(Though not, alas, in any way that is different from what big-budget, mainstream films typically dole out to women. The lead scientist here must be female because the horror that Natali wants to dole out is specifically of a female cast. I was delighted with Splice, at first, to see that it featured a female scientist doing basically realistic work, and featuring a real actress, in Polley, in the role. And the punishment he will dole out to Elsa for her overreaching into realms she was not meant to be meddling in will take on a particularly gendered tenor. (Dren is played, as a “grownup,” by the very lovely French actress Delphine Chanéac, with just a few CGI enhancements.) Natali wants the, er, male members of his audience to want to fuck Dren. You’ve seen the posters and the trailers: Though Dren, the creature Elsa and Clive mad-science into existence, starts out life as a larval blob not too distinct from Fred and Ginger, within days she is adult size and not so weirdly exotic that she isn’t supermodel-hot. But Natali appears more interested in serving up a kind of sexual torture, of the audience as well as of his protagonists. Moral outrage would only come as a result of Elsa and Clive’s next project: creating a “multispecies morphogen” that includes - as Fred and Ginger do not - human DNA.įred and Ginger would have been fodder enough for a thoughtful science fiction horror film, one that was genuinely concerned with exploring modern scientific ethics.
Fred and Ginger are intriguing extrapolations of real current science, but the drama invented around them by Natali - who cowrote the script with Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor - is hopelessly naive: the film pretends that the public response to Fred and Ginger would not be one of moral outrage. Fox, The Brothers Bloom), who have made a career of creating “multispecies morphogens,” and are about to debut their crowning glory: Fred and Ginger, a pair of horrific-looking blobs built up from the genes of many species that promise to, we’re told, supply the basis for countless new medications and treatments for all that ails humanity. So here we have geneticists Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley: Beowulf & Grendel, Dawn of the Dead) and Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody: Fantastic Mr.
The realms are pretty much the same ones that man gets his comeuppance for meddling in: whatever scientific bugaboo is hot and controversial at the moment. Vincenzo Natali - who made the intriguing and original Cube more than a decade ago - has a new twist on this hoary subgenre: What if there were realms in which woman was not meant to meddle? This warning usually comes via a solemnly silly overblown cautionary tale that revels in its own exploitiveness - wow! look at the freakish product of mad science and man’s arrogance run amuck! isn’t it cool? - while simultaneously chiding us for agreeing with the filmmaker that yes, indeed, the freakish product of mad science and man’s arrogance run amuck really is pretty cool, isn’t it? “You think it’s cool?” such movies suddenly turn around and slap us somewhere round the middle of Act Two. Science fiction horror movies have long been informing us that there are realms in which Man Was Not Meant To Meddle.
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