Splice

Starring: Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, Delphine Chanéac, David Hewlett

Synopsis:

Two renowned young scientists (Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley) become famous in their field for successfully creating a new species of animal, a species with a huge potential in the pharmaceutical industry potential for their ability to secrete profitable proteins. Despite a refusal by company bosses to approve further stages of the project, involving human DNA, their ambitions result in the creation of a human-animal hybrid. What should have been disposed of at an early stage becomes allowed to grow into a new humanoid species they name Dren. They raise and attempt to study Dren as a personal project kept secret from their employers and colleagues with disastrous and tragic results.

Splice reminds me of David Cronenberg’s early work. It encompasses an up to date fascination with using genetic engineering to produce treatments for afflictions like Alzheimers and then things go very badly wrong. It brings to mind, movies such as The Brood, Scanners, Dead Ringers and The Fly.

Whilst this could be considered a thinking man’s low budget movie, Splice likes to think it’s more intellectual than it actually is. The moral dilemmas are handled with little subtlety and the parenting metaphor even less so. Splice’s strengths lie in performances and atmosphere. Both Polley and Brody play their roles well as a couple whose relationship starts strong and degenerates throughout the film’s duration. The characters are, in a sense, a victim of their own success. Both actors successfully convey the arrogance and drive needed to further and go past the acceptable boundaries of modern science in the corporate world.

Other than that the writing fails on a few levels. Both Brody and Polley’s characters change when it suits the screenplay; there’s little consistency. Natali builds up suspense and curiosity only to finish on a Scanners-esque scene of the engineered creatures splattering the front row of an audience being presented to. Shades of both Scanners and Robocop don’t amount to much other than completing the first part of the movie in an over the top style. As Dren develops, in the second half of the movie as both an idea by the scientists and a covert experiment in a barn, the plot changes from intellectual and moral questioning of motives to the final hokey last act that resorts to clichéd horror movie conventions. The final “twist”, although unexpected, contradicts what is seen as the corporate view of these experiments. It’s possible that I missed the point trying to be made but by that stage I had lost interest.

David Hewlett, so good in Stargate Atlantis as Dr Rodney McKay, is woefully underused which I feel is a great opportunity lost. The effects are well realised and a credit to the effects companies involved.

Summary:

A disappointing entry into the sci-fi genre that had so much promise to be so much better. Even so, it is still worth a look for the positives that I mention above.

5 out of 10 (Wayfarer)

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