Paul Verhoeven
L'Uomo Senza Ombra

The fundamental question is: what would you do if you were invisible?

Well, in my opinion, if you think about it for a day, so many ideas come to mind that you can't even remember the first one you thought of.

This "Hollow Man" by the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven ("Robocop," "Total Recall," "Starship Troopers," "Basic Instinct," and "Black Book," among others) attempted to answer it in the year of grace 2000. Verhoeven is a rather inconsistent director but technically indisputable. Once the cast was chosen (the talented Kevin Bacon to play the lead Sebastian Caine and Elizabeth Shue - "The Saint," "Back to the Future," "Deconstructing Harry," and "Dreamer"), the big problem was: how to make the invisible visible? Bacon, when he read the script and discovered that he would be visible for a scant 20% of the film, rubbed his hands together and thought: "Great, I'll earn a ton of money not working too much!" (his words). Nothing, of course, could have been more wrong.

Thus, cutting-edge techniques (at the time) were used; poor Kevin was painted (depending on the situation) black, blue, or green, and the shots were taken multiple times to capture first the scene with the actors, then without (with the camera - obviously - programmed for this purpose), to then erase the areas where there should be "voids" due to invisibility using a technique called "Chroma Key" and overlay the two shots. Furthermore, with Bacon, in scenes where he became invisible, it happened progressively, so it was necessary to exactly reproduce a stratified human body (matching the actor's body dimensions), overloading computers with information; in short, a production then unprecedented. The question now is: did Verhoeven make good use of such a display of technology?

No, unfortunately, at least not fully; the plot flows plain (that Kevin/Sebastian would go insane after some time being invisible was understood by my 8-year-old cousin after 10 minutes of the film) and Verhoeven, instead of using special effects to support his sometimes even prophetic brilliant insights (as he did greatly in "Starship Troopers" and especially in "Robocop"), makes a merely systematic and cold use of technology.

Nonetheless, the film remains visually pleasing for some truly frightening special effects (especially considering it's a movie 7 years old) and for that touch of class that, nevertheless, the good Paul managed to bring out.

One last question; but what happened to Kevin Bacon?