A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: Splice

Date Viewed: 6/6/10

Details:

Adrien Brody

Sarah Polley

Delphine Chaneac

Brandon McGibbon

Written & directed by: Vincenzo Natali

Score: --

The Review: I'll never learn. Against my better judgment (just watch the trailers and you'll see what I saw and immediately understand why I should have been warned off), I chose to see this movie -- simply because a few local reviewers seemed to think the science was well-portrayed and the ethical issues were germane. But I'm reminded of Wolfgang Pauli's acerbic comment:"it's not even wrong!"The term bogus doesn't begin to convey the problems.

Splice is supposed to be about genetic engineering -- at the whole organism level. That should give you pause to begin with. If you decide to make some unusual protein products -- biologics -- it's not at all obvious why you would create a totally novel metazoan organism to do so. Nor why you'd actually create two of them --"male and female, he created them"-- as though you needed to create a totally new species for this purpose and let it self-perpetuate. Then, their cute names: Fred and Ginger, indeed! The fact that Fred and Ginger look more like enlargedflobberwormsgives you a early clue that this is more fiction, very little science -- and given the monsters' eventual proclivities, the horror genre is not far away. (Although it's possible someone has been takingHarry Pottermuch too seriously…)

That's just for starters. The scientists (a woefully miscast Brody, with Polley as his life partner and collaborator: and no, they're NOT named Fred and Ginger!) work for some anonymous biotech startup for whom these created genetic monsters are apparently a booming business model. So they take their continuing success as a given, stop paying attention to the developmental biology of flobberworms (but"just you wait, Henry Higgins"),and for no obvious reason, decide to conduct their ownskunk-worksproject,sub rosa, in an otherwise basic research-friendly environment. Then things really go off the rails: a double dose of hubris -- not just assuming you can (or should) create a new human form, but assuming you can do it without telling anyone, under the cover of dark, or off in a hidden country barn.

Thus is "borne" (not the most apt verb, considering the biology, but it will have to do) Dren (aptly interpreted by Chaneac) -- their next "spliced" product: human genes laced liberally with amphibian, reptilian and avian material. We're given a lot of snapshots of lab equipment spinning, whirring, plopping, dripping -- and lots of pseudo-scanning-EM illustrations of gene fragments doing the nasty, and most of the time not doing it correctly. These scenes are intended to establish credibility -- but to anyone who happens to be the least bit knowledgeable, it's just plain silly. The gadgets that are appropriate for real splicing are quiet and boring; although even that may have offered an improvement in mood. To give the screenwriters their due, they think that this type of experiment fails a lot. Although they show things failing with occasionally stupid graphics, at least this one aspect of doing real science does filter through.

To say anything much about Dren would require a spoiler warning, and I don't want to do that. (I will note that her adult form is reminiscent of James Paterson's character Max, fromWhen the Wind Blows.)Suffice to say that this experiment in genetic engineering also does not go as planned, that several moral and ethical boundaries are not just crossed, but thoroughly trashed, and that any respect you had for the representation of science on the silver screen will have evaporated.

In the final analysis, I left the theatre thinking over one of the lessons ofStar Trek 1(V'ger) -- no, not "some movies shouldn't be made", but "bald females can be really sexy." (Sorry!)

(7-Aug-10)

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