I'm scared of spoiling anything so I'll copy paste the Synopsis for the movie.
"director Vincenzo Natali offers up another visual feast with this sci-fi thriller starring acclaimed actors Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley. SPLICE follows a pair of scientists who have found success with creating genetic hybrids of various animals. When they attempt to add human DNA to the their formula, the results are both surprising and potentially destructive."
"CUBE" I can comfortably say if my favorite Thriller of all time. Sadly the director Vincenzo Natali doesn't have much under his belt, and I have been craving to see more of his work. He blew me away with Splice.
SPLICE is comforting to me in many ways. It's a movie that tackles one of my favorite genres, one that I thought had been dead since the late 90's. I guess a good way of referring to it is the "Science Gone Wrong" genre. There's been a lot of those recently, but they tend to be Apocalyptic. To me that changes it. Rather than "Matrix", or "Terminator", or any of those Apocalyptic scaled stories, SPLICE is more like "The Fly", "The Thirteenth Floor", "Event Horizon" or "From Beyond".
Those movies mentioned tend to have more of a campy tone. Like "Mad Scientist" feel to it, more or less in each of those obviously. The first great thing Splice does is set up the story with characters that are more grounded, and yes, isn't afraid to have fun with itself but treat its situations without cheesiness. For example, the Facility that the main character's work in is named with the initials N.E.R.D. This might seem campy, but actually perfectly illustrates the type of people that work there. These aren't up tight bland scientists, nor are they eccentric crazy scientists type. Like I said, they're young, grounded people who happen to be biology geniuses.
SPLICE clearly deals with gene splicing. Now, what this means is these scientists are trying to basically create and grow organisms like vegetables. This is very contemporary and new to our generation. And with something that concerns manipulating something with as many variables as life, so many things can be unpredictable and scary. This movie delivers in setting those tones.
In fact this movie is so dense in undertones and themes. I can't even begin to list them. It's the kind of movie that I'm sure I'll catch things I didn't catch the first time I watched it. I'm going to start listing a few to give you an idea.
There's playing God. Adam and Eve-like relationship. Conflicting morality when breaking new grounds (no pun intended). Parent hood. Male and female roll-reversal. Nature vs. Nurture. Pet vs. Child.
... I can go on forever.
The point is, this isn't just a piece of entertainment. Not just a creature feature about it's thrills. It's saying something and doing it god damn well. The story is so well put together and I feel achieves in spending en Shamalon ough time on each scene. There are lots of twists and turns in the story. But non of them feel like a punch in the nuts. Everything is foreshadowed, everything makes complete sense. It's not an ambiguous movie in structure, and it's especially not ambiguous in the sense where there's nothing there and you need to interpret. In fact, there's so much content there that you need to interpret it yourself. It's my favorite kind of movie. Simple on the outside, complex on the inside.
While I do love this movie, the ending was definitely not disappointing, but something inside me felt it was a bit lacking. It's probably because the last 30 minutes of the movie was hell for me because I had never in my life had to take a leak so god damn bad. I was literally about to give up and pee on the floor.
...Seriously, now that movies are getting longer, they need to bring back the intermission trend. it's retarded. Back in spain long movies had intermissions. you could take a break, smoke talk with your friends about what your thoughts are so far, then go back in.
It's important to note that this movie evolves into a horror movie towards the end. while some of you might find all these themes and undertones a pretentious thing in a movie. with a story tackling such a new phenomenon, i think it's important to start off playing with the possibilities and working its way to a set tonal conclusion... if that makes sense.
But anyways. To wrap up this thing. If you like "Science Gone Wrong" movies, If you like creatures, eerie, movies that create the biggest sense of mixed feelings about things. Watch this movie, it's a fucking classic to me. I think a lot of movies in the future will look back at this one for inspiration.
I've been reading a lot of reviews and i have noticed a lot of the bad reviews are pointing out that the movie was too eerie and didn't know how to handle itself. But I feel they're reflecting on their own emotions while they were watching it. The subject matter is naturally that way. When you set out to make a movie that is morally conflicting, you have to expect to run into those feelings. I think this film made these uncomfortable situations in good taste, as opposed to something like... THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE!
anyways. I'm done.
!["SPLICE" a Review by Hans Van Harken]()
