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Not a review of Splice but more of an article about the film and how it came to be and the genre in cinema.
“Splice” is the type of ‘smart sci-fi that has been making a theatrical comeback of late. While it sports some impressive special effects work, with barely a half-dozen speaking parts and only a handful of locations, it is still a relatively low-budget affair.
but as “District 9,” the animated “9” and “Moon” have proven, there is a place at the multiplex for modestly budgeted, complex genre films. Another positive sign came when the post-apocalyptic project “Skyline” was sold at the Cannes Film Festival. And while it has a reportedly near-$200 million budget, Christopher Nolan’s upcoming mind-bender “Inception” appears – on the page, at least -- closer in sci-fi spirit to “Moon” than to “Men in Black.”
These movies are almost spiritual ancestors to the best of the sci-fi from the 70s and early 80s, pictures that used science and technology to illustrate socially relevant stories.
"It takes you places where normally movies in the genre want to play it safe," del Toro said in a conference call on May 27, while he was in New Zealand, and before we learned that he'd quit The Hobbit. "It's not very often that a major release also gets to tamper with the moral borders that we dare not to cross."
I saw it tonight. I won't give away much about the "plot" but more about the experience, behind the cut ...
I have not seen a movie so unintentionally funny since Plan Nine From Outer Space. Oh yeah, it tries to be worse. It's like a Saturday night "sci fi original movie" with a huge budget.
Once I realized I was watching a comedy, it became even funnier. Yes, the dialog is terrible, the plot nonexistent, and the ending was all but telegraphed from the very first scene. I heard one guy behind me say "The MST3K writes itself!" and it's true. This movie is destined to be mocked at midnight showings for years, in a desperate attempt to create the successor to Rocky Horror Picture Show.
There are a few mildly "scary" scenes (as in, they might scare a five year old), with a few minutes of female nudity (though they're all prosthetics so I'm not sure if it even counts), with a heavy dose of the "f" word in quite a few scenes.
If you get a chance, by all means, go see it. Just have the right expectations when you do.
People won't care, though, because they're going in expecting a monster-kills-everyone horror movie and what they're actually going to get is an intelligent, thought-provoking creature feature that could have slipped out of a time warp from 30 years ago were it not for the fact that Splice delights in being a bit more brash in what it shows than even the great creature features of the '80s were all about.
I hope a smart, original sci-fi-infused film like Splice can survive the Hollywood machine (and to Warner Brothers' extreme credit, they didn't actually trim the film from an R to a PG-13 after buying it), but sadly I don't think it will.
Don’t let the generic advertising fool you. Splice is a superior horror film, although it’s safe to say it’s probably nothing you might expect and goes places you certainly wouldn’t dare.
The commercials and trailers make this look like a cheap rehash of films like Species and while it does possess some plot similarities, Splice is much more closely related to the classic David Cronenberg remake of The Fly.
Saw this movie this evening with a buddy, review follows:
Splice
Rated: R (Nudity, Language, Violence.)
My Grade: C+
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Splice is a somewhat unique movie, unique in that it "splices" together movies like "Alien", "Species" and a number of other sci-fi/"horror" movies to sort-of make its own thing. It pulls it off but only sorta. The movie carries out pretty much in "three" acts which, yeah, all movies do but the three acts are only vaguely connected and get progressively worse.
There will be some, mild, spoilers ahead.
Splice begins with the camera zooming around some vague internal body components/cells until finally the creature we're in is "born" to two masked doctors/genetic scientists. They apparently gave their creature a single tunnel-visioned fish-eye-lens eye. Genetic Engineering can make creatures so awesome!
It seems or "hero scientists" are dabbling in genetics for some Big Corporation, they're splicing together the genes from multiple animals to make a "new "animal" that'll have traits and genes that could cure and/or correct many diseases and genetic defects. They've already made a female creature and have just birthed the male. Both creatures look like, well, they look like penises. The newly birthed one even "sicks up" out of its urethral opening/mouth with a fluid that, well... doesn't look like puke given how this creature looks. Anyway, they hope the two creatures will mate and being to propagate a species of blobish penises. Genetic engineering is wonderful.
