I have long felt that if you are going to do a remake, do it right. Make something really different that stands on its own. Maybe go for a movie that isn’t a beloved classic, and make sure it stands out on its own. Sure, there exceptions to the whole “don’t do a classic” thing since sometimes that even works out, like when John Carpenter remade The Thing. David Cronenberg did much the same with The Fly. The 1950s version is a standard 50s sci-fi, mildly creepy in places, but nothing too serious by modern standards. Then along comes Cronenberg and we get a full-on body horror personal tragedy.
I’ll have to see if Spielberg can improve on West Side Story, but in the meantime, I opted to check out The Fly, a movie 12 year old me would have been a little too nervous to check out but which multiple friends of mine at the time described as, like, some cool thing where a dude’s ear falls off. 2021 me isn’t quite so nervous.
Reporter Veronica “Ronnie” Quaife (Geena Davis) meets shy scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) at a party. The two hit it off, and Brundle takes Ronnie back to see his telepods, a pair of teleportation machines that can zap things instantaneously across space from one pod to the other. They work fine for inanimate objects, but attempts to send living organisms tend to end up with inside out baboons. Seth is a shy but endearing sort who soon wins over Ronnie’s heart, and then he cracks the teleportation problem. Impatient, Seth decides to zap himself between the pods, but he doesn’t know there’s a housefly inside the pod with him. That results in Brundle and the fly merging into one being, and Seth begins to slowly transform from a man into a insect-human hybrid creature.
However, the transformation from man to monster is a gradual one. Cronenberg spent enough time with Brundle before the transformation to show what kind of a man he was, and while it initially seemed like he was just physically stronger and more agile, his personality changes first, showing a greater degree of arrogance and an attitude where he seems uninclined to listen when Ronnie says “no”. Sure, she’s saying that to the idea of teleporting herself so she can be “better” like he is, but the potential sexual interpretation isn’t all that hard to imagine. Brundle becomes more controlling before his body gets particularly revolting, daring the audience to find the character sympathetic at times. He really is a monster on the inside before he becomes one on the outside, but at the same time, he also has scenes where he is a sympathetic figure horrified at his own transformations.
Much of that is a credit to Goldblum as a performer. Today, he’s got that reputation as a phenomenally weird guy, but back then he was still somewhat new on the scene, and his performance here hits the right notes. He’s creepy when he has to be, and he’s tragic when he has to be. Davis and the rest of the cast are fine, but their roles are a lot more rote. It’s really Goldblum’s movie, and between that and the still-awesome make-up effects, there’s a lot to love about this movie.
It helps that this is unconventional horror. The horror is less the amount of death. Honestly, there’s only really one death not counting one of a pair of baboons, and instead, the horror is what’s happening to one man, a rather timid, harmless fellow who’s soon vomiting digestive fluids onto his food in order to eat and climbing walls while not sure what he can do to fix the problem if it’s even possible. There’s a lot of body horror, but the real horror is psychological. That’s always been my sort of thing when it comes to horror, so it looks like Cronenberg did that rarest of the rare: he did a remake better than a well-known original.
Grade: A-
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