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Splice (2009) Review
If you’ve ever wondered what a bird, horse, fish, kangaroo, lizard, snail, leaf and human crossbreed would look like, this is the film for you!
Now, before I started to watch Splice, I knew it was a horror film, I knew it was a science fiction, and I thought I knew the plot. What I didn’t know is how strange it is! Personally, I wouldn’t class it has a horror film, it’s more science fiction with a few frightening elements.
Again, I will save my personal opinion on the quality of the film until after we’ve heard from some critics (sources: IMDB & Rotten Tomatoes). This film is “fresh” according to Rotten Tomatoes, with a 75% score, which is pretty impressive, I assumed people wouldn’t like it due to it’s almost tongue in cheek sense of humour at times, such as the name of the laboratories being N.E.R.D.
There are other moments that made me laugh a little, some were admittedly due to my slightly sick sense of humour, others were more obvious jokes within the film. Splice has a lower score on IMDb, only getting 6.1/10. One reviewer said “It doesn’t take its terrific premise quite as far as it should, but Splice is a smart, well-acted treat for horror fans.” And I couldn’t agree more, apart from the horror fans bit.
The basic premise of the film, hopefully without giving anything away, is this: two scientists (Adrian Brody and Sarah Polley) that have been experimenting with splicing different animals together think they can cure diseases by adding human DNA into the cocktail. However, they don’t have permission to do this, so they do it in secret and raise Dren (nerd backwards). Dren is their experiment, who they later grow fond of (no surprises).
From the way this film was advertised at the time, you would be forgiven for thinking that Dren quickly turns into a horrible mutant, hell bent on destruction. You would be wrong. This film is very slow, but not too slow, which is good because they could have easily got it wrong and made a boring film. So if you watch this thinking it will be full of violence, much like I was, you could be disappointed to see 90 minutes of plot and minimal action. This is not a bad thing though, the plot is extremely good, the characters have a lot of depth, and I sometimes wanted to find out more about Elsa’s back story, because it’s not explained very much, but then again, it’s not essential to the plot.
There are a few minor holes in the plot, but I think we can forgive it for a couple of mistakes, like the fact Dren has a sharp tip to her tail, when Clive even questions it and says something like “We didn’t use any predatory animal DNA” That’s one minor hole I found, there’s another one towards the end, but it may have been intentional.
Also, this film has quite a lot of swearing, a lot of it isn’t even needed.
I’ll be honest, this film was not what I expected, but I still enjoyed it very much, it could have been an attempt at copying Alien, but it managed to be something entirely different.
Splice (2009): 6.5/10
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1017460/
