Review: Splice

Splice is the newest feature from director Vincenzo Natali who garnered some fame from his most popular film, Cube. I have to say, I wasn't a very big fan of Cube and found it to be pretty cliche in most respects. It's so easy to come up with ways to play off of the human survival instinct (specifically turning against your fellow humans/friends) which was the whole point of Cube. Yeah the characters being stuck in a giant cube with booby traps everywhere was kind of fun but more cheesy than anything else. 

Now comes Splice with the likes of Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley (pictured) playing two brilliant young biochemists working on splicing genes together for this company to come up with a new form of synthesizing protein to make a profit, naturally. But they want to go further than making weird, blob creatures like "Fred" and "Lucy", they want to incorporate human DNA into a new experiment, but no way are the big corporate leaders gonna let them do something controversial like that. But they do it anyway, and what they get is Dren: a female part human thingy.

Taken at face value, this is your typical experiment-gone-bad movie

but it begins and continues with more of a focus on the scientists themselves rather than on any gross-out horror factors which there is hardly any of actually. The trailers for this were quite misleading by trying to make it look like a horror movie. Instead, it does a great job of developing the characters, making us almost care about Dren and we go back and forth between agreeing with Clive (Brody) and Elsa (Polley) when it comes to what is to be done with Dren or whether or not to let her live.

So overall, the film is nicely paced and feels just creepy enough to keep it tense and interesting. 

But then comes the ending. Oh dear, the ending, I was so, so, SO disappointed. I don't really want to ruin it for anyone  so I'm not going to say what happens, but I will say people in my theatre were laughing. Including my friends, and I think I might even have let out a chuckle. Clive and Elsa are in serious pain and troubled on screen but it just comes across as so...SILLY. Seriously, I don't know what Natali was thinking. It was so painful to see these events coming and you're like "this can't happen, please don't let this happen, oh please...oh NO. oh no! GAH!" 

It seems Natali thought he was going to make us go "OMG! that's CRAZZY!" instead of "OMG! that's HILARIOUS!" Unless I'm missing something and this was supposed to be a dark comedy, Natali failed horribly. Probably the most disappointing movie I've seen for a while because the rest was really quite good. Oh well. Better luck with Predators Brody! (which looks awesome btw and has a lot more going for it in regards to actors/film crew/etc). In the meantime, instead of going to see Splice (or The A-Team) join Adrien for Brodyquest!