Lord of the Flies

Harry Hook's adaptation is not as faithful to the William Golding novel as you'd wish (they excised the Lord of the Flies dialogue with Simon!) and because of it, the movie is less allegorical and less resonant. A group of young men from a military academy are stranded on an island. The group quickly becomes fractious with a passive section led by Ralph, trying to get rescued, and a hunter faction, led by Jack, trying to procure meat and "have fun." Peter Brook's 1963 filming seemed to get closer to the Darwinist sense of this cultural disintegration. Here, the hunter faction seems more like Peter Pan's Lost Boys than the bloodthirsty murderers they are. The performances, particularly young Getty, don't quite carry the weight of the situation. It's still, however, sobering to slowly watch the school uniforms traded for war paint, and the little boys turn into little savages. --Keith Simanton