both chilling and strangely intimate, amazing make-up effects, but the depth of a very good play

Rating: 10/10 (16 June 2007)

Here is something of an unlikely, yet very likely, pairing: David Cronenberg and a big studio budget sci-fi remake. His take on the Fly, which was originally a film featuring a man with his body human and his head a fly, is stark as hell, with one of the bleakest endings in any movie of the 80s. Cronenberg is also working at one of his driving thematic forces as a filmmaker, though not as something that feels forced, per-say, which is the two sides to things, to people, to relationships, and to what science can provide in new breakthroughs. We're given the character of Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), who is a shy but massively accomplished scientist who's come upon the breakthrough of a lifetime- teleportation of matter from one spot to another. But a moment of relapse in his emotional state, of vulnerability to his feelings for a woman he gets close to (Geena Davis's Veronica), send him to go for the experiment himself, not noticing the little creature that's going along for the ride with him. It's a gradual change, but one that is not in the physical sense; we're not getting a man with a body of a man and the head of a fly, but a man who we're seeing in a slightly "altered" Kafka perspective. Instead of the man waking up to discover he's already been transformed, we're with him as he goes through a grotesque change, all the more-so because unlike in Kafka's tale he's very smart and can speak his emotions throughout the story, but at the same time it's the tragic unraveling of humanity.
For Cronenberg, this makes up the crazy dilemma of Brundle, who is truly half human and half insect, and it provides for him little moments of the macabre comedy he's famous for (watch as he exercises, or tears a guy's wrist off when in an hand match), while keeping strong to the darker implications of a story this implicit. It's a tale that starts out in romance as much as in science, with two characters we immediately care about because they're not simple cardboard genre movie cut-outs. They have their consciences, but for Brundle it gets turned up-side down by a force that is essentially instinctual. For an actor like Goldlum, it's not exactly a walk in the park to go from straight-laced (if eccentric) scientist to a half irritable and half deformed bugman. He's daring to go for the physicality straight-on, but to not make it terribly over the top, and it's a fine line to walk that isn't crossed. This is important considering for the last section he is, of course, totally disguised by lots of wretched (but excellently executed) make-up FX. There's not much to be bugged about, no pun intended, by the director or actors in how they approach tricky material.
Actually, what makes the Fly hold up isn't just its horror show aspect. Like John Carpenter's the Thing, we're given an atmosphere of true terror, but less for the simple facet of "ooh, there's something around the bend about to get us", but about human beings not being able to have trust in one another. Yet Cronenberg is even more operatic than that with his horror: the final scenes are very graphic (make sure you don't have a fly buzzing around the room!), but in still keeping the events on the horror for the characters. The ideas, as with many of the greatest horror films, are paramount, giving rise to everything else that is fun, and quite sad, in dealing with the unimaginable.