A good remake

Rating: 8/10 (10 August 2001)

From George Lagelaan's short story, David Cronenberg jettisonned all the characters,except the hero who is younger and a bachelor.Gone is the family,gone is the sheet on the monster's head,we had in the faithful Neumann version(1956).He only kept the "incident":the fly in the machine.Thanks to Jeff Goldblum's strange face,his remake is convincing ,focusing on the psychological aspect.The mutation is impressive,but does not sacrifice the emotion to special effects. This might possibly be an AIDS metaphor:the hero feels guilt (and however,he 's done nothing wrong to deserve such a fate;absolutely nobody deserves AIDS),his girlfriend is helpless ,their love affair is now irremediably doomed.Here the two versions meet again for the final. Both versions had sequels:the first one had two which I have not seen,the Cronenberg had one:so-so.