Lets keep it short, sharp, and to the point. "Splice" is a movie I wanted to adore for its sci-fi trappings are the things my cinematic dreams are made of. But how do you squander an interesting premise and try your audiences patience to the point that you then ask yourself at credits close "Was it ever about science". Not that anyone wants to get caught up in the particular details of the central conceit, but "Splice" like 2009's "Daybreakers" takes a sort of topical, white knuckle premise and then drowns it in rote, tepid, and unnecessary drama.
Meet Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley). If there names somehow strike a cue in the back of your brain its because there names are a wink to the central characters of the "Frankenstein" saga. Clive and Elsa prance about their domain as if they are pop stars of the biochemical world proudly referencing their feature in Wired magazine as if its some kind of Academy Award or Pulitzer prize. Not content with being scientist for hire, Clive and Elsa are continuously pushing the boundaries of science, all the while giving pointless exposition about how it all works toward the good of humanity. They work for a faceless corporation that is trying to splice genes from several different animals to create some type of protein that said corporation can patent and mass produce. At films start, we see Clive and Elsa in action as they are "delivering" one of two blobby worm looking specimens they playfully name Fred and Ginger. Fred and Ginger are the spliced up hosts to which to derive the protein.
Again, Blah blah blah, all is well until the two decidedly place ego on display and toss human DNA into the mix creating what later is know as "Dren". Until this point, "Splice" remains a highly intriguing endeavor. However, this movie presents the biggest bait and switch by promising a dive off the edge of the cliff into horror, but then delivering a shameless and unnecessary drama centered around the abuse endured during Elsa's childhood. Clive and Elsa are a couple, and Clive has expressed interest in having a child, to which Elsa opposes. But then when "Dren" starts to take on more human characteristic, Elsa treats her like a toy/pet/child dressing her up in baby doll dresses and giving her barbie dolls to play with all with motherly attention. This, for me, was the first WTF as Clive and Elsa's character motivations are so muddled that it hard to care about their outcomes.
Their is a sleigh of hand sexual element to the movie that ultimately takes over and ruins the proceedings. Warning - Spoiler alert, so if you do not want to know what happens then stop reading from this point on. Lets just first say that "Splice" is not a sexy movie whatsoever and because Polley and Brody have zero chemistry, when they do get intimate its very awkward and uncomfortable to watch. Somehow believing that it needs to shock instead of titillate and intrigue, "Splice" goes to places that I had rather not seen on celluloid and that says a lot considering that i quite enjoyed the likes of "The Human Centipede". Still not sure why it felt the need to be, but "Splice" is the first movie where we get both an inter-species sex scene and an inter-species rape scenes....yeah, I said INTERSPECIES. Both are played out so foolishly that you wonder at some point if you have stumbled into the wrong theater. What it ultimately boils down to is perversion, as with the films final reel we get a more menacing version of Dren who has a sex change (it starts out female and then becomes male), and flies around with his moth wings picking people off and then, I guess, gets horny enough to grunt out something stupid to Polley (when he corners her) like "me want to be inside you" (mind you, the thing says nothing the whole film and only makes clicking sounds). I wish I was making this up.
Also, what didn't really make much sense to me was the evolution of "Dren" (nerd backwards in a narrative threat that is supposed to read more clever than it is). Dren has the top half of a human and the legs of a chicken and like a long pig tail. When she reaches full maturity you realize that she has these weird moth wing things attached to her arms and odd fish gill looking things attached to the back of her neck. The trailer spot do so much to hide what Dren ultimately becomes that when you see it, it looks like a creature that stumbled out of "The Chronicles of Narnia". Since the thing supposedly ages so rapidly, it would have been nice to see it take on something far less human and far more animal for the finale.
But no, we get nothing but drama in the third act. A drama about Clive and Elsa's fractured relationship, a drama about Elsa and her childhood and how she has to "face her demons", a drama about parenthood, a drama about how pointless Clive actually is to the story, and a whole lot of stupid actions conducted by people we are to believe to be so smart they they create an entirely new species, but too dumb not to realize that maybe you shouldn't have sex with it.
Again, if "Splice" was the kind of movie that you could only catch at the Landmark on pico or the Laemmle theater on Sunset (both arthouse staples new and old) then the cult nature of the context would give "Splice" some novelty as pure arthouse fare. But as presented as mass consumption, it seems totally mismanaged by entities that have no idea what it actually is. How Warner Brothers came to acquire and then get behind such a thing with so much push seems baffling, especially since its the very kind of movie that major distributors shy away from.
I don't want to write Vincenzo Natali off just yet, for he is not the first or last director that has had to water down all the things that made them great and interesting in the first place for big box office esteem. For the "Cube" series shows an assured and confident filmmaker who had a specific vision and an eye for interesting visuals sometimes at the expense of the acting. But he is a good storyteller. With "Splice" not so much. I will be anxiously awaiting his exit from stage left and his return to the underground. Maybe then Natali can make a real film.
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