Splice: The importance of marketing

This weekend, one of the worst on record for the film industry, millions of people still went out of their way to throw down money at the movie theater, looking to escape the heat, and reality, for a few hours.

About ten people probably saw Splice.

Okay, obvious exaggeration, but the movie was a bomb, taking in just over $7 million with a #8 opening. Of course, it won't take much to make back the modest $26 Million budget, it'll do that over time with home video release, but its still not very impressive. Still, the question remains, why didn't people see this movie?

I know that I was excited to see Splice, but then, it had been talked up among the cinema world for several years. The script was well received when it first made the rounds. Then we were treated to shots of the film's creature, Dren. With the very sleek creature design, sharp CGI work, and production work by noted Director Guillermo Del Toro, there was a lot of buzz and positive talk about the film. Finally it debuted at Sundance, and it was very well received; there was even a bit of a bidding war over the distribution rights. And who can blame them? For a completely independent film, Splice looks wonderful. The 'net was getting hyped. All of the pre-game motions were set to see this indy-turned major release become a major hit.

And then we got this trailer.

Well... that doesn't look anything like the movie I had heard about in the production stages, the smart and creepy sci-fi. That looks like... Species 4 or something.

Then we finally got the poster and it too.... looked like part of the Species series. And the Species poster was a derivative of the original Alien poster. Coupled with the catch phrase "Science's Newest Miracle... is a Mistake" it looked like we had yet another 'cloning is bad' movie, stealing its visuals from a history of films that wished they were Ridley Scott's Alien. The film-going community shrugged, labeled it 'just another horror flick' and promptly ignored it.

I had a free ticket coming this weekend, so I braved Splice anyway, remembering what I had seen of it back in production and, wow, did they peg this movie wrong.

First off, Splice really isn't a horror movie at all. There are a couple jumpy moments when Dren is first introduced, and a big scary sequence at the film's climax, but the film doesn't really set out to scare you so much as make you ask questions. That's not horror, that's classic sci-fi. Though it has a creature in it, Splice is less about the monster, and more about the scientists; the focus is on the consequences they face when their own human infallibility enters the laboratory, their flawed compassion taking precedence over scientific reasoning.

Splice follows scientists and married couple Clive and Elsa (Adrian Brody and Sarah Polley) just after their biggest scientific breakthrough. They have created a protoplasmic creature that is a mix of the DNA structures of many different animals. Though lacking any real shape or function, the creature creates a series of proteins not found in any single creature in nature that can be used to cure livestock of many different ailments. The couple hopes to gain approval to add human DNA to their next proto-creature so that it might make proteins to cure Parkinson's Disease, Diabetes, and some forms of Cancer.

They are denied this, as most laws prohibit human cloning, even in a hybrid like this, and do the thing any two scientists in a film would do: they go ahead anyway.

At this point, the movie could have become the horror flick it was billed as, with the creature coming to life, escaping, and a bunch of people with guns trying to hunt it down in the sewers. Instead, it takes the more intellectual approach, and becomes about parenthood. From the offset, we know that Clive wants children, and Elsa does not. But when confronted with the partially human creation, Clive's first reaction is that of a scientist: destroy the creature, autopsy, examine, keep the lab controlled; meanwhile Elsa is immediately overwhelmed by her humanity, clothing and naming the creature, protecting it, and eventually taking it from the lab to nurture it. Despite Elsa's displayed superiority at lab science, she cannot keep the boundary of objectivity that is considered a necessity.

Throughout the film, the relationships between Clive, Elsa, and Dren all develop and change in startling ways. Dren ages at an advanced rate, going from embryonic to child to teenager over a matter of months. Over this time, Clive's strong paternal instinct begins to emerge, and he bonds with the creature. Elsa, maternally driven to protect the small Dren, now finds haunting memories of her traumatic childhood moving her in odd ways towards the adolescent she is now faced with. The rapid succession and development of emotions is more than the couple seem prepared to handle, and caught in the middle is a creature with many of the same human emotions, but lacking the reasoning to control them, having instead the instincts of the animals she was cross-bred with, play, eat, mate, survive.

From this set-up comes a number of questions. At what point do scientists cease to be humans, and should they/can they progress forward without humanity and compassion guiding them? This movie seems to suggest that it is the adoption of compassion over clinical behavior that can lead to disaster. At what point does a 'specimen' become something more? To what degree is a scientist 'married' to their work? The film suggests that there is truth to the notion that the results of an experiment are the scientists' 'child' in many ways, and that the experiment is a part of them.

Removed from the science, Splice has a few emotional questions at its core as well. Dren lacks much in the way of human reasoning, but her face and motions convey a full array of emotion. The longer the film continues, however, the more we begin to see that no matter how 'evolved' or adult humans are, our own reasoning can still be overwhelmed by the same instincts that drive Dren, or any animal. We seek control, we seek love, we seek comfort and joy. When hurt, when threatened, we lash out in the same way that an animal would, and we see that exhibited in many of the decisions Elsa makes. Splice questions our moral superiority that we, as humans, presuppose, looking at both our capacity for compassion and love, and our capacity for violence, incest, beastiality, rape, dishonesty and murder. Everything the scientific world fears Dren is capable of we ourselves are already committing; again it is emotion over reason. Emotion, perhaps, spliced with instinct; and maybe we don't really know how to separate the two.

All of this leads to our climax where Dren, overwhelmed by the emotional tempest of her two 'parent' figures and her isolation in their country home, makes a startling metamorphosis.

Obviously, I was impressed by the movie. Some of the story points you can see coming, I won't say that everything in the film is completely original, but by now everything seems to be borrowing from something else. But Splice is very smartly written and filmed, and presents its story in a new way, with more thought and depth than many sci-fi horror films in a long time. The performances are excellent, particularly Delphine Chaneac, who builds Dren into a believable and empathetic creature without speaking a word. CGI effects are also top-notch. It all adds up to a solid film that earned more than the meager audience it received this weekend.

In a summer of awful releases, this is one you should go see to escape the tedium of a useless Sex in the City sequel, or some needless remake.

Now, given it was mislabeled as a straight horror flick, I have to wonder why this one didn't attract more of the horror community. But that'll be saved for another entry...