Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies

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DVD Reviews of Lord of the Flies

DVD Review: Deeply flawed; unfaithful to its source
Summary: 2 Stars

The only character that seems to be on-target is Badgett Dale's Simon, whose pensive look and gentle voice portray the character's spiritual, Christ-like qualities. Balthazar Getty's Ralph is appropriately noble, but his voice is too shrill to command the respect that he does in the novel. Where the film really trips up is in its portrayals of Jack (Chris Furrh) and Piggy (Danuel Pipoly). In the novel, Jack is a choirboy, top of his class, which lends great poignancy and irony to his transformation and descent into brutal demagoguery and bloodlust as he succumbs to his monstrous, overpowering id; here, he's presented as a juvenile delinquent, sent to military school for allegedly stealing a car, so he seems pre-disposed to this sort of behavior and his actions carry less resonance. Golding's Piggy, despite his physical limitations, is practical, logical and thoughtful, but also proud and defiant; he never once sheds a tear even as he is ridiculed, bullied, belittled, even physically assaulted by Jack and others. Pipoly portrays him here as a sanctimonious crybaby, preaching practicality in a whiny tone, quite unconvincingly, and blubbering like an infant when his glasses are broken; I actually heard audience members cheer when Roger dropped the rock on him. That the film misses the mark so widely on two of the tale's most important characters is unfortunate and really works to its detriment.

The central flaw in the film, however, the crux of its literary shortcomings, is in its treatment of Golding's most powerful and important symbol: the "beastie" of which the boys are afraid almost from the very beginning. The beast is meant to symbolize both their fear, and the inherent illness in their own essential human nature. Golding accomplishes this by introducing the concept early on; in the novel's second chapter, after the boys' initial exploration of the island, one of the "littluns" asks about the "snake-thing," or "beastie," which he claims to have seen. None of the other boys have seen it, there is no evidence of any such creature, but many begin to believe in it and that belief contributes to the tensions, divisions and breakdown of order on the island. The twins' discovery of the dead parachutist, who falls from the sky in chapter six, merely fuels the belief and provides an object/manifestation of that fear.

In the film, the boys arrive on the island with the pilot of their doomed aircraft (there were, of course, no adults in the novel), who spends most of his screen time moaning and writhing under a mosquito net before wandering off and disappearing. Later, about 45 minutes into the film, by which time the camps have already divided (and just as I was thinking to myself, "Hey, they haven't mentioned the beast yet,") one of the boys wanders into a cave and is attacked by something which all but the dimmest audience members instantly realize is the missing pilot, but which the boy believes is a "monster" and reports as such to the others. The key here is that in the novel, the beast came from the boys' own minds and existed in their own essential nature, contributing to their downfall; the film diminishes the beast's symbolic value with the too-convenient and contrived device of the adult pilot providing the impetus for their fear AFTER things had already started to go wrong. Simon's pivotal observation in the novel that "maybe the beast is only us" doesn't really apply here, as there is no mention of (or belief in) any sort of beast until after the boy sees it in the cave.

All told, the 1963 version, despite its grainy black-and-white photography and shoddy sound editing, is vastly superior to this aesthetically impressive but thematically vacuous material. I think that modernizing and Americanizing this story diminishes its power and symbolism, and Golding's message is nearly lost in a sea of gratuitous profanity, modern (yet dated) pop-culture references, and contrived situations.

Read the novel.

Description of Lord of the Flies