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.
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