Movies - The Fly

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	Movies - The Fly

The Fly is a 1986 science fiction film produced by Brooksfilms and Twentieth Century Fox Television, directed by David Cronenberg, and starring Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis and John Getz. It is a high budget remake of 1958 film of the same name, but with a substantially different plot. The soundtrack was composed by Howard Shore. This movie was shot in Toronto, Ontario. The Fly was a box office success upon its release and was critically-acclaimed in the press.

Plot

As with many of Cronenberg's films, The Fly deals with themes of bodily disfigurement or metamorphosis and the darker aspects of human emotions and behavior. The film also deals with the dangers of the misuse of science to terrible consequences. An underlying aspect of the story is the doomed love affair between Goldblum and Davis and the rivalry between Goldblum and Getz that results from this.

Goldblum plays Seth Brundle, a brilliant, but eccentric scientist. He meets Veronica Quaife (Davis), a reporter at a convention. Brundle takes Veronica back to his place and shows her his invention: a set of devices that allow teleportation. She is highly impressed and agrees with Seth to act as a witness and document his work. Although the device can transport inanimate objects perfectly, it cannot do this with living things, turning them inside out. Seth demonstrates this with a baboon, killing it. Seth and Veronica begin a relationship, which inspires Seth. He realizes the machine is not perfectly recreating living objects but is rather "interpreting" them, and sets about adjusting his machine.

He succeeds in teleporting a baboon with no apparent harm. Flush with this success, and with his judgement impaired by alcohol and the worry that Veronica is rekindling her relationship with her boss and former lover Stathis Borans (Getz), he decides to teleport himself. Just as he's about to teleport, a fly gets into the pod with him. The computer, confused, splices together their DNA and Brundle gradually begins to transform into a hybrid (a "Brundlefly" as he calls it).

At first, Seth enjoys states of euphoria and heightened strength and endurance, especially in bed. As the metamorphosis progresses, he becomes violent and arrogant, and progressively less human in appearance, leaving sloughed-off human body parts in jars in his medicine cabinet. He also becomes incapable of eating solids and vomits digestive enzymes which dissolve food and even flesh. Eventually, he realizes that not only is his body mutating, his mind is becoming more insect-like, brutal and driven by primitive appetites.

When he learns that Veronica is trying to have an abortion to rid herself of their possibly mutated child, he abducts her and traps her in a telepod, trying to restore his own humanity by fusing with her and their unborn child. Stathis Borans goes to her rescue but is injured and almost killed by the almost fully-transformed "Brundlefly". Seth then undergoes his final transformation when his changed, more-insect-like body sheds the outer layer of decaying human flesh. However as the telepods are starting up, the wounded Borans manages to shoot the power cables connecting to Veronica's telepod so she escapes unharmed, and Brundlefly is gruesomely fused with chunks of metal from his own telepod door while trying to smash it open. As a final act of mercy, Veronica kills what used to be Seth Brundle.

The sequel is The Fly II
.

Critical Response

Upon its release, The Fly was praised for being more emotionally involving and genuinely poignant in comparison to Cronenberg's previous films, as well as having a certain simplicity and stylishness which set it apart from other, more gratuitous movies. Jeff Goldblum's tour-de-force performance was applauded as well, and many believe it to be his finest performance to this day.

The film was also widely taken to be about AIDS, although Cronenberg denies this and states that he believed the film to be about aging. He states that "we've all got the disease, the disease of being finite." This, when coupled with the tragic love-story of the plot (harking back to films such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame) makes The Fly an all-too human film, albeit filled with Cronenberg's familiar obsessions and gruesome attention to detail. The spectacular "Brundlefly" make-up was given a 1986 Academy Award.

Trivia

In the special edition DVD version of the film, there are a variety of deleted scenes. Of particular note is one scene, in which Seth Brundle, already quite far along on his way to Brundlefly, attempts to splice a cat and his remaining baboon together. The resulting creature, however, comes out terribly deformed and attacks Brundle, leading to him beating the creature to death with a crow bar. The scene goes on to show a disturbed Brundle exiting to his roof, only to accidentally slip off, have a fly-like mandible emerge from his side and then rip said mandible off. The script additionally called for Brundle to encounter a homeless woman outside, who he would digest via vomiting and then consume, but this segment was not filmed because of budget limitations.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for The Fly (1986 film) ]

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