Ah, another day, another adaptation. And really, it's right on point. Who doesn't need a review of a 27 year old movie that's never exactly been considered a classic?
It's a classic novel from 1954 -- that would be 63 years ago -- so I don't think we exactly need the traditional spoiler warning anymore. I'm going to talk about the book first to get to the movie.
But I'm going to be doing a book-and-movie group on the subject, so I re-watched, and my re-watch=review.
For starters, I consider the book one of the best to come out of the post-war cynicism. It came out in the 1950s, when Europe was still reeling from WWII, and William Golding's text rooted the evil that had just occurred not in some specific failure of the German state, but in the evil of human hearts. ALL human hearts (or at least most of them), which can manifest itself in any society. Golding stated, "The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable." He explores this by crashing a planeload of English boys onto a deserted island, with no adults in the vicinity. (He left girls out because he -- wrongly, I think -- thought that girls wouldn't form this kind of microcosm of society -- and because he didn't want to mix any of it up with the question of sex, which he seems to have considered a distraction from the question.)
In the book, this largely plays out through the main character of Ralph, who starts out as a fairly normal boy, but as he gains responsibility over the others, he sees the society they initially formed begin to fall apart as they realize that they're not answering to anyone or anything, and descend into violence, anarchy, and, ultimately, murder. It ends with Ralph, once the acclaimed and beloved leader, running through the burning jungle as he is hunted. The implication (the stake sharpened at both ends, which they use to sacrifice pigs before they eat them) is that they're about to cross over into cannibalism when the smoke from their out-of-control fire finally draws a rescue.
The descent is largely shown through Jack. He starts the novel fairly normal, but authoritarian and boastful. He insists that they will have a perfect society, for instance, because they are English, and "the English are the best at everything." He first becomes obsessed with getting meat, but that quickly morphs into an obsession with blood and with causing pain to the animals he's hunting. After his hunting causes the signal fire to go out just when a ship is passing, he and Ralph come to a parting of the ways, and Jack goes to the other end of the island, where he sets up a violent dictatorship, drawing the boys off one by one, either by the lure of living outside of society's "normal" rules or because they are scared. Toward the end of the book, the sympathetic characters of the twins Sam and Eric are actually tortured into remaining in Jack's band, peeling off the last of Ralph's friends.
A younger boy named Simon is the only one of the boys who is presented as fully good. Rivers of ink have identified him as the Christ-like figure, and story-wise, it's true. Certainly that would be Golding's frame of reference. What is it, though, that makes Simon good? Interestingly, in the novel, it's that he's able to see the truth from the start: That the Beast the children are afraid of is something inside of them. When the rest mistake a dead parachutist for a beast watching them -- which ultimately shifts the balance of power to Jack, who promises to hunt it -- Simon climbs the mountain to look the beast in the eye and understand what it really is. He frees the dead man from his riggings and lets the wind carry him out to a sea burial, then goes to tell the others the truth... only to be murdered in their first act of frenzied violence against one of the human characters. Simon is also the one who has a vision of the pig's head on a stick, which is the scene the title come from. It becomes "The Lord of the Flies" (ba'al zevuv, from Hebrew, surviving in English as Beelzebub), and it taunts him with his own inability to articulate the horror that's happening, and the fact that the other boys will think him crazy. (Filmwise: This crucial scene has got to be almost impossible to film, and I don't envy anyone doing this adaptation at this point. It's the crux of the whole book, and it's NOT VISUAL AT ALL.)
The last of the four main characters is Piggy, a physically weak, overweight boy whose real name is never revealed. He's the voice of "baffled common sense" -- a technocrat of sorts, who is generally right about many things, and who is Ralph's most loyal supporter up until his death, when he, along with the conch which represents a sane, Apollonian society, is crushed by a rock deliberately dropped on him by his equivalent on Jack's side -- a sadist named Roger who, it is strongly implied, is very happy to drop all of the trappings of society so that he's free to indulge his whims. Piggy is increasingly debilitated through the book, as his severe myopia eventually leaves him blind when Jack steals his already broken glasses to make fire. (And yes, making fire with myopia lenses isn't possible, but we'll suspend that disbelief for symbolism. Piggy's specs are the rational world, and they are used to create the signal fire that stands for hope in the world.) Piggy has one major moral failure: When Simon is murdered, Ralph -- picking up Simon's clear-seeing mantle -- identifies the action for what it was, while Piggy denies it vigorously.
(If you want a more recent story, take Stephen King's Shawshank Redemption -- King is a major LotF fan, so this isn't surprising. Shawshank Prison is more or less the Flies island. Most of the men deny whatever crimes they've committed, as the boys deny responsibility for Simon's death. But Andy, like Simon, is genuinely innocent, if unable to articulate/prove it, and Red, like Ralph, accepts, understands, and regrets his crime, thereby making penitence and the titular redemption possible.)
Okay, yes, all of that was set-up to review the 1990 movie.
Which had some excellent elements, but also dropped the ball in some MAJOR ways.
