: (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
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
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.
Cronenberg and Shore agreed to approach
The Fly
as though it were a full-blown opera, playing the tragedy very literally
and melodramatically in the tone of the music. The technique was
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 also managed to 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 extended the larger-than-life
scope of Shore's approach 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 strategy for the project. 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
harmonically accessible 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
duality inherent in 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 genre scores of 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 in
the score for
The Fly, including the lighter piano and solo
woodwind romance of "Particle Magazine" and a wispy xylophone
continuation in "The Street," but the remainder of the score as a whole
is generally extremely oppressive. The outward horror explosions in
The Fly culminate in "The Creature," which offers several
brutally harrowing, incongruous symphonic lines and a dissonant,
timpani-pounding, cymbal-crashing crescendo worthy of only the best
killing scenes. On album,
The Fly is a very impressive and
engaging work that does require a mood of doom and gloom for enjoyment.
The five minutes summarizing the most tonally appreciable 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 for
The Fly II,
while not explicitly utilizing Shore's constructs, is equally impressive
on album and arguably a more fluid listening experience. All the CD
releases of Shore's score dating back to 1986 have been pressed by the
Varèse Sarabande label, and all utilize the same
non-chronological track ordering. A 2005 remastering for release with
the sequel score is a great value, but that product unfortunately did
not solve these major sequencing problems with the 1986 presentation.
Both albums fell completely out of print despite being commercial
products. The same arrangement for
The Fly alone was re-issued in
2016 as part of Varèse's very limited, 12-CD "Little Box of
Horrors" novelty set, with no changes to mastering either. The 2005 set
with the sequel score remains the most attractive available product for
The Fly despite its resale price. The best testimony in favor of
Shore's music is his extension of the concept into an actual opera two decades
later for an impressive live performance. If only every horror film plot
and accompanying score could have such gut-wrenchingly melodramatic
substance.
**** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
| Bias Check: |
For Howard Shore reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.56
(in 25 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.33
(in 101,287 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
