SPLICE (Vincenzo Natali 2010)
Vincenzo Natali: SPLICE (2010)
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WHO KNEW THAT 'FRENCH WOMAN' WAS AN ALIEN SPECIES?
"It's alive" -- again
--------------------------------------------------------[SPOILER ALERT]
Lisa Schwartzbaum of Entertainment Weekly enthusiastically describes Splice as "A cheeky, great-looking, thoughtfully loopy creature feature about the lure and dangers of cutting-edge gene splicing." Somewhere near the other extreme we have Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post, who calls the movie "a thoroughly repulsive science fiction-horror flick that slicks up its B-movie tawdriness with high-gloss production values and two otherwise classy stars." They're both right, at least if "thoughtfully loopy" means silly, but not completely dumb. And both production values and promotional possibilities are indicated by Guillermo del Toro's name in the executive producer slot. Despite the charismatic stars, however, when it's all balanced out, Splice has some virtues for genre followers, but otherwise is unexceptional.
This movie gets both repulsive and preposterous in the first few scenes. Elsa (Sarah Polley) and Clive (Adrien Brody) are a biochemist couple who do experimental gene splicing for a Big Pharma corporation. They create two great repulsive worm-like things they call Ginger and Fred, wrinkly, gnarly abominations like faceless and limbless pigs, which are supposed to be the wonderful new source of a wealth of proteins and enzymes usable for medicines. Ginger and Fred look like some CGI gone horribly wrong. Against their corporate boss's prohibitions, Elsa sneaks off and goes one step further: she grows a critter that blends mammal, fish, bird, and human DNA. The thing that comes out, exploding and spewing disgusting fluids, of course, looks like a giant man-eating tadpole, or a flying snake. In time it gives birth to a little fledgling that grows up into a kind of bald, sweet-faced lesbian on spindly bird legs and Dren, as they name her, grows quickly from a child into a squeaky adult that can't seem to speak but can spell out words like "boring" and "outside" in Scrabble letters. The monster catch: Elsa's and Clive's critters not only slide back and forth between species. They also tend to switch genders unexpectedly. And since they have sharp little poisonous spider tails, they're dangerous when aroused.
Dren (played as an adult by French film actress Delphine Chanéac) is scary and dangerous, but also kind of cuddly. At first the childless Elsa develops an unprofessionally motherly approach, but then Dren grows up with breathtaking speed into (as Variety's Justin Chang puts it) "a cross between Gollum and Sinnead O'Connor," with a pretty face and, at times, a winning smile. You can see where this is going. When this movie was shown as a midnight feature in the San Francisco film festival the festival director Graham Leggett said it had "the best inter-species sex scene ever." Dr. Frankenstein's "monster," where all this came from, longed to be accepted as human. It didn't expect to have sex with people, but this is another era, with a different and greater focus on sex, morality, and economics. Only a post-millennial movie would end with one of the scientists being offered an unbelievably large check for their taboo-flouting experiments.
Splice is Sci-Fi that's scary and gross-out, though in an era when CGI allows spatter to be moved to an exponential level (even the low-budget District 9 outdoes Splice both in species-shifting and yucky-fluid spraying), the main thing it has to offer is the frisson of copulation with a non-human. And thanks to CGI, "she" can go amphibian, spout wings and retract them, and change sexes. I guess Adrien Brody, with his aquiline features and long body, has an edge of the alien himself. But when he puts on a record and slow-dances with Dren one evening while Elsa's away, is it gross-out, titillating, or just plain silly? Or maybe it's the call of the abyss? All these things at once, this is the film's best moment. Otherwise, how is this any better than the Spierig brother's zombie movie of earlier this year, Daybreakers? That too had a couple of A-listers, Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe, raising the B-picture tone. And with its dark zombie-infested future world re-imagined in Forties noir style and its own bloody explosions and scary flying monsters, it was just as imaginatively engaging.
Splice is thin stuff. What it's got is a couple of actors in Brody and Polley who make their relationship come to life. And Polley is a little bit scary herself. That's all.
Modern Frankenstein stories lack the melancholy of the old movies that stayed close to the original Mary Shelley story. Elsa and Clive don't seem to care a bit that they're messing with God's scheme of things. They're just worried to death they'll get found out -- and maybe lose their jobs. Other than Brody and Polley's, there are no characters of more than minimal depth in Splice; Dren comes across as a creature more of voracious appetites than feeling. Clive has his brother Gavin (Brandon McGibbon), a lower-level scientist at the lab, who of course finds out what the couple are up to and makes things more complicated.
