I just watched this movie on On Demand.
I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. What a great movie.
I didn’t go see it in theaters because I thought it was going to be on of those typical “cat and mouse” movies. Very thought provoking and very original in my opinion.
(Original even if it does have a lot of parallels between this and Frankenstein’s Monster.)
I haven’t seen it since it came out, but I liked it at the time, except I remember wanting to kick the lead character’s asses. Both characters were supposed to be so smart, but were each stupid in their own way, breathtakingly so. It was one of those movies where the plot depends on stupidity though, so it was required of them. I can like or dislike such stupidity plot device films depending on other factors. Seeing Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody in a movie together was a big plus factor. The actress who played Dren was amazing to me, considering she acted mainly through her facial expressions. The film was original, strange and bizarre and I like well-made original, strange and bizarre movies, another big plus factor, so all in all I came away liking it.
I always meant to see it again to get a better handle on liking or disliking the film itself, but I never did.
I saw it in the theater, and I’m not really proud of that.
It was very much like an episode of Tales from the Crypt with a slightly bigger budget. I mean that both as a compliment and criticism. The conference scene where they debuted their genetic creations really emphasized this with both the way it ended in an over-the-top humiliating bloodbath and how small and dark the room felt - like they couldn’t afford to have more than ten people on screen.
A somewhat strange but fascinating movie. I enjoyed it.
Hated it. Stupid plot, poor acting, bad editing.
I watched it with some buddies (yes, I have buddies… work friends) at the movie theater and one of them said, “That’s two hours I’ll never get back.”
It was interesting until the last reel, when it turned into your typical monster movie.
I like monster movies, I just had expectations that this was going to be something more.
So… umm… Would ya?
I’d hit it.
I really liked this movie. Right until the last ten minutes when the MBAs got a-hold of it and started adding their “valued” contributions to the project. As far as I’m concerned, the movie ended shortly after the female scientist cut off Dren’s tail. Perhaps she murdered her parent-figures, but the director stopped making a movie after that point. Spliced is the only movie that I am aware of in which the director has shown an accurate portrayal of the life of an abused child: Dren.
There are three major components of abuse: love, indifference/isolation, and hatred. Many film makers only show the hatred; this makes it difficult to understand why the abused child stays with the abuser. Most people will weakly use the magic words of “Stockholm Syndrome”. It is that first segment of abuse, love, that makes separation hard: the mind remembers those pleasant times more than the isolation and the hatred. The memory of the happiness is why the child continues to allow him/herself to be hurt by the abuser. Guilt plays a role too, and if Dren had lived long enough, I’m sure the female* would have called her up around Christmas time to remind Dren about the time that the female made her a blue dress; the movie didn’t end like that, so I’m not going to dwell on that aspect. The film is effective because it shows the emotional manipulations involved with each stage of the abuse very clearly where as most films only focus on the hatred.
*I’m not DeanC2000, I just can’t remember the name of the female scientist.
I’m not going to discuss the love because I think we can all agree that Dren was loved during the beginning of the movie. Well, except for the murder attempt by her father-figure. In any case, Dren was loved by her mother-figure.
In the middle of the film, Dren was isolated without interaction in the barn. Isolation for an eight hour, or more, work day, for a creature with a life span measured in months, must be like weeks of isolation for a human. There have been threads about whether or not solitary confinement is torture; I’m going to assert, for the purpose of this discussion, that it is, based on the ethical principle of “if you have to ask”. Humans are social animals; not just in the sense that we like to be around others, but that we must be around other people; based on this, Dren’s isolation was abuse, the same as hitting her with a wooden spoon would be. It’s hard to convince people of this, and I am lazy, so I am going to move on.
