On SPLICE 2 (Warning: While I’ve kept MAJOR spoilers out of it, you can still consider some of the following a minor spoiler regarding SPLICE. While the full interview will hit soon, I wanted to share some of what Natali told me regarding his various upcoming projects. We need to see the next science fiction movie together, assuming something worthwhile comes out anytime soon.Earlier today, I have the opportunity to sit down and chat with director Vincenzo Natali, who is doing the press rounds for his thriller SPLICE (opening June 4). I am only surprised that the green-shades overseeing the budgets of these movies allow the techies so much latitude with their (expensive) personalization. It suggests a variation of the age-old craft tradition of signing / watermarking. What's odd about this sort of CGI enterprise is that the attention to detail is, to a large extent, lost on the general audience it's more like the "Easter eggs" planted in software to be discovered, at leisure, by aficionados. No doubt her features are offered as "quotes" from evolutionary and developmental biology, maybe even including Archaeopteryx. It would be fun to sit down and look at a progression of photos of her from the movie. It's an interesting use of product placement, not as direct to consumer advertising, but as a way for these companies to cultivate status and have something glitzy to add to their annual reports.ĭren's development does make for a interesting study. Brand names were so visible that some sort of exchange - product placement fees or barter for equipment loan and consultation services - must have been agreed upon between the filmmakers and the manufacturers. I also noticed the showcasing of high-tech biotech equipment that you mentioned. While the ordinary user is busy pointing and clicking, the guru has opened a command-line interface and is typing away. It seems that low-tech displays now are employed in movies, oddly enough, to indicate highly sophisticated users, in a kind of "we don't need no stinkin' graphics" way. I take this kind of retro presentation to be a nod to "The Matrix", which wisely chose not to pointlessly chase technological trends and to stick with "timeless", tried-and-true character graphics, although with a vastly expanded character set. Now that you mention it, I do recall the low-tech, green-on black computer display. Splice the Movie - Paradise Fail by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.īased on a work at. It looks like we'll have to wait and see. Or maybe it is the pretext for a Splice sequel, as suggested by a Rosemary's Baby moment at the end of the movie. Perhaps it represents the ultimate table-turning comeuppance for its "parents", Elsa and Clive, in a concrete "who's your daddy?" demonstration of dominance by their genetically misbegotten offspring. It's not clear what writer-director Natali intends by this unexpected turn, which is disturbing more because of its implications of pedophilia and incest than the violation of a taboo having to do with inter-species love. Splice adds a new twist to the complicated relationship between the scientists and their creature, and that is the - sometimes mutual - feeling of sexual desire. Unlike Victor Frankenstein, though, who is thoroughly disgusted by his creation and abandons it in remorse, Elsa and Clive respond with a confused mixture of caring and revulsion, uncertain as the story progresses whether to nurture or to kill their new child. Shelley's homo novus is cobbled together from freshly-exhumed human body parts in Splice it is the strands of DNA from disparate species that are woven to craft a new being, with human genes, bearing the taint of the propensity for predation as well as, it appears, that of original sin, tossed into the mix. The morally questionable experiments central to both the novel and the film are quite similar, new life is assembled out of inanimate biological bits and pieces. Elsa and Clive, our post-modern Prometheans, somewhat less ambitiously, have set their sights on the conquest of disease - diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and the like - yet they nonetheless reap the unintended - and unwanted - consequences that are payback for their act of hubris. Its protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, had not set out to create a monster, but to benefit humanity by conquering death. It is interesting to recall that Shelley's Frankenstein was subtitled "The Modern Prometheus". Which brings us to the main storyline of Splice, an updating of the Mary Shelly gothic-horror, proto-science-fiction classic.
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