actor Oscar for his uncanny ability to disappear as an actor and make us believe we are watching Morrison. Some of the movie is silly, and Meg Ryan was really miscast for the part of Pamela Morrison. The surrealistic beginning of the movie was outright silly, with a pre-teen Morrison supposedly watching a Native American shaman unseen by others at the scene of a car wreck. Rock musicians in the late '60s and early '70s didn't have the clout that musicians do today and record companies ground them down by forcing album after album and tour after tour. That sheer exhaustion led many to reliance on drugs, and with that the death of so many talents: Morrison, Hendrix, Joplin, Keith Moon, and so on. This movie would have been better had it focused as an "insiders'" view of the Doors and conveyed the day to day, unrelenting stress that the musicians were under. There's no explanation why Morrison became a drunkard -- but it would have been more understandable if we'd been presented with a view of his life in a fishbowl, a fate the other three Doors weren't subjected to with the vehemence that Morrison was. For many, Morrison WAS the Doors, and the band's failure to produce anything of note after his death in Paris in '71 is gives credence to that. Morrison was a talented, emotional, sensitive soul -- and the music industry ate him alive. Stone does a good job of capturing the times and the essence of Morrison, but this movie doesn't deserve five stars because leaving out a critical portion of the "big picture" doesn't quite tell the full story. So, maybe David Crosby is right...
Rating:
Summary: Mixed Bag
Review: As a longtime Doors fan, the first time I saw this film I was somewhat disappointed in terms of the casting of the Doors members. After all, Val Kilmer's character is nothing like the genuis, poet and intellectual Jim Morrison was, which can basically be attributed to the directing. I am sure that Kilmer is a fine actor. Ray Manzarek, the keyboards virtuoso, has expressed such a view of Oliver Stone's film. Robby Krieger, whose earth-shattering composing and guitar playing will be remembered for centuries, was neither made into a strong character. It disturbed me to see Morrison portrayed as something of a drunk sex-addict. His drinking problem was overdone and had nothing to do with his genius at writing poetry or belting out incredible tunes that contributed so much to culture not just of the sixties but will last for centuries like the best of classic rock will. I did like the opening highway scene of the accident, with Morrison as a child gleaning his inspiration and sensibility for the Native American spirit. There were other really nice touches, lovely scenes set to Morrison's poetry. The second time I was it, ten years later, I appreciated the film much more. I especially liked the scene of Morrision onstage with the Doors going into a trance, dancing with the Indians. I think that this film is a mixed bag. I feel truly fortunate that I had become familiar with the music of the Doors well before I saw Oliver Stone's film. It is a somewhat glamorized and fictionalized version of what The Doors really were: a great rock group that changed society in a tumultuous historical time.
Rating:
Summary: Terrific! Oliver Stone outdoes himself and V.Kilmer is great
Review: Amazing movie... fun to watch and a total trip. (Seriously, this movie gives me a contact-high every time I watch it!) Val Kilmer is really great and of course the music is awesome. Oliver Stone is quite the visual weaver. This is a great film for anyone interested in the Doors - and if you're not? This film will GET you into them.
Rating:
Summary: Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding...
Review: Perhaps the most artistic account of a band's history, "The Doors," a film by Oliver Stone, delivers a rock solid movie experience. Oliver Stone has a way of capturing historic detail in a way that no other director has done before. It is obvious that the filmmakers have read about all the incidents and stories of how the band formed, how it succeeded, how it ended, and what happened afterwards. Detail like the scenes that show how "Light My Fire" was created give you a new insight as to how this group made it. The tripping scenes add alot to the movie, as the viewer gets to see what it was like to be Jim Morrison, or anybody in that era of drugs and sex. Being relatively young compared to the people in this movie, I feel that I've learned alot by watching this movie, and anybody who thinks that the sixties were a time of love and peace and relaxing should see this movie and then think about that some more.
Rating:
Summary: "Out here in the perimeter, there are no stars..."
Review: this movie made a Doors fan of me & the new edition has lots of extras & 5.1 sound. I think Oliver Stone did a wonderful job for the most part with this movie; looks so realistic which I think was one of the great things about this & JFK. Val Kilmer gives the performance of his career & I think the whole cast was great.
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