cientist Seth Brundle (Goldblum) is so eager to seduce journalist Veronica Quaife (Davis) that he takes her back to his workspace/home to wow her with a demonstration of his invention in progress. Brilliant but clueless, he thinks he's just impressing a pretty girl, not revealing major industrial secrets, when he teleports one of her stockings from one telepod to another.
When Veronica asks Brundle, over lunch, what happens if he tries to teleport an animal, he looks sick. "Not while we're eating." But if Veronica agrees to hold on to the story until he's ready to have his work revealed to the world, she can document every step of the research process, and later produce an authorized inside account.
It's a good deal. And it soon becomes an even better one for both parties, as Veronica, on the rebound from a failed relationship with Stathis Borans (Getz), falls for the smart, funny and self-deprecating Brundle. Their relationship gives Brundle the kick in the pants he needs to perfect his device, which for the first time manages to transport a baboon without turning the poor beast inside out.
It's a happy day. But when Veronica is too busy fending off unwanted publicity from her editor and Stathis, Brundle gets drunk and recklessly tests the telepod on himself. It seems to work ... but he has unknowingly mixed his genetic structure with that of a captive housefly, initiating the early stages of a grotesque and frightening transformation.
Likable players, plausible plot
The greatest revelation greeting viewers who return to David Cronenberg's macabre hit, the second film version of George Langelaan's story, two decades later, is just how modest a production it truly is. Though there are a number of bit players, including Cronenberg himself as a gynecologist who's lucky he inhabits a dream sequence and not the story's real world, it's essentially a three-character play, driven more by literate dialogue and detailed character interaction than by its Oscar-winning makeup work or the oogie-boogie scares inherent in any story about a man turning into a murderous half-man, half-fly. The majority of the action is confined to Brundle's apartment/workspace, where he demonstrates his machine, develops his partnership with Davis and comes to live as a man literally falling apart one piece at a time: A claustrophobic staging that brings the doomed love story into sharp relief.
Brundle is a fully realized character throughout, from early revelations that include his unease riding in cars and his approach to figuring out what to wear every morning, to the nastier psychological quirks that await as his transformation into the creature he calls Brundlefly begins to affect his sanity. Jeff Goldblum, giving his all for his craft under pounds of increasingly icky makeup, makes the doomed Brundle a sympathetic monster indeed, even when he turns murderous.
Veronica is not quite as lucky. This is not the fault of Geena Davis, who still manages to carry much of the film's considerable emotional weight. It's not her fault that Veronica is largely defined only in terms of her relationship with two men: the arrogant and abrasive Stathis and the kinder but deteriorating Brundle. She's most interesting wailing, "I don't want it IN me!" when she finds out she's pregnant with a fetus that might not be entirely human. Still, she's the one you feel for when Brundlefly is no longer Goldblum but a special effect silently begging her for one final act of compassion.
The story does strain credibility, given the computer's penchant for creative gene splicing and the necessity of believing that Brundle could spend that much time working on a teleportation system without installing safeguards to avoid such a fatally corrupted signal. The screenplay offers some much-needed plausibility when Brundle describes his inventing process. Far from that staple of cheap science fiction, the lone inventor working on a revolutionary machine, he's just a project manager who has farmed out most of his creation's development to subcontractors "much smarter than I am." He further specifies that he doesn't even understand how some of the components of his device work—an ominous confession, indeed, given the gruesome results when he offers himself as its first human subject. Maybe the true lesson of The Fly is not that Brundle was too brilliant for his own good but that he should have invited some of those unnamed smarter guys into the room with him to make sure conditions were right before somebody flicked the switch.
