Lord of the Flies

Click here for a video version of this review: https://youtu.be/b-v5AvIlc8E

Lord of the Flies is a classic book that I have never read, and its the source material for two movies, one from 1963, and the other in 1990, both of which I had also never seen. Having spotted the 1963 version on Kanopy, I loaded it up for a look.

If you're not sure what it's about, here's a brief rundown:

Amidst a nuclear war, a plane carrying a group of schoolboys crash lands on a deserted island. With no adult survivors, the boys are forced to fend for themselves. At first they cooperate, but when they split into two separate camps their society falls into disarray.

Opening with a pretty effective photographic prologue that sets up things nicely for the commencement of the film itself this got my attention quite quickly, but boy does it go downhill very fast after that. The kids are not very good actors - most of their lines sound like they're reading them, it's poorly edited, and overall comes off feeling like something made by a first year film student in their back yard.

I spent a lot of the runtime thinking "okay this isn't very good, but let's see where its going" but ultimately it goes nowhere. There's no real explanation as to why certain boys go so wild, they just suddenly do. And as there is no time scale given you can't gauge if this was a slow descent into madness or not, and because of that we're just left with the choppy editing so it seems they went wild in a matter of days which makes how wild they go even more ridiculous. For a movie that sets out to be a serious drama film that asks the "what if?" question, it hasn't a shred of logic to it.

Any metaphorical meaning is lost in its terrible execution and complete lack of explanation. If I had not been primed by years of "this is an examination of the breakdown of humanity" and gone into this blind, I would have come away thinking it was a shoddily made movie with an incoherent story and no message. In fact, even going into it primed for a "breakdown of humanity" story, I still came away thinking it was a shoddily made movie with an incoherent story and no message.

There are no explanations, no exposition, and I couldn't help but be left thinking "why on earth is this a classic?"

True enough to the book. It has been decades since I've read the book, and also since I've seen the movie. For the few who are unaware, it's about the savage ways that a group of young boys take on when left on their own after a plane crash. One of the boys becomes a sort of "anti hero" just by not being a sadist. He begins by being a leader, but some of the other boys begin being sadistic savages. It's a bit of a reflection on the debate long ago between Voltaire and Rousseau, about the nature of man. The French Revolution and other incidents bore out Voltaire's cynicism and mocked Rousseau's optimism. Other movies have the same motif. Anzio, Ulzana's Raid, End of the Spear, while which reflect on the need to understand that we have to fight inner demons. Here, two boys totally give in to the demons, and two boys totally reject the demons. Other boys fall in between, but find that if they reject the demons, they must do so in an underground movement., It does make for some characters whose motivation is just pure evil, because they are totally possessed by demons. It's something everyone must fight against all the time. A film to compare this with is "Fortress", which is much the better film, because there is an adult who mentors the young boys and girls who go through an ordeal, and in "Fortress" we see them work together for a common good to help every individual. Which is the exact opposite of what "Lord of the Flies" does. The boys here do the exact opposite. It's depressing, but not contrived IMO. It shows how ugly that ugliness truly is, which is its saving grace.