"Splice" is an Infertile Hybrid
The movie Splice recently opened in the U.S. Since it's about mixing DNA from different mammals, including humans, I went to see it. You don't have to.
The protagonists are a wife-and-husband (emphatically in that order) scientific team, who are apparently creating novel proteins by combining genetic material from different species, than identifying novel genes which they isolate after discovering a protein of interest. They do not make goat- or cow-like creatures that produce human proteins in milk. Instead, they have made a pair of completely new organisms (named Ginger and Fred; failed experiments included Bonnie and Clyde, etc) that look like nothing on earth and have some original mating rituals, involving the rhythmic intertwining of surprisingly delicate tendrils. But when our heroine mixes in a soupçon -- or more -- of human DNA, the plot thickens.
The easy comparison is to Frankenstein, only updated to today's headlines. I see it as a cross between something as serious as To Kill a Mockingbird and as chilling as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre -- part ethical conundrum and loss of innocence, part horror pic with a neat twist (I won't give away anything major). The trouble is, it doesn't do either well.
The opening set-up isn't bad, with a few nice wisecracks: Why are we doing this? "Because Wired doesn't interview losers." There's a excellent corporate exec who has the nerve to want "product" out of the lab. She turns down the proposal to include human elements in the next prototype despite a classic invocation of the medical justification, basically: Who knows what diseases we'll cure but there are bound to be some. (Their business manager has already pointed out that "the regulators and politicians would tear us to pieces.") Wacky rebel that our heroine is, she gives it an unauthorized, illegal and unsupervised shot anyway.
Some of what follows is presumably meant to dramatize bioethical dilemmas [see this pdf for extensive production notes], but since they've already busted right through the major taboos -- and these are the heroes -- expressions of concern rather fall flat. There is some potentially interesting material about families, but it's never adequately developed and is rather off the clear point of the film. And if you don't like cheesy horror flix, you might want to skip the last half hour; if you do, you'll appreciate a nifty pair of outrageous sex scenes but probably hope for a lot more in the way of surprises and thrills 'n' chills.
To be fair, the acting -- Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody are the leads -- is more than adequate, and the effects are well-done. Rotten Tomatoes finds the critical consensus to be mostly favorable ("a smart, well-acted treat for horror fans"). Roger Ebert liked it somewhat better than I did; Mick LaSalle perhaps somewhat less. The opening weekend gross was a disappointing $7.4 million on 2600 screens, not great for a "creature feature" and the worst showing of the four new releases (8th overall).
The professionalism of this "artsy horror flick" -- it's a Franco-Canadian production (in English), which debuted in Europe last year -- extends to a conclusion that leaves open the possibility of a sequel. But don't hold your breath. Splice is, in the end, an infertile hybrid.
Previously on Biopolitical Times: