When I saw the trailer for Splice I thought to myself: “Wow, I remember that I totally hated this movie back when it was called Species“. Btw, did you know that they made 4 Species movies? I somehow managed to avoid 2 of them, and I wasn’t really in the mood to watch a movie that seemed to be just like that, but different. A one paragraph synopsis of Splice could be mistaken as the synopsis of Species. Observe:
Scientists make a hybrid baby by combining human DNA with a little bit of something else. The baby grows up to be a somewhat attractive female who does not appreciate being confined and hidden away from the world. Shit goes down, people die, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Fortunately this is where the similarities end. Where Species was a dumb festival of sex, violence and gore, Splice is a smart, psychological drama. It is strikingly original and very, very different. I was literally blown away by this movie. I was expecting it to be a fairly standard moralizing monster flick, in which we learn that scientists should not play god and mess with human DNA. That’s pretty much the approved standard for horror and SF these days. Whenever I see it in the movie I think back to this excellent Dresden Codak comic titled “Caveman Science Fiction”:
click to see the full comic
This is the go-to story template for most movie makers. Take some new technological advance that people are currently concerned about, capitalize on that concern and have one of the characters deliver a big moralizing “ME AM PLAY GODS” speech at the end. When I saw the trailer for Splice I was almost completely sure the movie will be about the evils of human cloning. But it was not. If anything, Splice is one of the strongest arguments for legalization of human cloning and human hybrid research I have ever seen on the silver screen. It shows what can happen when this type of research continues to be forbidden. People will do it anyway, but in secret and without oversight. They will end up rising a half-human hybrid baby on their own and they will keep it locked in some dimly lit basement, prohibit it from going outside or socializing with other people.
Splice is not Species. It's actually a good movie.
Dren, the spliced half-human female ends up being emotionally unstable not due to some quirk in her DNA but because her “parents” (or creators if you will) are emotionally unstable themselves. They have trouble figuring out whether they should treat her as a human being, an animal or an experiment. They hide her from the world like an embarrassing secret. They are scared by her rather natural curiosity of the the outside world and her emerging sexuality. They are not prepared to deal with her unusual (but not malicious or overtly violent) psychological makeup. Dren is basically an abused child – and when she finally goes feral, it is not because she is part animal. It is because her guardians really failed at parenting.
If the research project that created her was legal, perhaps things would be different. Perhaps she would be given to a responsible surrogate family, have access to psychologists who could help her work out her issues and would enjoy the human rights we all take for granted. Who knows. The point this movie makes is that someone will make an experiment like that eventually – whether it is legal or not. Hell, for all we know, a little Dren may already exist locked up in some dirty basement somewhere out there. We can’t really stop it from happening, and keeping it illegal is only going to make things worse when it happens. What we can do, is to make sure that it is done the right way – in the open and with full legal protection to the hybrid baby.
This is why you need to go see this film. Because it says what Hollywood never had guts to say. Because it doesn’t do the the “ME AM PLAY GODS” anti-science, anti-progress shtick. It is smart, different and original.
Dresden Codak FTW! :D
Seriously? I hated this movie. Personally, I wouldn’t describe it as very ‘smart’ at all. From a mere story-telling standpoint, you can tell how it’s going to end from the first few scenes and despite your impressions, it played out the “I am play gods” plot to a tee. The protagonists created an ego monster. The splice had little to no practical scientific utility but did serve to boost their egos. The fact that they do it without over-site is inconsequential there, as a large number of those movies have scientists acting without over-site. Dr Frankenstein (the quintessential scientist playing God) had a distinct lack of over-site if you’ll recall.
Anyway, the frustration I had with this movie was the same frustration that I had when I read Frankenstein. The protagonists are all absolute morons. For starters, they knowingly created and raised a creature with human intelligence and an alien psychology. Even with proper resources and public funding and over-site I cannot imagine a way to care for the thing that was both ethical and prevented unknown disasters. You assume that the creature turned dangerous solely because of its upbringing, but it was heavily implies by the movie that the reason it turned out the way it did was that its psychological makeup was determined by the creatures that went into it. They could have been perfect parents and it still could have tried to kill/rape them.
Of course the actual science in the movie was complete bullshit, defying the laws of thermodynamics among other things. In that final sequence when the create utters its final words, I (and a few others) burst out laughing because it was so goofy and unbelievable.
@ astine:
Point taken. I guess the creature could still become aggressive and rape-y even without the parental abuse. I guess I was just surprised that they didn’t go that route. Also I felt like they didn’t demonize science and scientists as a whole – just the two protagonists who were clearly unhinged from the start. But perhaps they did it in a roundabout way – instead of demonizing science they have shown us crazy scientists with nothing to balance them against.
You are absolutely right that the human splice had basically no utility. That bothered me too. On the other hand the idea of doing weird experiments for shits and giggles just because we can is not that outlandish.
Also good point about the shaky sscience in the film. Especially the puny wings. The creature should not even be able to glide on these things.
Interesting how we both watched the same movie and had drastically different reactions to it. :)
Luke Maciak wrote:
*cough* Dr. Mengele *cough*
…
@ TJ:
Great, Godwins law invoked in just 4 comments. I think this is a new record on this blog. :)
Interesting, I’ll have to watch this movie now just to see who I agree with more. Your argument is basically a variant of “If we outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns”, and as such I completely agree. I just hope I’ll get the same impression from the movie =)
re: update
I should comment more often :)
Huh. So, I have now watched it, and I mostly agree with Luke (at least up until the final scenes, but I’ll get to that). Maybe the intent of the movie wasn’t to show how science can be dangerous without proper oversight (actually, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t, based on a lot of the scenes), but overall it did give me that impression. Also, regarding scientific utility, I thought they addressed that pretty well (curing diseases and all that). Sure, an actual human splice as portrayed in the movie was quite obviously the wrong way to go to achieve that goal, but then again they did originally do it just to prove they could with human DNA.
I also agree that the way Dren turned out was in part because of her “parents”. However, a much bigger matter in my opinion is the fact that she aged extremely fast. I don’t know about you, but for me growing up was quite a challenge when it took 15-20 years. I can’t even imagine the psychological ramifications of going through it all in what, a couple of months? There’s no time to learn how to interact with people, no time to fully learn the difference between right and wrong.
All things considered I thought it was a pretty good movie. It did raise a lot of questions, many of them concerning morality. Unfortunately when they were all at the farm near the end, it turned into Generic Horror Movie. It really bothers me that they couldn’t think of a better ending than that. Up until that point it was fine, but that final scene in the woods felt a whole lot like “Me am play gods”.