On Horror Chick: The Awfulness of "Splice" Cannot Be Solved by Adrien Brody and Monster Sex
Sheesh, will no one say a nice word? Despite its flaws, Splice has a lot more going for it than makeup and special effects. This review notwithstanding, good movies don't have to resemble TV procedurals in which protagonists are uniformly rational, efficient, and earnest in every domain of their lives; such people tend to be tedious, except perhaps to those who know them really, really well. The flawed protagonists here maintain viewer interest because their coldness and narrowly functional motivations commingle with tenderness and fear. Like their work, their personalities function on an edge. Their creation, Dren, is even more interesting. Ebert did note in his review that Dren should have been given more attention, and that's true enough. But until the overdone last half-hour, Splice is funny and warm while being intermittently unnerving, which is to say it evokes a tense, off-balance mood. Apparently these tonal subtleties were lost on this reviewer because the film didn't present characters who were "admirable" enough. I really don't get that perspective; I want to like movie characters, just as I want to like people I meet -- but I care at least as much whether I find them interesting and layered, and the scientists are that. Clive could have been fleshed out a bit more, but Elsa was bursting with interesting contradictions. Bear in mind that in the real world, top-tier professionals in a field sometimes do have ascetic tendencies, emotional conflicts that have motivated their career paths, a competitive streak, and other complexities. Yes, this is an extreme case, but it's a genre movie, reveling in extremes, not a documentary. If the reviewer had saved her intense criticism for the last half-hour rather than blanketing it over the movie as a whole, I would find her take unassailable.
0
On Horror Chick: The Awfulness of "Splice" Cannot Be Solved by Adrien Brody and Monster Sex
A quick follow-up: I was somewhat unfair, in that the review did acknowledge horror movies should have their moments of human irrationality. But the extremes of risk-taking that the review deems so objectionable not only mesh well with at least Elsa's psychology, but follow pretty naturally from the subject matter. That is, not only does the suspense genre essentially require that this sort of experimentation be an undercover project, but the controversial character of the research requires it too. Can you imagine any university or government approving this research? And If Dren were hatched in an entirely above-board, controlled, collective way, and her creators weren't in any sense outlaws, there wouldn't be grist for a film, now, would there? So a complaint about the scientists' crazy, stupid behavior throughout really doesn't wash. I think.