A gruesome and perverse vision of science

Rating: Null/10 (6 May 2000)

David Cronenberg is a filmmaker whose films you just simply love or hate. He has a peculiar, disturbing, raw and perverse vision of the humanity, and in great part of his motion pictures, explosive and controversial themes like rape, incest, murder and homosexuality are analyzed in a cold and honest way. The Fly's main character is Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum, giving his career's best performance), a brilliant scientist who works with insistence in the "Telepods" :two capsules that supposedly are capable of disintegrating a body and transport it to another capsule in which it is reintegrated. Seth meets an attractive and ambitious reporter (Geena Davis) in a party and the two fall in love. She starts to share with him the experiences, but something comes out wrong when Seth uses his own body for the experiment - his genetic cells are mixed up with the DNA of a fly. This is the beginning of a nightmare that will throw Seth in a mutation process. The mutation will turn him progressively into an implacable monster. Cronenberg made a film that doesn't follow the basic formulas of the gender. The Fly is not exactly a horror movie, but a mixture of drama, romance and, of course, a lot of violence, blood and gore. The Fly is so violent that makes Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 look like a Disney film.The magnificent special effects took home the Oscar in 1987, and even after 14 years, the scenes in which Goldblum progressively "melts down", shocks for its realism. The director doesn't spare the audience and, unlike The Blair Witch Project, that scared just suggesting, he maintains the cameras in focus, documenting exaggerating cruelty scenes. Jeff Goldblum never delivered such intense acting in all of his career after The Fly. Without a doubt, this film deserves to be a part of any movie lover's collection - buy the movie. Twentieth Century Fox did with The Fly the same thing they did for Alien (1979), they released with a lot of excellence a terrific DVD, bringing extras, back stages and an excellent image and sound.