The idea that she's a stew of unnaturally fused genetic material apparently wasn't reason enough.Įlsa and Clive are not the best parental figures for poor Dren, their own attitudes and conduct toward their creation shifting abruptly, often without clear cause. The story throws in traces of lame, ill-defined family backstory to explain Elsa's reluctance to have a real child with Clive, as well as to account for Dren's behavioral instability. The filmmakers seamlessly graft computer imagery onto Chaneac's shapely real parts to fashion Dren's nonhuman appendages and features. She grows bored of confinement, but Elsa and Clive fear she might be discovered outside. Now they want to use human DNA in a hybrid that could revolutionize science and medicine. Natali composes some truly striking images centered around Dren, who's bald, has a tail and birdlike lower legs, a fierce intellect and fiercer appetites, as well as some serious mommy-and-daddy issues. Dren reveals she has carnivorous tendencies and retractable wings and enters adolescence. In the new horror tale 'Splice,' superstar genetic engineers Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) specialize in splicing DNA from different animals to create incredible new hybrids. Instead, Elsa and Clive move her out to the country, shutting her up in a rickety barn, under the sound scientific judgment that Yale locks and brittle clapboards are the best things to contain your dangerous new lifeform. Yet the movie's occasional bolts-in-the-neck crudeness is offset by its wicked humor, really cool effects and a fair number of genuine scares as the laboratory offspring of two cocky scientists grows from cute little freak to sensuous monster.Īdrien Brody and Sarah Polley bring more weight to these research whizzes than their rather superficially drawn characters merit in the screenplay Natali (whose films include the cult sci-fi thrillers "Cube" and "Cypher") wrote with Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor.īrody's Clive Nicoli and Polley's Elsa Kast are possibly the dumbest super-geniuses ever on screen, a rock-star romantic and professional couple who apparently skipped Medical Ethics 101 on their way to the top of the recombinant DNA field.Ĭlive and Elsa's hybrid creations - two writhing blobs of flesh named Fred and Ginger, formed from the DNA of different animals - hold enormous promise of medical breakthroughs for the pharmaceutical giant that funds the research.ĭren is the sort of creature that needs the right environment - say, a steel-walled observation chamber - to play well with others. The parts sometimes don't fit that gracefully.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |