Released: August 15th, 1986
Starring: Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, John Getz
Writer/Director: Charles Edward Pogue and David Cronenberg/ David Cronenberg
[Review may contain spoilers. Please watch movie before reading, unless you don't care. Most of these films have already been released for a while, so they should be readily available.]
***
Jeff Goldblum is really a national treasure, and along with Nick Cage, they are two actors that I will watch the movie just because they're in it. You will always be entertained no matter how awful the movie is written. But lucky for their careers, they've also been in some good films. "The Fly" is one of those film.
Probably one of the more underrated sci-fi films ever made. The film follows scientist Seth Brundle, who has create a way to teleport inanimate objects, but has yet figured out a way to do it with organic things. After his first experiment fails -- a chimp is turned inside-out -- he decides to do the valiant (stupid) thing and go in the pod himself.
Let's talk about these pods. Why do they look like a cross between a DeLorean and a Dalek from Dr. Who? It's like they merged two things that were supposedly "futuristic", and said 'these thing are cool because they look odd and have ridges!' Hindsight is always 20-20, but I find this part the movie's most unintentionally funny moment.
Back to the movie. As the pod closes, a fly sneaks in with Brundle. After he is successfully transported, he begins to slowly turn into a fly. The slow transformation is the best feature of this film. If only, for the hour-long brilliant performance by Goldblum, who while turning into a fly, manages to play Jeff Goldblum, and it seems natural.
No other actors, besides Goldblum and Sean Connery, consistently play themselves in a movie. It doesn't matter if one keeps his Scottish accent even though he's playing an Irish-American cop (Connery), or is still neurotic as a physics teacher (Goldblum), both of these actors still find a way to give great performance despite seemingly having no range.
The restraint the filmmakers showed in revealing Brundle's new fly body is something that would never happen today. Budgets are so large that someone in the art department, or in the graphics department, would have created "the fly" and the producers would have forced the director to show it off for a half-hour. I can't imagine what Michael Bay would have done with it.
Goldblum's storytelling as Brundle is spot on, especially as he explains his recent discoveries. He slowly shows a brilliant man, who mind is crumbling quickly, coming to the realization of his situation. Then, his moment of clarity in the final scene, as he is fully delusional and almost all fly, is heartbreaking. Even though that it is not Goldblum at the end, his work leading up to that is what makes the ending sad. This is probably one of his best performances in his career.
"The Fly" is one of those rare remakes of a classic film from the studio era to actually be better than the original. It is fun to see that after almost 30 years, the idea of a transportation pod was still relevant, and probably would still be today. Despite the fact that they are two completely different version of the original short story, the 1958 and 1986 version were both still critically well received, a rare feat in movies.
Rating: 7.5/10 -- One of my top five sci-fi movies, and shame on you if you haven't seen it. Probably the best performance of Goldblum's career. Spectacular special effects for the time, and still passable today.
Here's Brundle's transformation into Brundle-Fly in picture form:
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