Take a clichéd theme and remove the clichés and you get Splice

The theme of using genetics to play God and create new life, and then have everything go terribly wrong, is hardly new to movies. From Jurassic Park to Species to Godsend to Deep Blue Sea, scientists creating and tampering with life and having everything go to hell has been done so many times before that any attempt to make a similar themed movie usually gets a “why bother” from people. The only way to have this movie theme executed successfully is if we take what we’ve seen before and offer a fresh approach to the subject. Which is what works best for the movie Splice. Everything we’ve previously seen in genetic tampering movies is taken here and used in very unexpected ways. This makes for an original and enjoyable movie.

Splice starts Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley as Clive and Elsa, two genetic scientists who’ve been creating new life forms through gene slicing in order to create new protein strains that can be used to cure diseases. After successfully creating two worm like hybrids Elsa wants to create a hybrid that has human DNA in it. When the company they work for forbids it Elsa and Clive decide to secretly do it anyway, reasoning that they will destroy the creature before it ever carries to term. But once they fuse the DNA the creature is born within hours and forms far faster then they ever dreamed it could. First it resembles an armless rodent with a stinger. But after a few days it starts to look more human, resembling a hairless girl with impossibly large eyes, backwards jointed legs and a tail with a stinger at the end. Elsa begins to bond with the creature, naming it Dren and treating it like a child. Within a month Dren grows into an intelligent and curious adult sized woman (Delphine Chanéac) and is moved to Elsa’s old family barn for her protection. As time goes on the three individuals form a sick and twisted family unit, with Clive disgusted with what they have done and yet also protective towards Dren, Elsa becoming colder and more stern towards her surrogate daughter, and Dren yearning to explore and experience the world beyond her prison.

The obvious theme of this movie is not to mess with Mother Nature, because nature is unstable and unpredictable. This is shown early on when a presentation of Clive and Elsa’s original experiment goes horrifically wrong. The theme is explored even more so in Dren and how she grows and develops, both physically and mentally. She begins to communicate her frustration at being isolated and how she wants to explore the outside world. This frustration at her limited options in life has an unexpected parallel with many young people today, for like Dren many of us are trapped within the limitations of our own lives brought on by shrinking outside advantages.

What makes this movie work so well is that it avoids most of the clichés one would expect this kind of movie would have. While Clive originally is disgusted with Dren and comes close to killing her he later begins to truly care for the wellbeing of the creature. And while audiences would expect Elsa to become a mother like figure to Dren it’s harder to predict that she will become abusive and harsh towards her. What’s even more refreshing is how the character’s changing feelings (Clive’s caring and Elsa’s coldness) leads to each of them abusing Dren in very different but equally disturbing ways.

While both Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley play their roles extremely well, the real standout of the cast would have to be Delphine Chanéac. Communicating only through chirps and having to act through prosthetics and CGI she manages to create an engaging character audiences will feel real sympathy for. As she explores her limited world she conveys such wondrous excitement at her surroundings. But as she struggles to understand herself and her building frustrations her features contort and compress to clearly show off her feelings. By using her body to express her feelings she communicates more clearly then if she could form cohesive words.

While it is a good movie it is by no means perfect. The last fifteen minutes makes sure that will never happen. While I can’t reveal what happens without spoiling everything I will say that it goes from a disturbing thoughtful thriller into an almost campy by the numbers horror clichéd mess. What makes the ending worse is that it went so out of its way to avoid clichés before it reached the end. It’s almost as if the writer and director grew tired from all their previous work and went the lazy route with the ending.

But while the end of the journey is a bust, the lead up to it is anything but. If you are looking for a thoughtful and provocative sci-fi thriller, then Splice is one summer movie to see.

Prince of Persia: one movie that won’t withstand the test of time

According to recent internet chatter Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is being regarded as the best movie adaptation of a video game. If that is the case then it really says much about the quality of movies based on video games. Prince of Persia was both boring and uninteresting, with wooden acting and bloated yet unconvincing special effects. In short it was a complete mess and not worth the $10 ticket price.

Here’s the plot: in ancient Persia the king adopts a street urchin named Dastan after witnessing his bravery and kind spirit. Fifteen years later the adult Dastan (Jake Gyllenhaal) leads a preemptive attack on the holy city of Alamut after the king’s brother and adviser Nizam (Ben Kingsley) reveals that the Alamut people are selling weapons to their enemies. During the attack Dastan subdues a palace guard and unknowingly obtains the Dagger of Time, which allows the user to travel back in time if the dagger is filled with the mystical sands of time. Thanks to Dastan’s ingenuity the Persians overtake the city and capture Tamina (Gemma Arterton), the Alamut princess. But at the victory celebration the Persian king is killed after donning a poisoned robe Dastan presented to him. Dastan and Tamina flee and learn that Nizam killed the king and plans to take the dagger to the sands of time so he can ensure he rules instead of his brother. The two form an uneasy alliance as they race to stop Nizam from releasing the sands and destroying the world.

While this sounds exciting the actual result is much less so. The movie was boring and lost my interest after about a half an hour. While the sequences where the dagger was used were done well, it only happens a couple of times in the movie. While it didn’t need to be used every second it feels like a cheat when it’s hardly used at all. In addition some of the effects, like the deadly vipers, look cheap and unconvincing. The computer effects looked like something that would be seen in 1990, not 2010. I also noticed there were way too many jerky jump cuts, making the viewing experience awkward.

While Jake Gyllenhaal can give engaging performances, such as in Donnie Darko and Brokeback Mountain, here he came off as annoying and dull. Not great when the character is suppose to be engaging. Gemma Arterton seemed to have one default emotion in this movie, anger. Otherwise she seemed to simply be eye candy instead of an interesting character. Alfred Molina, who played shady entrepreneur Sheik Amar, was painfully jokey and seemed more meant to portray people’s outcry on resent tax hikes then to be an actual character. And Ben Kingsley came off like any generic epic movie villain, which is a shame when you cast such a strong actor in the role.

I will say that the creators of the trailers for Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time deserve an award. They managed to take a mess of a movie and recut the footage to make it look like an epic. They managed to take my $10 from me. Hopefully I can save you from losing your hard earned money. Save your cash for another trip to the theater this summer by avoiding Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.