Splice attempts to tell the tale of genetic manipulation gone wrong, in an escalating series of events which force two geneticists to make tough moral decisions in a changing landscape of greed, discovery, family, and love.
The tale it actually succeeds in telling is that of the disjointed coming of age of a small, creepy, hyperactive frozen turkey. It runs around, has a dress slapped on it by some lunatics, grows some eyebrows and Wolverine-style retractable wings (because that's a thing), gets a makeover (I kid you not), learns to dance (still not kidding), and then starts seducing/killing stuff.
The rough premise of this movie had some great potential. I think that one place where they fell completely off the rails was in deciding to actually show their creature in plain view, fully lit, for long portions of the movie. This thing was the uncanny valley personified. (Near-personified?) It made me recoil from so much of what was going on, and made sitting through the full length of the movie painful.
I'm trying to think how this movie would have worked if they had kept the CG to a minimum, hidden the creature in the shadows for most of the time, and spent the extra budget on fixing up the flow of the story a bit, maybe giving the scientists some reasonable motivation for their decisions. It could have been decent, when in fact, well... did I mention that there were giant French-kissing slugs?
All that said, there is some fascination to be had in watching such a confused movie. It kept making less and less sense right up until the end, but for some reason, I couldn't take my eyes off it. The fascination of a train wreck, perhaps? Or maybe the underlying premise was interesting enough that the execution of it was secondary to seeing how it ended? Speaking of which, near the end, I thought I had spotted the plot twist they were going to spring on us, and rolled my eyes, as I figured that it was fairly obvious, and it turns out they didn't even take that - they went with an even more obvious, plain vanilla "twist", which was even more disappointing.
Fun movie fact: I couldn't get this out of my head for a good half hour during this movie...
Modifiers: Bad stupidness, and I almost gave Adrien Brody the nod for "actors who annoy me", but it was just one movie, so I'll give him another shot.
Rating: 4.5 out of 10
2 comments:
Ew! Glad I didn't watch this one with you!
p.s. add more photos to your blog posts!
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