(Continued)

6. 'Lord of the Flies'

Call of the Wild
During wartime, a plane full of evacuated British boys goes down on a tropical island.

Gods and Guides
Survivors range from little kids to adolescents, and their first "chief" is rational, organized Ralph, who sets up rules and assigns responsibilities: "We're not savages. We're English." But very soon, blooded by the knifing of a pig, the tribe slips further and further into savagery. Now painted, howling primitives, they imagine that a dead pilot, helmeted and jerked about by the cords of his parachute, is a malevolent "god," demanding sacrifices.

Transformation
A towheaded little angel stares at the rotting head of a pig, jammed on a stick, until his eyes go dark, infected by some ugly, bestial knowledge. "Flies" exposes the fragility of civilization, how quickly, in the right circumstances, playing at cowboys and Indians can become bloody reality.

7. 'The Edge'

Call of the Wild
Two men, a millionaire and the fashion photographer who' s sleeping with his boss'beautiful wife and plotting his murder (Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin), fly into a remote region of Canada for a photo shoot. When the plane crashes, Hopkins, who's read "Lost in the Woods," elects himself "chief" of the terrified survivors.

Gods and Guides
On a totem pole, a bird-spirit with wings outstretched looms protectively over the millionaire at first arrival, signaling the first leg of his quest. Then, as a joke, his wife's lover dons a bear robe to scare Hopkins to death. The real ursine monster that viciously assaults the men in the forest — "with the ruthless and irresistible deliberation of a locomotive" — represents the wild's violent revulsion against human presence, but it's also the beast the bookworm must confront in order to become his own man.

Transformation
Ironically, it's the thinking man who almost immediately proves that wilderness is his element, the petri dish in which he grows ever larger in knowledge and power. "How did your friends die?" inquires a reporter after rescue comes. "Saving my life," replies — with purest irony -- the last man standing.

8. 'Dead Man'

Call of the Wild
A Buster Keaton lookalike (Johnny Depp) named William Blake goes west, to work as an accountant in the town of Machine. It's clear from the get-go that this black-and-white stream of surreal — and spectacularly beautiful — vignettes, separated by fade-outs and punctuated by Neil Young's haunting guitar riffs, is not your usual Western.

Gods and Guides
After turning killer and taking a (fatal?) bullet himself, Blake travels deeper into spiritual and geographical wilderness, guided by "Nobody" (Gary Farmer), a genial outcast Indian who loves poet William Blake's verses. Their violent journey turns into a parable about America's fall from innocence as the nation pursues its Manifest Destiny.

Transformation
Traveling upriver, the strange duo presses back in time, away from killing civilization to an unspoiled Indian village. Bullet-riddled, his face painted with ash and the blood of a gun-shot fawn, our deadpan hero now sheds his civilized duds for native gear and lies down in a canoe to "return to where all spirits came from" — finally passing from life into death, from hell to a kind of natural heaven.

9. 'Dances With Wolves'

Call of the Wild
Released from the nightmare of Civil War, John Dunbar (Kevin Costner) is reassigned to the "furthermost outpost of the realm" — a frontier fort consisting of dilapidated shacks, a pond polluted by slaughtered deer, and caves where degenerate soldiers had denned up. This violation of nature — "an injury slow to heal" — presages the killing fields whites will make of the Great Plains, as they destroy Sioux and buffalo.

Gods and Guides
Dunbar's totem animals are his buckskin horse (stolen twice, the steed unerringly heads home) and a wolf that mysteriously chooses to keep company with the lonely soldier. Then come the godlike Sioux to share their natural wisdom. In contrast to the hellholes of white civilization, the homeland of the noble savages looks like an ecological Eden.

Transformation
In this earnest fantasy, Dunbar evolves into Dances With Wolves, beloved member of a community of Sioux saints: "I knew for the first time who I really was." Simultaneously damning white America and deifying the Sioux, "Dances With Wolves" sends its Adam and Eve (both white) deeper into wilderness, to save them from coming extinction and racial guilt.

10. 'The Emerald Forest'

Call of the Wild
While Dad's busy building a dam in the Amazon rainforest, his 7-year-old son is mysteriously spirited away into the jungle. After a decade, the still-grieving father (Powers Boothe) boats upriver, deep into the hinterland, where Tommy lives with the Invisible People in a paradise of natural beauty and innocence.

Gods and Guides
A boy verging on manhood, Tommy (Charley Boorman) goes nearly naked, covered in emerald dye and green leaves, so that he's just another aspect of verdant nature. (To his tribe, the dam-builders'awful rape of the rainforest looks like "skinning" the earth.) While his aboriginal father mentors Tommy in both spiritual and practical skills, his white dad's nearly the death of him.

Transformation
As Tommy's "dream made flesh," "dadee" is treated with great respect by the Indians, who help him unite with his animal spirit, the jaguar. In return, the engineer who leaves his son to Eden becomes the tribe's ally as civilization threatens the Center of the World. "The Emerald Forest" celebrates a utopian vision: a lost world populated by beautiful children, capable of world-altering magic.

Previous

Sound off: Comment on this story

Kathleen Murphy reviews films for Seattle's Queen Anne News and writes essays on film for Steadycam magazine. A frequent speaker on film, Murphy has contributed numerous essays to magazines (Film Comment, the Village Voice, Film West, Newsweek-Japan), books ("Best American Movie Writing of 1998," "Women and Cinema," "The Myth of the West") and Web sites (Amazon.com, Cinemania.com, Reel.com). Once upon a time, in another life, she wrote speeches for Bill Clinton, Jack Lemmon, Harrison Ford, Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, Art Garfunkel and Diana Ross.