Buy it... if you desire one of Howard Shore's best pre-The Lord of the Rings career achievements, a massively melodramatic horror score of operatic constructs and overwhelmingly morbid romanticism.

Avoid it... if you expect the listening experience of The Fly to be as harmonically fluid as Christopher Young's mostly unrelated music for the inferior sequel.

Shore

The Fly: (Howard Shore) Skepticism about remakes is usually warranted, for so few manage to improve upon the concepts' prior incarnations. Such was not the case with David Cronenberg's The Fly in 1986, a loose rearrangement of ideas from George Lengelaan's original short story and the subsequent 1958 film adaptation. Whereas much of the prior film was truly laughable, Cronenberg's version was a horror tragedy of the highest order, praised soundly by critics, earning an Academy Award for make-up, and rewarded with more box office success than all of the director's other films combined. The basic premise survives; an eccentric but likable scientist invents a working teleportation device but has difficulty sending living objects through it. He eventually works out the kinks, but in the process of teleporting himself, his DNA is accidentally fused with that of a housefly that occupied the chamber with him during the experiment. His transformation into a human/fly hybrid thus begins, slowly at first but eventually turning him into a hideous, rampaging creature. Along the way, Cronenberg provides some extremely gruesome visuals, with plenty of blood and exploded intestines to go around. Key to The Fly is the love story that made audiences attach themselves emotionally to both Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis' characters, and their strong on-screen chemistry (until she has to take matters into her own hands with a shotgun, that is) was assisted by the fact that the two actors were dating in real life. There has been speculation over the years that, with so few characters in the film, the plot was actually a highly directed allegory involving the rise of AIDS, but Cronenberg has never bothered himself to address such claims. Cronenberg's collaboration with Howard Shore had been responsible to a great degree in bringing the composer from the anonymity of television and other writing venues into the motion picture scene, and their work together would continue for several decades. The two agreed to approach The Fly as though it were an opera, playing the tragedy very literally and melodramatically in the tone of the music. The technique would be relatively new in a genre that had been recently defined by far less traditional (or even orchestral) sounds, but it would prove to be successful due to the inherent emphasis on the romance in the story. The sound would also inform a new generation of film music in the genre, including the work of Christopher Young, whose score for the idiotic sequel to The Fly in 1989 would extend the larger-than-life scope of Shore's apporach into another generation of fly mutation horror.

Shore's work for The Fly remains a highlight in his pre-The Lord of the Rings career, assuaging his severe initial qualms about his approach. Despite the opportunity to explore harrowing electronic textures on top of an orchestra in a context like this (something Jerry Goldsmith might have done with the assignment), Shore utilizes the force of The London Philharmonic Orchestra alone. The general tonality of his music for The Fly is harmonic enough to remain pleasantly suspenseful for much of its length while exploring wildly fiendish and challenging avenues when necessary. Many of his motifs and underlying rhythmic constructs are based on multiples of two notes, an appropriate choice given the topic. The primary theme of the film is a series of identical four-note progressions over shifting bass chords that extend from the solitary and ominous tone of "The Phone Call" to full ensemble crashing of "The Finale." The score both opens and closes on a monumental six-note brass figure that addresses the larger-than-life science fiction aspects of the tale. A rising string progression in both "Main Title" and "The Finale" would seemingly inspire a range of similar progressions from John Ottman, Marco Beltrami, and others in the following decades. All of these ideas are toned back into strained, tense applications within the center of the score, though usually exhibiting the same morbidly heavy attitude (led by bass strings). There are brief respites from the gloomy atmosphere, including the lighter piano and solo woodwind romance of "Particle Magazine" and a wispy xylophone continuation in "The Street," but the score as a whole is generally extremely oppressive. The outward horror explosions in The Fly culminate in "The Creature," which offers several brutal, incongruous lines and a dissonant, timpani-pounding, cymbal-crashing crescendo worthy of only the best killing scenes. On album, The Fly is a very impressive work that does require a mood of doom for enjoyment. The five minutes summarizing the most harmonic performances of the themes in "Main Title" and "The Finale" are nothing less than awesome outside of context, though the remainder is almost morbid to a fault. The harmonics are not as simplistically grandiose as those in Young's overwhelmingly powerful sequel score's primary theme, but together they form a good tandem (Young's score, while not utilizing Shore's constructs, is equally impressive on album and arguably a more fluid listening experience). A 2005 remastering for release with the sequel score is a great value, but that product unfortunately does not solve major sequencing problems. The best testimony in favor of Shore's music is his adaptation of it into true opera form two decades later for live performance. If only every horror film plot and accompanying score could have such gut-wrenchingly melodramatic substance... ****   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Howard Shore reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.43 (in 23 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.25 (in 93,154 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.