The Lab Mishap

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Reaction Paper
The Fly

Rather than interesting, I found the film “The Fly” intriguing. When a film opens with a murder case where the killer herself wants to be persecuted by the authority, I can’t help but to wait intently for revelations on the crime. I didn’t have a clue that soon it’s about a lab mishap.

For a movie during the late 1950’s, I think that a sci-fi film like that is ahead of its time. It poses a warning to the future generation on how to treat discovery and innovations. For this, I think it’s a morality play. It tells the viewers that playing God is always doomed to failure. There are boundaries on being human that there is always a margin of error. Scientists always have this uncertainty in their experiments and as long as this small probability exist, the film instructs, men of science should not play with the sacredness of life.

Over-all, the movie is logical by giving an explanation to every situation even to the scientific innovations and mishaps. But the highlighted message of the film is that the society back then dictates what can be explored and what cannot. The science back then already has an idea of what all the innovations and discoveries can do. That all needed resources are just around us but we should think if moving “forward” does really benefit us.

Like the exploration of the steam engine during the Greek period, being advanced is not equal to being beneficial. Exploration and discovery considers a lot of factor, down until the smallest decimal place.