Overall Rating
  Awesome: 63.64%
Worth A Look: 20.45%
Average: 4.55%
Pretty Bad: 4.55%
Total Crap: 6.82%
2 reviews, 76 user ratings
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| Fly, The (1986) |
by Jay Seaver
"Friends don't let friends drink and conduct teleportation experiments."
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One of my first thoughts after watching David Cronenberg's version of "The Fly" was that it is a horror movie for adults. Not just because the stars can't exactly pass for teenagers or college kids or because the science in its science-fiction is particularly good - it isn't. The thing that elevates it above many other horror films is how introspective it is.If The Fly were being remade today (and, for all I know, there probably is something being worked on), there would be more characters, and the human fly of the title would be killing them off, sucking their blood after he did so. That's not where Cronenberg is interested in going, though - he's more interested in examining the effect Seth Brundle's metamorphosis has on the man himself rather than painting targets on people's backs.
Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is a physicist who has been working in relative solitude on teleportation for years, and has managed to transport inanimate objects, but living things get turned inside out by the process. He brags about it to Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis), a pretty science journalist as a means to get her back to his warehouse which serves as both lab and living space. She's fascinated, both by the science and the scientist, but when her editor and former lover (John Getz) tries to publish before she is ready and insert himself back into her life, a drunken Brundle uses himself as a test subject, and though it appears he's fixed the inversion problem, a fly that accidentally entered his teleportation pod has been fused with him at a genetic level, and as time goes on, Brundle begins to exhibit more and more insect-like traits.
Since the movie is only focusing on two or three characters, it's important that we don't get sick of them. None of the characters in The Fly are terribly complex, but they play to the performers' strengths and keep us interested. Seth Brundle is the quintessential Jeff Goldblum character - smart, but more than a bit peculiar; he's the kind of guy who'll get engrossed by a problem and not recognize that it's well past time to be concerned for his own well-being or the world around him. His jealousy of Veronica plays as coming from the same personality traits that make him a successful scientist: He sees all questions as problems to investigate and solve, which is a sure route to madness in a relationship. His positing that he is no longer Seth Brundle, but some hybrid offspring he calls "Brundlefly" means that his curiosity rather than problem-solving instincts are engaged even as the other characters react in horror at what is happening to him.
Geena Davis and John Getz aren't quite that complicated, but they do their jobs very well: Davis's Veronica is sane and beautiful enough to serve as sharp contrast to Brundle's eccentricities, but she's also got the sort of interest in the unusual to be drawn to Brundle and hold off taking action until things get really strange. Getz plays Brundle's opposite, a guy who is basically a jerk and more interested in the practical than the amazing.
The story is good and the performances are pretty decent, and that gives the film an unsettling atmosphere. That might be good enough, but Cronenberg and his special effects team (notably Brundlefly designer Chris Walas) take that air of uncertainty and make it pay off with some top-quality gore. Bones get exposed when Brundle doesn't know his own strength, and its a tough call as to whether his shedding of human characteristics or the addition of insectoid ones are more gleefully disgusting. Even some of the effects which don't stand up as well at least succeed in being unsettling for a moment or two before the urge to laugh kicks in.
The script by Cronenberg and Charles Edward Pogue is smart enough to not be about any one specific thing, as science fiction stories are often wont to be. There's bits about scientific hubris, abortion, stunted emotional development; Brundle's transformation can be seen as disease, aging, or the delusion that he can handle things life throws at us. Cronenberg, Goldblum, and Davis do a pretty fantastic job in making sure that we can see bits of ourselves in Seth and Veronica, but the shift to a nail-biting finale doesn't seem artificial.Cronenberg's "The Fly" is one of the great horror movies, not just because it can be accurately described as "more" and smarter than most horror flicks, but because it can do all that and still be eminently watchable when the goal is quality mutilation and gore.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=936&reviewer=371
originally posted: 02/15/08 13:32:18
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Horror Remakes: For more in the Horror Remakes series, click here.
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USA
15-Aug-1986 (R)
DVD: 04-Oct-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
02-Feb-1987
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