The female scientist acts to increase Dren’s isolation and to strengthen Dren’s dependence on the female by removing the cat. The female did spend some time with Dren during the working day, but the female scientist interacted with Dren as she would towards a toy, not a person: the female scientist liked playing “Wear Makeup” while Dren liked drawing and physical activities; this is a demonstration of the scientist using Dren to satisfy the scientist’s needs. However, Dren didn’t find this activity unpleasant and it satisfied her need for human interaction. This is incredibly fucking perverse: the female is hindering Dren’s basic motivations; this is an example of backhanded love. My basic argument is that the female interacted with Dren in order to satisfy, bring pleasure to, the scientist, not the child: Dren. Dren was the female scientist’s toy. I need to make this a paragraph somehow, but I want to digress and discuss the scientist’s attitude towards Dren’s omnivore-ism.
We see an allegory for religious intolerance in the film. After Dren ate the rabbit one would would have expected the scientists to feed Dren meat. However, the scientists stock their house with vegetables; this is akin to a religious family denying a child’s homosexuality, with the religion being vegetarianism, and the homosexuality being the desire for meat; the scientists are creating stress in Dren by denying a fundamental part of her psychology. Religiously intolerant parents create stress by demonizing core elements of a child’s identity. This element of Dren was hated, the same as religion promotes hatred of gay people for being dirty-boys. For this reason I excuse the killing of the cat by Dren: as far as Dren was concerned the cat was a fucking chicken/boy-girlfriend.
The female scientist later returned the cat to Dren. From Dren’s point of view (POV), this is an acceptance by the scientist of one Dren’s core beliefs, as a religious parent might tell a child hat s/he loved the child, including the gay portion of that child’s identity. Dren then took this expression of acceptance as sincere and killed the cat; don’t judge Dren too harshly: your pork cutlets come from a cut piglet. The female scientist, of course**, provided the cat (a thing valued by Dren) in order to have something that the scientist could later remove; in order to use the stick to motivate, you must have a carrot, love is required to force a person to stick around to be hated. In those tender teenaged years, Dren brought her Gay-lover home to meet her mother who had previously expressed acceptance.
**I say “of course” because I don’t have evidence to prove my comment, and I am hoping that you will not notice. Shhh.
The female scientist reacted negatively when confronted with Dren’s [del] homosexuality [/del] omnivorism. (Similarly, the economic crisis was a bit of a bother- thanks a lot guys, I’m stuck in Tranna). The female scientist expressed her hatred of Dren (recall that shortly previous she was expressing what from Dren’s POV could be interpreted as love) by punishing Dren. The female scientist humiliated Dren by stripping her naked and mutilating her tail. I’d discuss the Freudian implications, but then I’d have to go back and try justifying an Oedipus complex when I would rather confirm that there are no answers at the bottom of a bottle (On the SDMB on a Saturday: w00t w00t). In summation, Dren finally feels that she is able to share a keystone of her identity with her mother only to be brutally slammed down.
On draft two of this post I will need to go back and discuss how the abuse of the female scientist is being vested on the child Dren. Abuse of Dren can be taken as read. Evidence for the abuse of the female scientist: a barren childhood room, “just as I left it”, her behaviour towards her cat, her reluctance to discuss the farm with the male scientist, and her lack of enthusiasm for the prospect of having children of her own. I will need to make a case for the cat being her sole source of relief during her childhood. There’s not going to be a second draft of this post.
TLDR
In conclusion, Splice is a good movie because it shows abuse (action) motivated by emotion. Most films show children being abused because the parents hate the child because it is in the script that the parents hate the child. In this film we see the parent’s (particularly the mother’s) love turn to indifference and then to hate due to conflict between the mother’s values and the child’s identities. Furthermore, we see how the mother and Dren’s love allows the mother’s indifference and hatred to hurt Dren more effectively than hatred alone would be able to hurt a child. In short, the mother’s hatred for Dren evolves organically, out of emotion and out of the mother’s past. Splice is the rare movie where child abuse is presented realistically, not as pure hatred, but as love mixed with indifference and hatred.
I need to go through this post and do a third and fourth draft; additionally I need to do more research to determine what exactly is abuse. However, I’m not going to expand on this topic. I haven’t proved my conclusion to the best of my ability, but I believe that my conclusion can be proved. My conclusion is that Splice is a good movie because it creates emotion in a person. I need to spend more effort showing (proving) that the relationship between Dren and the female scientist was abusive. But no matter how many drafts that I may do, I feel that their relationship was abusive, and vividly so. Art exists to inspire emotion, and Splice is a good movie because it reminds me of that “box of rocks” that I haven’t been able to put down.
