Before last night I had a great deal of respect for actress Sarah Polley and a reasonable amount for actor Adrien Brody. Now both have greatly fallen in my esteem. Rarely have I seen a couple that has less chemistry than these two. In a movie where the sexual undercurrent is supposed to play an enormous role, I felt completely unaffected by the torments the characters have to suffer. Sarah Polley plays Elsa Kast, a slightly traumatized but very successful geneticist. At the moments of great suffering in the story Elsa is played with the agony of a small child not getting the ice-cream she wants. Elsa is whiney and sentimental for the most part, a severe problem for a woman who is supposed to be an extremely professional and intelligent scientist. How can a true scientist suddenly decide to discard the most important rule of genetic research: that cloned or manipulated DNA must be kept in complete isolation at all times?
But fair enough, this is a modern day Frankenstein story so I was prepared to suspend my disbelief for a while. The premise was promising; two important scientists working on revolutionary DNA recombination technology face the closure of their research project at the point where they might have just discovered a way to integrate human DNA into their subject. So what do they do? Right, they continue the research secretly to disastrous effects. So far so familiar. At that point the obligatory statement ‘It’s Alive’ is made with just about as much convincement as ‘your dinner is ready’. But after this, the story becomes a lot more sordid, with some incestual and psychopathological details I will not go into here. They try very hard to make the movie into something more than the B-monster-flick I thought and was kind of hoping it to be. I do not mind big ideas, but they were hardly executed in a convincing way. What I missed mostly was the plain fun of the monster-film. The problem was that it takes itself far to seriously. A bit of humour would have done so much to alleviate the dreary pressure that lies on the story and its characters. This said, it might have been a tough task combining humour with some of the developments near the end of the story, but it would have made the whole thing a lot more enjoyable and help it to fit the genre. There is no reason why big ideas can’t be combined with some laughter. I remember precisely one very lame joke (‘at least it has some rustic charm’) made by Adrian Brody’s character, which was a dud before it was even uttered.
The character of Dren, the creature they create by combining human with several forms of animal DNA looks quite haunting in a later stage when played by actress Delphine Chaneac but is much less convincing in CGI. What is most hilarious is the first introduction to their research, a creature that looks remarkable like a large floppy penis and is an example of some of the worst CGI done recently. Why couldn’t they have made this creature as a puppet? It would not have allowed for some of the specific interactions they wanted the creature to make but it would have given the film infinitively more charm and believability. But back to Dren, although she is created from the DNA of about five creatures she looks remarkably human, but this can be allowed in a Star-Trek-kind-of-way. It also makes the sexual tension between her and the human characters a lot more believable, although it felt a bit much like ‘Species’ to me. What is problematic is that Dren cannot speak and displays her emotions in an often laughably pantomime way. The corny dance scene half way through the movie made me cringe for the 80s type superficial sentimentality of it, ‘this… is music..’ oh how lovely. Overall the film just makes for a joyless overproduced underacted movie that could have been so much more…
But fair enough, this is a modern day Frankenstein story so I was prepared to suspend my disbelief for a while. The premise was promising; two important scientists working on revolutionary DNA recombination technology face the closure of their research project at the point where they might have just discovered a way to integrate human DNA into their subject. So what do they do? Right, they continue the research secretly to disastrous effects. So far so familiar. At that point the obligatory statement ‘It’s Alive’ is made with just about as much convincement as ‘your dinner is ready’. But after this, the story becomes a lot more sordid, with some incestual and psychopathological details I will not go into here. They try very hard to make the movie into something more than the B-monster-flick I thought and was kind of hoping it to be. I do not mind big ideas, but they were hardly executed in a convincing way. What I missed mostly was the plain fun of the monster-film. The problem was that it takes itself far to seriously. A bit of humour would have done so much to alleviate the dreary pressure that lies on the story and its characters. This said, it might have been a tough task combining humour with some of the developments near the end of the story, but it would have made the whole thing a lot more enjoyable and help it to fit the genre. There is no reason why big ideas can’t be combined with some laughter. I remember precisely one very lame joke (‘at least it has some rustic charm’) made by Adrian Brody’s character, which was a dud before it was even uttered.
The character of Dren, the creature they create by combining human with several forms of animal DNA looks quite haunting in a later stage when played by actress Delphine Chaneac but is much less convincing in CGI. What is most hilarious is the first introduction to their research, a creature that looks remarkable like a large floppy penis and is an example of some of the worst CGI done recently. Why couldn’t they have made this creature as a puppet? It would not have allowed for some of the specific interactions they wanted the creature to make but it would have given the film infinitively more charm and believability. But back to Dren, although she is created from the DNA of about five creatures she looks remarkably human, but this can be allowed in a Star-Trek-kind-of-way. It also makes the sexual tension between her and the human characters a lot more believable, although it felt a bit much like ‘Species’ to me. What is problematic is that Dren cannot speak and displays her emotions in an often laughably pantomime way. The corny dance scene half way through the movie made me cringe for the 80s type superficial sentimentality of it, ‘this… is music..’ oh how lovely. Overall the film just makes for a joyless overproduced underacted movie that could have been so much more…
