Splice is at its heart a modern spin on the Frankenstein story (the two lead characters are named after key actors in the Universal Frankenstein films) centered around scientists with God-complexes trying to bend nature to their wills with cutting edge technology and then being overwhelmed by the unconsidered consequences of their actions. Fortunately for viewers, he also shares Cronenberg's penchant for surrounding the icky and transgressive with ideas and an interesting point of view which prevent his films from coming across as exploitation. Their efforts are further complicated by confusing emotional connections that begin to develop as Clive and Elsa bond with their creation and unexpected twists and turns in Dren's development.ĭirector Vincenzo Natali is clearly a fan of fellow Canadian director David Cronenberg and shares his fascination with all things icky and transgressive. As she continues to rapidly develop physically and mentally, Clive and Elsa find it increasingly difficult to keep her existence a secret. Reversing the acronym for their lab, they christen her "Dren". The humanoid creature (special effects as an embryo and infant, Chu while child-sized, and Chaneac when fully grown) develops at an unexpectedly rapid rate, eventually being "born" in the laboratory. Initially planning simply an attempt at creating a hybrid embryo, Elsa's God-complex gets the best of her and she rashly implants the embryo in a gestation chamber. Without telling their superiors or their staff, Clive and Elsa continue their work in secret. The company funding their research is leary of the potential public outcry of such tests and instructs them to redirect their efforts towards perfecting the process of extracting the critical proteins from their existing work. After a series of breakthrough successes, Clive and Elsa are enthusiastic to move onto the next phase of their research incorporating human genes. Their specialty is splicing the genes from various animals to create hybrid life forms that can be used to harvest unique proteins useful for fighting diseases and to gross out movie audences who have to look at them. In Splice, Adrian Brody and Sarah Polley play Clive Nicoli and Elsa Kast, a pair of star genetic scientists at the Nucleic Exchange Research & Development (NERD) lab who maintain both a professional and a personal romantic relationship. That's where the horror lies.Starring: Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, Delphine Chaneac, Brandon McGibbon, Simona Maicanescu, David Hewlett, Abigail Chu Splice would like to mess you around with some aggressively transgressive material toward the end, but this just leads us away from the most fruitful moral questions surrounding the creation of the semi-human being in the first place. It would be nice to report that director Vincenzo Natali (whose Cube was a very fun Twilight Zone-flavored teaser) is able to stitch these elements into something that keeps its momentum going alas, despite the arrival of Delphine Chaneac as the mature (and unsettlingly sexy) mutant creature, the movie begins stepping into the sillier possibilities of its scenario. But this is science, right? Surely the breakthrough in human evolution that would come with this experiment justifies a little corner cutting? Splice is going to answer these questions in a reliably familiar way, and in its early going it finds some fun in working hip variations on the mad-scientist genre-plus, in Brody and Polley, the film already distinguishes itself by reaching up to the top shelf for actors. more » e ethics of swizzling together human genes with various lab potions is queasy, and the initial result of their rogue project is disconcertingly pitched somewhere between a human baby and a monster thing with a stinger in its tail. In the grand movie tradition of doomed scientists, Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) won't let the official quashing of their Frankensteinian experiment stand in the way of working on the scheme anyway.
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