The director had assets : a good cast with Richard Berry,Jean Yanne ,Xavier Delluc and even Anna Karina ,I would only pass over in silence the female lead ,whose main merit is to show her breast every fifteen minutes.There was an exotic place ,Guiana ,and the jungle;there was the launching site of Kourou.Plus a score which is sometimes nice .
Alain Maline made a mess of everything.Blame it on a desultory script which wanders everywhere :there are so many subjects that it never gets anywhere: two brothers (half-brothers,actually), a chick who can't choose between them,a mysterious father who was sentenced to life imprisonment in Cayenne penal colony (because he poisoned Noel's mother to marry Matthieu's), a Young child the hero would like to adopt ,a gang of sinister-looking guys with a very original way to torture people with a snake ,a brilliant scientist with a promising future ahead ,a carnival ,and of course gold, a treasure ,you name it...The actors ,left to their own devices,have unfortunately a tendency to overplay.
One example (you could mention ten others):Matthieu is severely injured but he's not going to lose any sleep over that!The next sequence shows him flying a plane.