Splice got a jump-start for its critical rep by debuting at Sundance. Graham Leggett put his finger on its main selling-point. Sure, in horror/Sci-Fi terms it has two good selling points: decent actors and production values (but is either a necessity for the genre?) and sex. First Dren craves sweets, then she wants Clive. Then, like all cinematic human efforts to tamper with Mother Nature in the movies, things go haywire. I'm not saying this movie doesn't deliver, only that there's nothing profound about it.
This film was a part of the SFIFF, but I saw it after its theatrical release June 4, 2010.
A Sci Fi Psychological Thriller That Captures the Essence of Its Genre
Unfortunately, Chris has seemed to focus on the sensational aspects of this movie and thus in a negative way and overlooked the more fascinating and compelling visceral experience of the movie that makes this one of the best movies of the year (2010). Chris's comments contain for the most part the sexual proclivities and the yechy blood splattering that envelopes the screen at times. But what really makes this movie a new benchmark is that like ALIEN (1979) and THE THING (1982) as well as DARK WATER (2005) and 1408 (2007) there is the creeping terror in the exploration into the unknown, the unpredictable that is both familiar and completely alien. What this sci fi movie has accomplished is to raise the bar on the sense of sci fi alienness, the weird, off-balance undertone that seeps into the emotional pours and leaves the audience smoldering in smothered anxiety. The script and the performances of the new life form read like a late night sci fi horror novel that grips one into an other-worldly experience, beyond those that have taken a more traditional, predictable path of monster movies. Instead we have the anthropomorphic turn on the head sensitivity and awakens our alert senses to the possibilities that we cannot necessarily trust in our own human egoistic belief in our greatness and understanding of the universe.
How Do You Scientifically Prove An Experience - It's a My Word Against My Feelings?
Watching this movie was like reading a great horror movie late at night, unable to put it down, shivering and tip-toeing over broken glass as the movie unfolded. Off balance and unpredictable, strange, and new... just like the first astronauts heading into space on complex, first time million piece components with anything that could happen, life and death...this movie took me into a journey of disturbing science with each new experience. I would have to agree I have not given you any specific examples and thus how can one grasp such intangibles...or even hold a conversation outside of "How are you?" "I'm fine."
It's been months since I've seen this movie, back in January at the Sundance Film Festival.
I guess the one example is the public presentation of the two original life forms that then turned on each other was a gory, savage and for me unexpected in its presentation, and laid out the unnerving expectations for the rest of the movie. Like being traumatized, the emotional wound and sensations became sensitized for future aftershocks and even though I cared and hoped for sweet and lightness there was always the lurking feeling of abiding darkness and danger. Dren was also scripted and performed in a way that was alien in both body movement and behavior outside the typical monster, horror movie making Dren even more delightfully ominous.
Spiritually and philosophically speaking, this movie wasn't about an indepth original Solaris depiction of mysterious world consciousness. Instead this was a scientific experiment ladened with human-inhuman relational elements that proceeded to implicitly provoke a larger sense of the meaning of scientific research and investigation, the meaning of human relationships, facing fear, fearing different strange and alien encounters...such as we all may do in our lives at some point. In my IMDb review, I pointed to the ambivalence and actually unanswered questions that this movie didn't answer, nor was it meant to which made the movie more authentic that forcing on the audience some specific paradigm that we must accept, but only posing the questions and offering some glimpses into some of the experiential encounters leaving it to us to continue onward on our search for meaning and truth.
A Selectively Great Element Added To The Genre
I would agree that this movie might not be classified as a great classic, but I would assert that it has made its solid footnote in the history of sci fi movies as focusing brilliantly on the frightening, scientific voyage of discovery into the unknown, especially an alien unknown, in some ways I would compare with ALIEN (1979). While ALIEN set a standard as a serious depiction of authentic human behavior in the face of a posited alien creature and its threat to them, SPLICE sets a standard for a focus on the alien itself and its remarkable evolution and the various human reactions and interactions between such experiences. This movie cannot be a masterpiece in that it has at least one significant cinematic flaw, primarily the problem I had with the two scientist behavior particularly in the beginning, didn't seem that authentically real and, if I recall, came across more manipulative for script/film purposes.
