Review - Splice

[Darkwing]

I wrote this one in October:

Splice
Starring
Adrien Brody
Sarah Polley

Introduction
As
many reviews have already stated, this film starts out with a concept
with some potential for a half decent, mind challenging film. But it
doesn’t take more than fifteen minutes for you to realize that you are
wasting your time. Every so often so half decent, basic ideas are
brought up, but are quickly dashed in the poor acting and the poor
fluidity of the film.


Acting
I’m not
entirely sure what happened here as the movie had some half decent
actors in it, but the acting was fairly poor overall. Adrien Brody’s
character was very stiff in my opinion and it felt more like he was
reading words off of the page and he seemed to do a lot of just standing
still or not moving around that much, which made some of the scenes
drag on. There was little engagement of the acting with the viewer so
it made it difficult to feel for the characters.

Both characters
went through a bizarre set of character arcs that really made them feel
like simply movie characters and not actual people. Adrien Brody’s
character for starters is this very scientific yet almost classy and
punk at the same time. He is also very harsh towards the “Splice” for
the majority of the movie, including the very idea of doing this.
Suddenly things turn around and he’s loving and compassionate towards it
(including making love in a whimsical scene).

Sarah Polley’s
character wasn’t much better. She starts off as your regular movie
character with very little depth. Her purpose seems to solely be to
move the plot along by pressuring Adrien Brody into helping her make
this “Splice” creature. She starts off compassionate and loving towards
the creature, but about halfway through, things change and she’s
suddenly very harsh, cold and bitter and very angry. She turns into
this suddenly aggressive character which makes the audience step outside
of the film again to evaluate what’s going on, which is a bad thing.
Also, her character is moving along with very little depth, when there
is suddenly this backstory introduced involving her and its placement is
neither subtle or fitting.

Cinematography
Fortunately,
the only really redeeming point to this film would be the filming,
editing and soundtrack. The director plays with some interesting,
albeit cliche shots which help to keep the viewer engaged (even
partially) in the film. The film had an overall nice look colour-wise
and there wasn’t much along the lines of poor lighting or camera angles.
Near the end however, there are some shots that really stand out as
inappropriate simply because they are corny and once again remove you
from the film.
On the same respect, the editing is fairly standard,
but the opening title sequence is quite well done, plus all of the
creature effects are also very well done. The film had a chilling theme
which was very nice, though unfortunately the film itself wasn’t very
chilling.

Story
The premise is all right as
a starting point, however, it is becoming more common for films to
explore the topic of genetic research, cloning, hybrids etc. This movie
only stands out because it’s bad. The movie is a bit of a paradox in
that the movie seems to drag on because nothing really feels like it’s
happening, yet at the same time, the scenes are short and somewhat
pointless for a fair amount of the film. The story goes from half
decent, to bad, to finally laughable. Unfortunately with B-movies, you
can laugh at them the whole way through, thus satisfying your
entertainment requirements. This movie however doesn’t really become
laughable until about the last third of the movie, so there’s two thirds
of relatively boring material and attempted intricacy. For being a
film intended to keep you on your toes, it’s very predictable,
especially the ending. They set things up in this movie and it’s very
obvious that it was a set-up so that things can happen later on to make
the events come full circle, implying some sort of cleverness in the
film. However, it is very plain and apparent that the events are
happening so that something similar can happen later.

Conclusion
I
would chose a Roger Korman film any day of the week over this movie. I
found myself constantly looking at the clock, counting how much time
was left until the end of the movie. It wasn’t engaging and in multiple
instances, did things to throw the audience out of the movie until
eventually you don’t even bother to get back into it, but just wait it
out, just to say you finished it.

3/10