A Movie Critique of Lord of the Flies

Picture this: you sit at your desk, hands cupping your face. Tears stream down your cheeks, and your nose begins to run like the river Nile. You are a blubbery mess, and your sobbing heaves share a striking and sadly ironic similarity to the barking of a seal. In your sorrow, you involuntarily emit a noise, much like a sigh, but which bears a close resemblance to the words “thank god it’s over.” You collapse to the floor in a pathetic pile of regret and contrition, as you wallow in self-pity. You, my friend, have just watched Lord of the Flies.

The novel of the same name, authored by William Golding, comes from a man who had seen the worst of humanity. Having served in the second world war, Golding’s traumatic experiences had all but ruined his faith in humanity. In fact, one of Golding’s most well-known aphorisms was that every person had the capacity to be a Nazi. So, in 1954, William Golding published his first novel, Lord of the Flies, a book that expressed this confession of human evil and moral turpitude, that now so lugubriously plagued his conscience. The book, a spin on island adventure stories to the likes of The Coral Island, follows a group of British schoolboys stranded on an island during an unspecified war and their slow descent into madness.

In 1963, Lord of the Flies was adapted to the big screen. Although the novel was an exceptionally well-crafted story, its occasional lack of flow and often abysmally slow pace had the potential to be remedied in a screenplay, possibly even exceeding the quality of the novel itself. Yet instead, a monumentally haunting and grotesque story highlighting the fragility of human civilization became ninety-two minutes of watered-down cinema, barely passing as the same grizzly story which it so meagerly tried to recreate. The unadorned truth is that the Lord of the Flies movie adaptation, if you wish to call it that, fails in so many simple ways to convey the emotional depth of the book, leaving the viewer disappointedly numb with little to no resounding messages imparted on them. The unrecognizable setting and complete lack of emotion both in the characters and the execution of the plot leaves this film a hard pill to swallow.

One of the simplest ways that Lord of the Flies failed to deliver an experience as striking as the book were the immensely boring sets and low attention to detail. Despite the lack of technology or larger-than-life budgets put into the sets and special effects of movies today, Lord of the Flies’ island represents a near complete lack of interest and artistic creativity. In the book, Golding meticulously describes the lush and breathtaking landscapes the boys trek through. “Tall trunks bore unexpected pale flowers all the way up to the dark canopy where life went on clamorously. The air here was dark too, and the creepers dropped their ropes like the rigging of foundered ships. His feet left prints in the soft soil and the creepers shivered throughout their lengths when he bumped them,” (pg. 78). The island in the book represents freedom, wonder, and the boys’ inner temptations come to life. To put it plainly, the island in the film represents none of these things. One would be hard-pressed to find a young boy who would prefer the nearly excruciatingly bland desert-like landscapes of the movie to the luxuriant green jungles and pink granite mountains of the book. Although setting is certainly an important aspect of a good film, what’s arguably more crucial is dialogue, and the way in which it is delivered by the actors.

In the movie, Lord of the Flies’ characters also suffer. Though the film does the bare minimum by utilizing the book’s more significant dialogue, it fails to incorporate it in a way that conveys the emotions or personalities of the characters. The actors speak their lines with inflections that misconvey the characters’ emotions, or they use none at all, so as to entirely drain the script of any life or fervor it might have had otherwise. Additionally, and perhaps most insultingly, the film chooses to cut arguably the most important dialogue in the entire story. At the end of chapter eight, Simon stumbles into a clearing in the forest and comes across the decapitated pig head. He begins to hallucinate, believing the head is speaking to him. What the head tells him is arguably the clearest glimpse we get into Simon’s personality in the entire book, and its lines, such as, “fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!.. ‘You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?’” (pg. 206) have been quoted ceaselessly by fans of the book and scholars alike for their introspective and telling view of what transpires on the island. And yet the film, for reasons beyond comprehension, cuts the dialogue out of the scene entirely, opting to instead show a frightened looking Simon staring at the pig’s head, the camera slowly zooming in on his contorted, twitching face. This nebulous and befuddling version of the scene offers no emotional impact whatsoever, and leaves the moviegoer confused.

The final and most objectionable way that Lord of the Flies dishonors William Golding’s creation is the poor execution of the scenes, and nearly painful subpar acting. Time and time again, Lord of the Flies fails to uphold the quality of its source material. Perhaps one of the best examples of the movie’s ineptitude to convey scenes with the same emotion and draw as the book is the final scene of the story. In it, Ralph is being hunted down by the other boys as the island roars ablaze. Having nowhere to run, Ralph stumbles fatuously onto the beach, and suddenly sees a pair of shoes in front of him. He looks up slowly to see a British naval officer. The two have a short exchange as the other boys reach the shore. Ralph confesses that Simon and Piggy died, and finally, he begins to weep, with the rest of the boys following suit. This scene is an anticlimactic if not abrupt resolution to a truly unnerving tale, yet it also conveys an eerie calm that provides just enough closure to leave the reader with a sense of finality. However, much of this effect is lost to the film. The exchange between Ralph and the naval officer is replaced instead with a long, awkward stare between the officer and another boy. Finally, the camera pans back to Ralph, whose face is screwed up in a way that would lead you to believe he ate too much cheese the previous afternoon. However, based on context clues, we can infer that he was meant to be crying. Overall, this scene is unequivocally disappointing, the most emotional part of it being when the credits finally roll. It is hard to say which brought out my tears, the fitting choir music playing in the background, or the relief that the movie was finally over.

It is clear that Lord of the Flies’ attempt at recreating William Golding’s twisted world was a totally fruitless effort. Whether it be the film’s failure to replicate even the simplest of details from the setting, its hack-job dialogue inclusions, or its inconceivable ability to leave scenes completely devoid of emotion due to unironically poor acting, Lord of the Flies is simply a dissapointment. William Golding’s work deserves better than this, and seeing his story translated into a film that so starkly lacks what made the book special feels like a slap to the face. With all of the different ways to enjoy a book available to us today, from good old fashioned paperbacks to narrated audiobooks complete with sound effects and music, there are near countless great ways for those interested to enjoy the masterpiece that is Lord of the Flies’ story, but sadly the film is not one of them.