But pseudo-Dren is very obviously a person. Its eyes give us nothing, they’re only glassy orbs, and we can imagine that we see Goldblum’s busy mind at work behind them. Why is it easier for me to identify with puppet-Goldblum than with pseudo-Dren? I suspect it’s precisely because a puppet isn’t a person. He’s some guy I’ve never seen before, and his fate doesn’t interest me. But I can’t transfer my affections to him because he’s obviously not Dren. Intellectually I can acknowledge that this spiny naked guy leaping through the trees is supposed to be Dren. The actress who plays Dren, the most sympathetic character and one-third of the romantic-incestuous triangle at the dramatic core of the movie, disappears, and is replaced with a totally different actor. It’s a leap, but we can project our feelings about Goldblum’s character onto this pathetic creature.Īt the end of Splice, a similar transformation occurs. But it’s not that big a problem, because A) it happens a minute or two before the end of the movie, at a point of maximum tension, so we don’t have time to think about it, and B) in the puppet’s final scene, when it helps Geena Davis aim the shotgun at its own head, we’re willing to believe that the puppet is Jeff Goldblum. And suddenly, right at the climax of the film, one of the two main actors disappears and is replaced with a slime-covered puppet.
#SPLICE DREN MOVIE#
It’s the relationship that makes the movie interesting. The problem is, we’re not only watching a monster movie, we’re also watching a movie about the relationship of Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis. If you go to see a monster movie called The Fly, you expect to see a giant fly – not an actor swathed in lumpy latex. I can understand why Cronenberg chose to do this. Then his rotting flesh sloughs away and he turns into an animatronic monster. He takes her back to his lab and spells out his nutty plan to use the teleporter to combine himself, her, and their unborn child into a single being. As you’ll recall, at the end of The Fly, the direly mutated Jeff Goldblum kidnaps Geena Davis from the doctor’s office to prevent her from aborting their baby. Perhaps we can better identify what’s wrong with the ending of Splice by comparing the movie with its most obvious antecedent, David Cronenberg’s The Fly. In the paragraphs below, I’m going to talk about precisely what goes wrong, so if you haven’t seen Splice yet, you should head down to your local second-run movie theatre and watch it before reading further. Splice is four-fifths of a superior science-fiction movie.
0 kommentar(er)
