Splice

In my attempt to go and see more movies in theaters this summer, Splice kicks things off. (I don't count Kick-Ass or Iron Man 2 because I was still in school when they came out.)

Anyway, I'm not sure what I was expecting. I like to go into movies knowing as little as possible, if only for the sake of having as few things ruined as possible. (This is a whole other blog post, about how much trailers reveal. But anyway...) I knew it'd be about scientists creating some sort of human life, but I didn't know much beyond that.

It was so weird. So, so weird. It's definitely a movie that poses more questions than it wants to answer, and challenges contemporary views of the scientific community (as well as more general moral questions). Things take weird twists at the end, and things got so out of hand that the theater was cracking up at points. I'm not sure if director Vincenzo Natali wanted that.

I read a comparison of the film to David Lynch's Eraserhead. I can buy it. Both deal with parenthood, and both are abstract as hell, especially considering they don't deal with traditional children. But I mean, come on. The "kids" in each are weird, but that's where similarities end. Eraserhead is good; Splice is just weird.

A post on Cinematical sums this up well. Quoting film critic Jeff Bayer, Eric D. Snyder writes:

Certain terrible things occur in the last act of Splice. I'm not going to tell you what they are. Suffice it to say that they are terrible. Jeff's point was that while it's possible for a movie to include depictions of these Terrible Things for purposes of shock, horror, or entertainment and still be acceptable, this movie didn't pull it off. In this case, he said, the attempt was laughable, and the Terrible Things were cheapened.

Yes, there are Terrible Things. And yes, they were laughable. And yes, the laughability ruined how terrible they should have been.