I thought it was possibly the strangest retelling of Frankenstein ever commited to film.
That was an amazing post Zany. You make me want to see the movie again.
Score +100 for Zany!!
It was okay until Brody’s character decided to boink Dren. I could have called the rest of the movie without about 90% accuracy after that. When they said “Hey, Dren’s a guy now!”, I should have just turned it off because I called the rest of it with 99% accuracy.
Much of the conflict in the movie is driven by identity. Particularly the conflict between the female scientist as THE scientist and THE mother. I say THE scientist, and not a scientist because it is clear that the female wants to be known as the very best genetic scientist. She started (with her husband) her own business, she created life, and she gives press conferences where she tells people that she is the best genetic scientist. She is deeply invested in her identity as the best scientist, and as a result she has a well earned ego. She doesn’t listen to others because she knows that she is correct: for example she created and sustained life over the objections of her partner. She kept Dren alive because her identity as THE scientist required that she be right and that her husband be wrong with respect to Dren.
A personality that identifies itself as the best at something wants to be the best at everything. And so, once Dren was born, the female wanted to be THE mother. For a time she was the mother. She was kind, compassionate, and caring. She put the mind, energy, and ambition that she used to become the scientist into becoming the mother.
Later in the movie she realized that the limitations in her upbringing would prevent her from becoming THE mother. This is the phase I’ve previously styled indifference. This is the period when the female goes to work (leaving Dren alone for several weeks in Dren-weeks) but also tries to be a caring mother when she is around Dren. This isn’t a well supported argument, but I’ll need to watch the movie again to improve it. The female scientist eventually notices the scars left upon her by her mother, and realizes that she cannot be THE mother, this compromises her previously demonstrated patience and compassion and drives her to adopt her identity as a scientist.
The female scientist retakes her identity as THE scientist shortly after Dren kills the cat. She feels that she cannot feel compassion for the “thing” that killed her childhood friend, and since she cannot feel compassion for her child, she cannot be THE mother. As a result, she decided she didn’t want to be a parent and rekindled her identity as a scientist. She does this by de-anthropomorphizing Dren: she straps Dren to a table and cuts her clothing off. Dren goes from a child-surrogate to an over indulged pet. By cutting the clothing off Dren, the scientist resumes her mantle of objectivity takes a sample of Dren, with no more emotion than you or I would use when spraying for mould. The female scientist dehumanized Dren without malice; she dehumanized Dren simply because THE scientist does not anthropomorphize specimens*.
Splice is a good movie because the character’s actions result from their motivations.
• I’m going to have nightmares about Nazis and Unit 731 tonight because I think I see how they found otherwise good people to commit those horrific acts. If the Nazis are not a unique example of cruelty, then the Nazis can arise again, and I must offer my life to prevent their re-emergence.
I have not seen this yet but now I really want to. When it was released, I did like how the ads noted the names of the couple- Clive & Elsa.
(In Karloff’s Frankenstein, Colin Clive played Dr. F while Elsa Lanchester played the title role in Bride of F.)
[quote=“Jophiel, post:14, topic:566916”]
It was okay until Brody’s character decided to boink Dren. QUOTE]
+1
I loved the first 80% of the film, but I did not like how it devolved into standard horror fare at the end.
Alien B-movie schlock - 5.5/10
NB: Extra point for the inter-special copulation scene! 
PS: Does ‘species’ even have an adjective? 
As requested, my thoughts:
“Huh? Why did they do that? Ew, what’s that thing? What? huh? Oh shit, don’t go there! Holy crap! AND wings? Yipes… that’s a spectacular fail if ever there was one…Oh gross… What’s the mommyness all about? Oh NOW she sees it’s dangerous. Wait, he’s fucking it??? Too vile! Fucking her mommy with her spike? Wait…oh right, she’s pregnant? Puhleeze. I guess they needed a sequel setup…”