It was co-written and directed by Terry Gilliam and stars Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro as Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo, respectively.

The film details the duo's journey through Las Vegas as their initial journalistic intentions devolve into an exploration of the city under the influence of psychoactive substances.

They pick up a young hitchhiker and explain their mission: Duke has been assigned by a magazine to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race in Las Vegas.

Trying to reach Vegas before the hitchhiker can go to the police, Gonzo gives Duke part of a sheet of "Sunshine Acid" (ultra-purified LSD), then informs him that there is little chance of making it before the drug kicks in.

By the time they reach the strip, Duke is in the full throes of his trip and barely makes it through the hotel check-in, hallucinating that the clerk is a moray eel and that his fellow bar patrons are draconians lizards.

When Duke returns he finds that Gonzo, high on LSD, has trashed the room, and is in the bathtub clothed, attempting to pull the tape player in with him as he wants to hear the song better.

Duke instead heads to a payphone and calls Gonzo, learning that he has a suite in his name at the Flamingo Las Vegas so he can cover a district attorney's convention on narcotics.

Gonzo accompanies Duke to the convention, and the pair discreetly snort cocaine as the guest speaker delivers a comically out-of-touch speech about "marijuana addicts" before showing a brief film.

As he listens, he has brief memories of the general mayhem that has taken place, including Gonzo threatening a waitress at a diner,[3] himself convincing a distraught cleaning woman that they are police officers investigating a drug ring, and attempting to buy an orangutan.

Duke drops Gonzo off at the airport, driving right up to the airplane, before returning to the hotel one last time to finish his article.

[6] Head of Production and the film's producer Stephen Nemeth originally wanted Lee Tamahori to direct, but he wasn't available until after the January 1997 start date.

[6] During the initial development to get the film made, Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando were originally considered for the roles of Duke and Gonzo but they both grew too old.

[6] Gilliam said in an interview that his films are actor-led, and the performance of the two characters in Fear and Loathing is hyper realistic but truthful: "I am interested in real people in bizarre, twisted environments that force them to act... to react against.

Del Toro gained more than 45 pounds (18 kg) in nine weeks before filming began, eating 16 donuts a day,[12] and extensively researched Acosta's life.

"[17] One of the most important scenes from the book that Gilliam wanted to put in the film was the confrontation between Duke and Dr. Gonzo and the waitress of the North Star Coffee Lounge.

Keeping it set in the 70's, using the backdrop of the Vietnam War and a perceived loss of the American dream, offers reasoning to the characters' actions.

"[22] David Kanter, agent for Cox and Davies, argued, "About 60 percent of the decisions they made on what stays in from the book are in the film – as well as their attitude of wide-eyed anarchy.

When this changed in early May 1998 after the WGA revised its decision and gave credit to Gilliam and Grisoni first and Cox and Davies second, the short was not needed.

"[26] Nicola Pecorini was hired based on an audition reel he sent Gilliam that made fun of the fact that he had only one eye (he lost the other to retinal cancer).

"[27] For the desert scenes, Pecorini wanted a specific, undefined quality without a real horizon to convey the notion that the landscape never ended and to emphasize "a certain kind of unreality outside the characters' car, because everything that matters to them is within the Red Shark.

[26] The production used motion-control techniques to make it look like they had a whole room of them and made multiple passes with the cameras outfitting the lizards with different costumes each time.

Most of the music is present in the soundtrack with a few exceptions: the Lennon Sisters' version of "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music which plays at the beginning of the picture, Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love" which is heard during a flashback, Beck, Bogert & Appice's "Lady", Tom Jones' "It's Not Unusual", Frank Sinatra's "You're Getting to Be a Habit with Me", Combustible Edison's "Spy vs Spy", the Out-Islanders' "Moon Mist" from Polynesian Fantasy, Robert Goulet's "My Love, Forgive Me", and a recording of "Ball and Chain" by Janis Joplin.

Gilliam could not pay $300,000 (half of the soundtrack budget) for the rights to "Sympathy for the Devil" by the Rolling Stones, which plays a prominent role in the book.

'"[15] The filmmaker said that it was important to him that Thompson like the film and recalls the writer's reaction at a screening, "Hunter watched it for the first time at the premiere and he was making all this fucking noise!

[34] Gilliam chalks this up to the fact that many of the studio executives read Thompson's book in their youth and understood it could not be made into a conventional Hollywood film.

Vintage Press reported an initial reprint of 100,000 copies to tie in with the film's release, but demand was higher than expected and forced the novel to go back to print a further five times.

In The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote, "Even the most precise cinematic realizations of Mr. Thompson's images don't begin to match the surreal ferocity of the author's language.

"[42] In The Guardian, Gaby Wood wrote: "After a while, though, the ups and downs don't come frequently enough even for the audience, and there's an element of the tedium usually found in someone else's druggy experiences.

"[45] Michael O'Sullivan gave the film a positive review in The Washington Post, writing "What elevates the tale from being a mere drug chronicle is the same thing that lifted the book into the realm of literature.

[47] Andrew Johnston, writing in Time Out New York, observed: "Fear is really a Rorschach test of a movie – some people will see a godawful mess, rendered inaccessible by the stumbling handheld camera and Depp's nearly incomprehensible narration.