Splice is one of those movies that I had no real interest in seeing but after being cooped up in the house for 4 days, I was like why not take a drive into town. The movie starts off well enough – a couple of conceited scientist, Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) successfully create a new life form by splicing a bunch of different genes together. Not being happy with this major accomplishment they immediately think – hey let’s splice human and animal DNA together and see what we get. When are scientists going to learn that these experiments at playing god never end well?
The first half of the movie is actually pretty good. It pretends to have a debate about the ethics of what they are doing. It’s handled in about one or two sentences, the debate goes something like this – “We shouldn’t do this,” “Why?” “It’s illegal and we’ll lose our jobs” “We’ll do it in secret, no one will ever find out,” “Ok…” Director, Vincenzo Natali takes a lot of time for the set up and does a good job of making us care about the “child” they end up creating Dren (Delphine Chanéac) but it takes forever to go beyond the birth and the child years to the inevitable “evil” turn.
While I started to care about Dren, the movie fails to give any texture to Clive and Elsa by the time the movie does give us some background it felt as if it came completely out of the blue and basically turned Elsa into a sociopath. The last 20 minutes of this movie is about as bad as movie making gets. To top it off, it ends up having a really graphic rape scene that has elements of bestiality, incest, etc. The other problem with this movie is it’s ugly to look at, which is probably what material like this should be. It’s summer time, I want sunshine and roses, not muck and dreary. I would have been fine with the movie if they wanted to do it as straight up horror, instead it desperately wants to be a serious film, but fails at it.
All the actors give decent performances with the material they have, the problem is the story was just so derivative of a million other straight to DVD movies of this type. I guess it’s a fine Saturday night HBO or even SyFy type of film, but in the theater? No.
Final Grade D
EM Review by
Michelle Alexandria
Originally posted 6.05.2010