(On the other hand, consider how human a mere plastic bag becomes when given Werner Herzog's voice.) It would have been its own kind of challenge, but to me this seems a missed opportunity. Also, as much as anything else, it is our capacity for language that separates humans from animals, but Dren barely exercises any such faculties. Visually, the most distinctively human and relational part of our bodies is the face, and Natali's team departs a little too much from the template here, making Dren something entirely not human. But the humanity doesn't come through enough, for at least two reasons.ĭren (Delphine Chaneac) puts a move on Clive. That's why they cast a real actress (Delphine Chanéac) to portray her (yes, it's a 'she'), only using CG to tweak her facial features and add animal appendages. 'I wanted a creature whose humanity we fall in love with,' he says. Instead, Clive is rather easily won over by platitudes from Elsa like 'scientists push boundaries-at least the important ones do.' Which essentially sounds like, 'Clive, scientists don't ask hard questions they push the plot along.'Ĭonversely, I'm sure Natali would take issue with my assessment of the creature Dren as not being human enough. In these early conversations, the film could have actually developed some of the ethical issues at stake. After all, you might expect that, on the verge of doing something so wildly controversial, the brilliant Clive and Elsa would first have some semblance of a nuanced debate. This is a generous assessment of their characters. 'Clive and Elsa are smarter than they are wise,' says Splice director and co-writer Vincenzo Natali, 'and while they play with the building blocks of life, they don't really have any deep understanding of what life is.' But when they succeed, Elsa (for reasons not fully apparent until later) presses Clive to take it one step further, and again and again until they have a mysterious, illegal, and rapidly maturing new creature under their care, which they dub 'Dren' ('NERD' backward).

At first they tell each other that they just want to see if they can successfully do it, if they can Splice the DNA together-they won't even go on and fertilize the egg. She wants them instead to find ways to capitalize financially on what they've created so far.Ĭlive and Elsa pretend to go along with their orders, but behind the scenes they go to work on their dream creation. As they see it, the right human-animal hybrid could yield the real medical goods-cures for cancer, even. At the film's beginning, they successfully engineer a new hybrid animal species that looks like Flubber and promises a wealth of disease-fighting proteins for the pharmaceutical company they work for, NERD (Nucleic Exchange Research & Development).įlushed with success, Clive and Elsa go to their corporate boss and pitch their most ambitious plan yet: throw human DNA into the mix. The creators of this part-human, part-animal being are Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley), the Brangelina of bio-engineering. For all its seeming ethical import, Splice shocks us not to make us think, but just for shock's sake.Īdrien Brody and Sarah Polley as the 'Brangelina of bio-engineering' This amplifies the surface-level horror, but it glosses over the weightier questions of tampering with human nature. Unfortunately, Splice is more in the tradition of the popular Frankenstein myth than it is Shelley's original, diminishing the human nature of its monster in favor of its brutish nature. This premise, which sets us up to wrestle with some of the same questions, is all the more relevant in light of today's advanced bio-engineering technology and debates about human cloning. In Splice's 21st-century scenario, the featured creature arises not from a patchwork of human remains, but instead from a genetically engineered blend of animal and human DNA. The story raises questions of science's boundaries and what it means to be truly human. Nonetheless, his hideous appearance denies him a place in human society. In Mary Shelley's classic novel, the creature is a re-animated bundle of human body parts that, contrary to many popular re-tellings of the myth, has a keen intelligence.

Splice is a modern-day variation on Frankenstein: what happens when science makes an unnatural form of human life.

Dren splice male