9 Movie Villains Who Are Really The Victims

2. Brundlefly in The Fly

Goldblum The Fly Watching David Cronenburg€™s The Fly is quite an experience. Of course it€™s a horror film and you get gruesome special effects (Academy Award winning in fact) but the overarching reaction to the film€™s events isn€™t so much fear, but rather an elongated sadness that pulls you down to the depths rarely repeatedly plundered by fiction (save for anyone keeping up to date with the Walking Dead comics). There doesn€™t need to be too much analysis for this one, The Fly is the deterioration of one man, Seth Brundle (played brilliantly by Jeff Goldblum) who strove to excel in his field and even managed to succeed in his big scientific experiment before, like so many inhabitants of Spiderman€™s world before him, he fell victim to an accident. Brundle pours all of his efforts in getting his teleportation device working with living tissue following a mishap where a baboon is turned inside out. Once he has things working (and, bear in mind, having already tested in on a second, more fortunate baboon) he puts himself into the experiment. A risky move, obviously, but surely the experiment will either prove a great success or kill him relatively quickly. Sadly, a housefly enters the teleport pod with Brundle and from then on he painfully transforms into a horrific creature. He even goes mad, trying to fuse his girlfriend, their unborn baby and himself together into a sort of €˜ultimate family€™ all the while you€™re starting to forget the charming, brilliant man at the start of the film. Finally, when he realises all hope is lost, he begs to be put down, which his reluctant girlfriend slowly brings herself to do. Tragedy with a capital... well, everything.
 
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A Cinema and Photography graduate whose media exposure has amounted to little more than an amateur comics society podcast and a one minute radio discussion about cantaloupe melons. Reader of Vertigo, watcher of Doctor Who, lover of everything film. Tweet in his direction @Story24