The Film Strain: Splice0
Posted In Blog,Entertainment,Movies
Splice is a beautiful and warped film that we don’t see in theaters anymore, due to the fact that the Hollywood Engine never gets behind this kind of creativity. Horror/SciFi films today are generally a painful mix of remakes or mindless gore-fests, but you are in for brain-tweaking treat with this new film.
Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) are two young genetic engineers who have been given the job of running a genetic laboratory at a large corporation to develop a protein using animal gene splicing from several different species. To speed up the process, they secretly take a chance and add human DNA to the experiment. What they get is a new organism which Clive wants to destroy, but Elsa convinces him to let it live a little longer. As the creature grows bigger, you begin to see a new animal species. The creature looks like a human female, but it has many features of several animals. The creature has wings, a stinger, can breathe under water, and can communicate with Elsa. They begin to bond with the creature and name her Dren (Delphine Chaneac). Their little experiment has gotten out of hand, and it could be the end to their careers if it got out that they created an animal/human hybrid. Clive and Elsa finally learn the reason why they shouldn’t play with Mother Nature.
Elsa and Clive make a lot of mistakes and poor judgments throughout the film considering how brilliant they are. They try to approach the creation of this hybrid being with an objective mind… purely for the sake of science. The character’s themselves are even named after pivotal actors in Bride of Frankenstein (Colin Clive and Elsa Lanchester), homage to one of the great creatures of Science Fiction, and a source of inspiration to Director Vincenzo Natali. The creature effects are disturbingly hypnotic and the actress playing Dren is amazingly beautiful and exotic looking. Her mild androgyny and mannerisms took the creature further than what FX could have done alone. Adrien Brody and Polley were both solid actors throughout the film also. This film creeps into you on a moral, intellectual, and erotic level. The science in the film truly exists and everything you see is, or will be done in many laboratories around the world. The topic of Splice is ripe for discussion and exploitation, and will make you wonder about the strange world we live in.