The first and most obvious change is that English schoolboys have been changed to American military school boys. Of all of the changes, the nationality change bothers me least in terms of the themes of the book. Is anyone going to seriously argue that a random group of American boys wouldn't contain a good number saying, "We can't screw this up -- we're Americans, and Americans are great at everything"? Which is, of course, the root of what goes wrong, because pride is never a good start, and association with any group pride is not a good start. It depends on the individual and his ability to do what's right ("the choice between what is easy and what is right," as Dumbledore would later put it, and what are the Death Eaters but Jack's followers, all grown up?). You could tell this story about a group of people from literally anywhere in the world, and it would play out the same way, because it's not a truth about Englishmen or Americans. It's a truth about human nature, and humans, God bless us (please), are humans. You have your Ralphs, Simons, Piggys, and Jacks pretty much anywhere. Was it necessary? No (except in as much as everyone occasionally needs that slap upside the head saying, "Yeah, that could happen to you, too, if you're not careful"). Was it destructive to the theme? Also, no.
The most baffling change was leaving one of the teachers alive but delirious, ultimately becoming what they perceived as the Beast. I understand the thinking: Ultimately, it served the same purpose as the dead parachutist, pointing out that the adult world was the macrocosm of the island. But it didn't work well in practice, and since the boys all knew about him, it seemed much more unlikely that NO ONE other than Simon would figure it out. The parachutist drifted down at night, from a battle that the boys didn't even know about, and was therefore utterly terrifying to them. The beast was death and war and all of the endpoints of where their dark sides were leading them.
There's also not much establishing of why they were in a plane over the island in the first place. In the book, they're being evacuated because of the war. It's not specified, but given the choir's stated stops -- Gib and Addis -- it's a reasonable guess that they were being flown down to Australia or New Zealand from Great Britain, and the plane was shot down on the way. Wherever their latest stop was, the airport was blown up out from under them as they took off. That's why the ending isn't the cheat that some people think. Wow, they're rescued by a naval officer.... who is taking a break from hunting his quarry to rescue them. To paraphrase Golding, sure, the cruiser rescued the boys, but who's rescuing the cruiser? In this movie, there's not much indication that there's anything going on other than a routine patrol, and there's no talk of any war going on. So the ending loses some of its horror.
But the worst failure was in the characters.
I don't mean the child actors. Some were bad, most were competent, and Balthazar Getty as Ralph was quite good. Chris Furrh, who played Jack, seems to have left acting, which is too bad for the profession (though probably good for him), since he actually was very good.
The problem with the characters was the script. Granted, the story is a fable and therefore a lot of them are sort of one-trick ponies in the first place (by design), but script decided everything needed dumbing down. Therefore, Jack is written not just as kind of an ass to Piggy, but as every bad thing that the screenwriter could think of. Instead of a choir boy whose absurd (but kind of amusing) notion is that he should be chief because he could sing a C sharp, he's a juvenile delinquent sent to military school as a disciplinary measure. From the start, he's a snake in the grass. And Ralph, who is the ego character and therefore the only one who changes in the course of the story, begins and ends the movie at the same place: A deeply serious boy who is obviously right about things. Basically, he's Simon, but with power, which renders Simon kind of pointless as a character. And since Ralph is already right about everything, it also leaves Piggy basically to supply the glasses and to whine. Now, at the end of the story, this characterization works, but it's because Ralph has come by his wisdom the hard way. He's lost his innocence. In the movie, he begins this way, so there's no growth at all. (This is especially galling, as Golding told the story of the two images that became the book: A happy boy doing a headstand in delight as he finds himself on an idyllic tropical island, followed by the same boy weeping and filthy, having discovered how humans would really act.) ETA: Interestingly, in neither film version do we see the final moment of Ralph and Jack's feud. The naval officer who arrives asks them what they are doing and asks who is in charge of this obvious disaster. Jack, who authored the misery, shrinks back to just be one little boy among the group, while Ralph answers that he is, indeed, responsible, in charge. It seems like a strange thing to skip, now that I think about it.
Simon, while filmed in a kind of beatific way, is left with very little to do. He loses his central scene (except for a puzzling shot of him staring at the pig's head -- see above for my sympathy with the screenwriters on doing this scene), and he doesn't get the establishing scenes where he shows kindness and responsibility toward the littluns, fetching them fruit before going about his own business. You can't see his struggle to tell the others what he understands. He's just basically a good egg who has the unfortunate luck to choose the wrong time to run into a Dionysian revel.
I don't want to say that this movie is all bad. It's not. There a lot of elements I like. Philippe Sarde's score (here's the main title) is very good, and, while they skip the choir in the story, the choral backing toward the end brings it in surreptitiously (I wonder if the composer was annoyed that the choir was cut). It's not as chilling as boy sopranos singing Kyrie Eleison, as they did in the 1960s version, but it's dramatic and effective. Like I said, Chris Furrh's Jack is very well realized, and Balthazar Getty, when not hampered by bad writing, seems to understand what's going on. The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, and the dance scene where Simon is killed is genuinely frightening. And truth is, it's hard to do this story badly, per se, because it is a very simple story that works well on film even when individual elements don't play out properly. Like most very basic stories, it can be told and retold in a lot of different iterations, and an updating isn't a bad idea. You could also put it in space or... I don't know. In an arena on deadly reality television show? In a prison? Lots of places.
So, my feelings about this movie are mixed. The technical work is excellent, and parts of the story come out very well. I don't hate it. But given their resources, it could have been so much better!
Ah, well.
