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This is deceptively compelling. At first glance, the ape men, broken english, and doctrine that all animals converge on the perfect (evidently white) human form feels teleological with a distinct flavor of eugenics. But as the film progresses, it builds out a much more nuanced narrative. "Are we not men?" cry the islanders, taught this mantra by Moreau himself. But Moreau does not truly want them to see themselves as fully human. To him they are at their most compelling, and their most useful, as a sub-human who will do his bidding without ever being his equal.

Although Moreau's work isn't precisely secret, he is coy about it, and when he speaks to the mainland about the other inhabitants of his island he refers to them as "the natives". This gives away the allegory: Moreau is a colonizer and the beast-men his colonized subjects. Whatever he has given them has come with a terrible price: not just subservience but subhumanity. When Bela Lugosi's striking Speaker of the Law accuses Moreau of making them "not men but things", I hear it not as a tired admonishment to avoid meddling in the natural order, but as a claim that it is Moreau himself—despite his vaunted laws—who prevented them from becoming fully human.

It's telling that where H. G. Wells's novel is structured around the tendency of beast-men to revert to their bestial instinct, the film pushes this thread far into the background. The climax of the plot is no longer driven by instinctual violence, but by words: the Speaker of the Law confronts Moreau and declares his laws void because they are built on lies and hypocrisy. In their way, the beast-men are more rational than Moreau himself. The film ends by challenging the core dichotomy between "beast" and "man" at its root and suggesting (surprisingly deftly for a film made within Wells's lifetime) that the concept of "sub-humanity" is itself inhuman.

This film is doing something interesting in presenting Max as an almost unbearable human being—someone who marries total earnestness with total pretension, self-aware enough to put on airs but not quite enough to realize how obvious it is that he's putting on airs, who once heard the phrase "fake it 'til you make it" and decided to make that his entire personality—and then tries to inspire in the viewer an affection for him. He mellows out over the course of the film, but only moderately. He's still essentially manipulative and overbearing, and one gets the sense that the only reason Margaret is even able to cope with him is a tremendous stubbornness in her own right.

The film's real argument is that Max's sheer intensity, whatever his motivations, creates a more vibrant world around him. He's responsible for everything interesting we ever see at either school, he literally speaks Guggenheim back to life, and in particular he brings color into Herman's dull world. This film is an argument for vivacity no matter the cost, for action-in-itself as an antidote to emptiness.

There's even a kind of desperation in it, just under the surface, a terror of what might happen if even for a moment you stop moving. You could even read this as a tragedy of alienation, in which a man and a boy claw feverishly at some kind of real connection only to get subsumed under an endless tide of aesthetics and activities. Are Max's plays an expression of himself, or are they just another thrashing hand seeking something real but grabbing only empty air?

A triumph of anti-fascist filmmaking that never allows itself to become complacent or moralistic. Although the film is structured around the personal failings of Clerici, it's not a pillory. It's deeply interested in his own battle with himself, between the part of him that longs to be normal and the part which the Quadris catch glimpses of that aspires to be a whole person. It is the tragedy of a man who has choices and chooses wrong again and again.

Despite this tragic bent, it's also dryly humorous. The set design, particularly in the scenes set in fascist Italy, is quietly but deeply satirical: huge useless empty spaces, people shuffling around lugging gargantuan fascist statues, marble so pervasive it becomes a parody of elegance. Tacky prints mounted like fine art. A room drenched in walnuts. The film is clear: fascism is deadly but it's also ridiculous. For all its supposed grandeur, it was only ever a bully dressing like a Roman to make himself feel big.