David Cronenberg's remake of the 1958 horror film must be seen as an attempt to make the story more palatable to a new generation. Those old enough to have seen the original when it first came out might have some difficulty understanding how something can be made more palatable by being made more sick-making. Well: to each his own, and all that. The sick-making stuff, after all, is only a part of a general push toward greater realism: but realism, surely, will be of limited usefulness in these sorts of circumstances. (The storyline, you will hardly need to be reminded, tells of a scientist who has invented a couple of "telepods" for the purpose of disintegrating matter in the one and reintegrating it in the other, and who, when using himself as a guinea pig, manages to hybridize himself with a stowaway housefly.) The realism comes in most useful when the action is most nearly human. Which means in the preliminary and expository stages. The measured pace of the remake helpfully stretches these stages out, and there is an additional sort of twilight period when the hero begins almost imperceptibly his total physical transformation. This is the big innovation in the remake: that the scientist doesn't come out of the experiment as a man's body with a fly's head, but goes instead through a gradual, head-to-toe change. (Who's to say that this is more real?) Certainly the filmmakers have done some diligent entomological research, with educational results. However: the hero's high-toned ravings about liberation of the flesh, about purification and higher life forms, are of little thematic relevance when you consider the source (and the eventual destination). And by the time he starts to vomit a milky fluid onto his food in order to dissolve it and ingest it, realism has begun to relax its claims. It refuses, though, to relax its grip -- and this, as the effects grow more and more graphic, eventually reaches the threshold of pain. Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, John Getz. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd
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