But BigCo. is tired of spending money on the project and won't give the scientists played by Adrien Brody (who've I've never bought as an actor let alone a scientist capable of splicing together genes) and Sarah Polley permission to make more or even take the next step; making a humanoid creature that'll piss of people who don't like tampering in God's domain.
Adrien and Sarah are in a relationship together and Sarah ultimately convinces Adrien to go along with her and make their human/animal abomination on the side. (No points for guessing who donates the human component.) There's some tinkering on the computer in finding out which combinations work best and viola they've made their creature. At first it seems the intend to just take the embryo-tic cell and freeze it but Sarah pulls an ambush and puts in their magical womb machine, giving birth to it. Simply saying they'll study it for a short while then kill it.
It seems that splicing together all of the genes made a new deus ex machina gene in it and it grows at an accelerated rate, it birth itself in a semi-embryo-tic state and continues to develop outside of the womb. At first they try and kill it but Sarah bonds with it and decides to raise it in secret in the lab's basement. The thing develops into a child and eventually a teenage girl.
The creature is fairly well done in the effects and makeup department. The adolescent form of it is that of Ilia with chicken legs, a prehensile tail with a stinger in it, four fingers hairless and has a babyish, innocent looking face.
This is pretty much where our first act, the most interesting act ends as Adrian and Sarah are forced to move the creature they've named "Dren" (An anagram of "Nerd" the name of lab they were working in) to the abandoned farm from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Like all abandoned farms this one still has electricity and running water. Dren has now mostly fully developed, speaks mostly in clicks and squeals, has sprouted bat-like wings and has taken a vested interest in Adrien (leading us to a huge, disturbing, WTF scene.)
The second acts plods along with some interesting bits but mostly becomes about them "raising" Dren whom they've pretty much treated now as a child/pet. Their actions kind of dance back in forth on how the treat and even between the characters. (At first Adrien wants to kill it and Sarah has imprinted with it but eventually their roles swap for no apparent reason.)
The third act devolves into horror nonsense as Dren has entered a third stage of her development and is now killing people. Despite being raised, mostly, in a loving way.
In one scene, Dren and Adrien have sex. It's a scene that beautiful, kinda sexy but disturbing at the same time. Mostly odd is how quickly Adrien does it, and no plot reason is given like that she has super-pheromones or something like that, he just nails her. Which is odd considering he's pretty much been her adoptive father this whole time.
The effects are decent, though the phallic/graboid creatures are corny looking but I really disliked the final act as it just sort of seemed cliched. It tries to explain it away from an earlier scene but it doesn't work and, for me, doesn't follow what came before.
It's a fairly well done and chilling movie in some scenes and I'd say it's worth seeing but not sure I'd rush out to see it in the theaters. Probably worth a rental, however. If the movie had kept up the interest they built-up in the first act with the science stuff and the development of Dren and not gone into some of the bureaucratic stuff, the home-life stuff and then the cliched ending it would've been much better. Oh, and Sarah's ambiguous back-story of having mother issues didn't work for me either.
You could probably say Brody "raped" Dren but only in a "statutory" sense. Dren at that point is about the age of a older teen but, probably, still mentally a child. Honestly, I'm not entirely clear on why Brody's character tapped it other than for shock value. Even his "defense" of Dren looking like Sarah Polly's chraracter doesn't completely wash.
Misogyny... I'm not so sure. I wouldn't say so, really. Honestly, I don't think this movie is quite that deep.
The child-abuse thing.... Ehhhh maybe, but considering the extreme circumstances of this "child" that thing doesn't work either.
such a comparison is simply asinine. "Species" was the kind of film that keeps sci-fi in the trash ghetto, whereas "Splice", with it's nuanced characterization, brisk but coherent pacing, and consistently logical plotting, is the kind of film that brings the genre steadily further up the ladder of class and respectability.
