THE FLY
Screenplay by Charles Edward Pogue and Walon Green
Produced by Brooksfilm
A screenplay review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1987 Mark R. Leeper
THE FLY has been considered one of the great science fiction horror films for many years. Perhaps millions of children have frightened younger brothers and sisters with falsetto cries of "Help me! Please! Help me!" It was a natural for a remake and in 1984 Brooksfilm bought a screen adaptation by Charles Edward Pogue (who also scripted PSYCHO III) and Walon green. David Cronenberg was given the screenplay to film; he kept some, rewrote a lot more, and filmed the result. On a visit to a cinema shop in Manhattan I discovered that copies of the Pogue-Green screenplay were available. As a fan of the original film with screenplay by James Clavell (who went on to script films like TO SIR WITH LOVE and THE SATAN BUG and then to write novels like SHOGUN and TAI-PAN), and to a lesser extent as a fan of the remake with screenplay credited to Pogue and Cronenberg, the temptation was too great to pass up.
Geoffrey Powell is a research scientist just below Nobel Prize caliber. he works for a high-tech research and development company--Loften Industries, headquartered in new York City. Loften, however, has grown tired of waiting for Geoffrey's researches into "particle transmission" to bear some sort of useful fruit. He is ready to replace Geoffrey if the young researcher does not produce. Geoff is able to transmit objects, sometimes successfully ("like STAR TREK," as a friend observes), but often not so successfully. He usually transmits souvenir Statues of Liberty. A poor touch here is that one appears to be successfully transmitted until Geoff's wife Katie notices the wording has been reversed. If the wording were reversed, the whole statue should have been noticeably reversed. Under pressure from Loften, Geoff transmits himself, but the audience knows that a fly transmitted at the same time has disappeared.
Now the story is similar to Cronenberg's film. Geoff at first seems much improved by the transmission, finding himself a much faster jogger and able to lift greater weights. He starts transforming soon, growing new hair on his body, losing his fingernails. He does not, however, climb the walls (at least literally) the way Cronenberg has him do. But then neither does he philosophize about his condition either and we can credit Cronenberg for the strange thought processes that were the high points of the film.
There is no discussion of how a matter transmitter turned in a gene splicer--a rather absurd concept from the film. Instead, the two organisms were fused into one and we are told, "A fly is a very primitive form of life. That's why it's so successful. Its cells are stronger, they are able to multiply more rapidly than [Geoff's] own...in mutation the more primitive structure is always the victor."
(Spoiler--in case you ever find the script)
In the end and out of control, Geoff murders a neighbor and his villainous boss using vomit drops full of burning enzymes (much as in the film). An attempt at suicide in his matter transmitter turns him into a six-foot fly, and finally he is killed by a laser gone wild. Apparently Pogue thinks that a laser will flail around like a fire-hose if not bolted down. The final scene has his wife Katie giving birth to a giant maggot only to realize it was a momentary hallucination--or was it?
If you can turn a blind eye to some of the scientific blunders, Pogue's script is often more credible than is Cronenberg's rewrite. The funding for Brundle research never made any sense in the film and Pogue has a much better feel for how research gets gone in the R&D community--and under what kind of pressures it is done. Neither script will win any prizes for scientific accuracy. Neither script is clearly better. Overall I would say that the Cronenberg script, while less believable, is the better for having shown us a little more of the mental processes of a creature part man and part fly. I would still contend that of the three stories, the original film was the best and at the same time the most accurate to George Langlaan's story.
Mark R. Leeper
ihnp4!mtgzz!leeper
mtgzz!leeper@rutgers.rutgers.edu
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews