Title: Splice
Year: 2009
Director: Vincenzo Natali
Stars:Adrien Brody
Sarah Polley
Delphine Chanéac
Brandon McGibbon
Simona Maicanescu
David Hewlett
Plot:Clive and Elsa are a pair of brilliant scientists whose cutting-edge experiments in genetic engineering make them superstars in their field. As devoted to their careers as they are to one another, they start conducting unauthorized experiments with new animal species that show great promise. Drunk with their god-like powers, they introduce human DNA into one of their creations, producing a creature that is greater than the sum of its parts: a rapidly developing animal/human hybrid that may be a step up on the evolutionary ladder. While this female creature inspires maternal feelings in Elsa, she evokes something far-from-paternal in Clive, something that poses a threat to them all. Then, when this seemingly perfect organism makes a final, shocking metamorphosis, it is mankind itself that is threatened.(From Yahoo movies) My Thoughts:
I went into this expecting something akin to Species or Cronenberg's incarnation of The Fly with maybe a dash of Hollow Man. A horror.
But what I got instead was something far better. Something, that I suspect holds a closer relationship to the orginal novels(that I have never read) of Dr Jekyl & Mr Hyde, The Invisible Man.
Yes the tension does increase and there are a few moments where I was waiting for the obvious gory moment where someone would be mauled, these moments where a kill would normally happen but didn't, weren't a bad thing as they would detract too much from a very interesting idea and would spoil it.
This is not to say that there aren't some scenes where the claret flows, but these scenes are used to progress the story and are not gratuitous(?).
The three central performance by Brody & Polley as the Biochemists are good, but Chanéac as the adult Dren, is outstanding. She has less lines of dialogue than Daryl Hannah in Clan of the Cave Bear, but her movement and body language spoke volumes. Kudos too to Abigail Chu, who played the child Dren and also gave a great performance.
The CGI is not intrusive, in fact it's so good that I forgot that it wasn't real.
I am not saying that this film is perfect as there were still a few pieces that didn't quite flow, but it didn't fail. I does make you wonder about how far people are willing to go and what they are willing to do.
Rating:
