Thursday Review: Splice

EDITORS NOTE:  THIS REVIEW IS FULL OF SPOILERS.  THIS MOVIE IS TOTALLY CRAZY AND WEIRD AND IF YOU ARE EXPECTING ANY OF IT, THE THING WILL BE RUINED.  IF YOU ARE GOING TO SEE THIS MOVIE, TURN BACK NOW.

Susan:
Oh my fuck, where to even BEGIN talking about this movie.

Basically, Splice is about a married couple (Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley) who are also edgy scientists doing genetic experiments on various sorts of animals.  They have successfully spliced together a bunch of animals to make some really good protein, but their funding gets cut before they can start splicing in human DNA.  But because they are edgy rock-n-roll scientists, they break the rules and make a human/amphibian embryo in secret. (Get it??  That’s why the movie is called Splice!)  Things go predictably awry and the first part of the movie is pretty boring and all about, like, science and the danger of playing God and also about this married couple trying to decide how to treat the thing they’ve made.  She wants to keep it and treats it like a pet.  (Lady scientists, always wanting to raise their experiments like babies, AM I RIGHT??)   He wants to destroy it or at the very least treat it like a scientific specimen at first, but then later when Sarah Polley starts being mean to it, he gets all soft and fatherly-ish about it.  Anyway, all of that is a real yawn-fest.  BUT THEN THE THING GROWS BOOBS AND ADRIEN BRODY TOTALLY DOES IT WITH THE THING AND YOUR BRAIN EXPLODES.  And then the rest of the movie has you squirming and uncomfortable in that totally good Orphan-esque kind of way.

Most sci-fi movies about creating new creatures and playing God and all of that raise questions about the humanity/morality of the scientists who do it.  And most of those movies end up killing off the creator of the monster, which has been a tradition since Frankenstein.  But man, I have never seen a movie about creating monsters in which the creator has SEX with the thing it made.  Splice was a whole new level of awkward-weird and I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

Geoff:
Man, there is just really nothing else to focus on, is there? I mean, you’re sitting there, and you can see the writers leading you down a path where the chimera/monster/freak/whatever is going to jump Adrian Brody, but you’re thinking, “Well, there’s no way Brody’ll go for it.” But then there’s the scene where he’s dancing with her/it, and then he’s reaching out to her unconsciously when she’s staring at him through the video monitor, and then she’s jumping him in the barn, and you think “AH AH AH!!!” It wasn’t fear, but something had me covering my eyes and watching through one break of my fingers. I think you could more accurately describe it as some combination of disbelief and revulsion.

Here’s what I’ll say. I actually wasn’t completely hating the first portion of the movie. I thought Brody and Polley made a decent couple, and I could see (at least to a point, but the sense of the whole thing started to break down real quick) why Brody stuck around even as Polley kept going too far and then going too far again and etc.

I thought her whole I’m-a-mom-and-this-is-my-baby shtick got a little annoying, but I was willing to go along with it. But the whole thing just goes nuts in the third act. When Polley turns and suddenly it’s Brody who’s okay with letting the creature live, and then suddenly he’s doin’ it with it, and then Polley’s getting raped by the thing’s son … well, I just had no words.

Does it seem incredibly morbid that I laughed for much of this movie? I laughed during their fundraiser unveiling (WORST. FUNDRAISER. EVER.), and I laughed HARD during the sex scene. And I wasn’t the only one. The couple behind me couldn’t stop either, and we were exchanging looks. I don’t know whether the film’s Italian director was trying to play the final third completely straight or with a smirk on his face. Regardless, you laugh for a while, but then (particularly when the rape scene happens, and then the PREGNANCY) you just feel like taking a shower and getting the movie off of yourself.

Susan:
GEOFF.  GET READY TO HAVE YOUR MIND BLOWN.  That wasn’t the thing’s SON, that was the THING ITSELF.  It changed genders (like another of the couple’s experiments had, an event which led to the WORST. FUNDRAISER. EVER. moment Geoff mentioned above), and then IT, the same monster which had seduced Brody, raped Polley.  That’s right.  Everyone does it with everyone/thing in this movie, folks.  I didn’t know the director was Italian, but that makes so much sense to me now.

You are correct to say that Brody and Polley made a good couple — their chemistry was awesome.  They also were strong enough actors to animate what was, at times, a pretty cheesy script.  And you are also right to say that everything goes completely nuts in the third act, which was, at least for me, the best part of this movie — that you “see” it coming, but you really DON’T see it coming.  You wanted to take a shower and get it off of you?  I kind of enjoyed the squirm.  Mostly because I really didn’t expect this movie to be more than a parade of boring gender stereotypes (which it kind of was) and fancy fake-science.  It definitely surprised and even, dare I say, shocked me.

I also dug Polley’s psychological backstory — apparently, the character had a controlling mom who kept her locked in a room with a bare mattress and didn’t let her play with dolls or wear makeup.  So as the thing gets older, Polley tries to give it/she the things our noble scientist never had.  Until the thing is ungrateful of her love, at which point Polley goes crazy just like her mom (apparently) did.  I mean, it’s another movie where the lady is painted as the worst person in the film, but luckily in this parade of skewed morality, she comes out looking not that much worse than anyone else.

Geoff:
Man, are you sure it was the same creature itself? I thought maybe Brody’d gotten her pregnant when they did it, and then the creature getting sick was just the pregnancy happening at the same rapid pace everything else did with its physiology. I think you’re probably right though, especially if you’ve already looked stuff up about the movie. I myself have not.

Whatever. The point is the ending is FUCKED UP. And if your reading of the end is the correct one (it would make more sense with the stuff about the females becoming male), then it’s even more fucked up. And I’m not saying it’s not worth seeing. I told people today that I’d just watched the movie, and they asked me if it was good, and I had to insist that they just see it. I said this because you really can’t get an idea of this movie without buying a ticket yourself.

That said, I maintain that the final third — while interesting and fascinating on all sorts of icky, gross, disgusting levels of human sexuality, pathology, etc. — went completely nuts. In a good way, in a not-altogether-expected way, yes, and the film never really cheated its logic, but still … nuts. Whether it’s a good nuts is completely subjective.