People often use the phrase, “Ambitious, but flawed” to describe a movie. I use it a lot; it helps hint at a film that was trying to be more complex than The Blind Side or something, and depending how you put the emphasis, it can mean anything from “there were a few things that didn’t sit quite right” to “what a magnificent collection of moving images that had no discernible narrative cohesion”. (Oh, Sunshine.)

Splice tries very hard to be a Frankenstein for our times; a CGI creepfest; a meta-horror; a complex dissection of parenting norms; a parable of nature vs. nurture. At the same time. (You can see already where we’re going to have problems.)

As for how well it did at any or all of those things…how big can I make “Flawed”?

And 3D text, if you have it.

The thing is, in a perfect world, Splice would be a clever horror movie about a couple of insufferable hipsters who create a partially-human life-splice just to prove they can (and, explicitly, to get on the cover of Wired), and then when it goes feral on them, they’re not equipped to handle the consequences of the science they employed. In a perfect world, when one character wears a tee shirt that says “I Bring Nothing to the Table,” we would know that character is supposed to be the fucked-up but meta voice of reason, and when the other character expresses an insistence that the project go on, that hubris will eventually be catching up with that character in a major, probably-fatal way.

The movie about those two characters would still be flawed, largely because they’re terrible people and sloppy scientists who do not deserve our attention for more than the length of the trailer, but in a perfect world, the signifiers would have no agenda of their own, and those kinds of problems would stand or fall on their own merits.

Sadly, we do not live in a perfect world, which means that when a guy wears a shirt that says I Bring Nothing to the Table, it’s shorthand for Dickhead Who Will Still Always Be Right, and when a woman creates a life in a lab and then insists that the experiment be allowed to grow despite obviously-correct advice to the contrary, it’s a huge career-woman-bad-mommy metaphor, and since she’s a woman, her hubris will come in the form of rape.

Because that’s just how the world rolls, apparently.

The worst part is that this movie was full of glimpses of some other, better movie that was trying to get out. The use of the splice, Dren, as woodland-creature-cum-fetching-child-cum-ingenue could have gone somewhere; when Adrien Brody tries to cheer her up by teaching her to dance, and you get the romantic-comedy overhead shot, I laughed out loud. That shit was amazing.

And at the very beginning, when I was hallucinating that this might be a movie about Sarah Polley being an ambitious scientist held back by her hipster-jerk boyfriend, I was interested to see where this would go.

Turns out, it went right where every other movie goes, where the dude, no matter how worthless, is always more observant and correct. (He misses that Sarah put her own DNA in the splice, and also the behavior of previous creatures they created, and also synthesizing some MacGuffin protein, but whatever!)

In the movie’s other stab at being interesting, as soon as Sarah gets embroiled in a power struggle with what we can basically refer to as her child, he absents himself to go to the lab and suck at making proteins for a while, then comes back when the little lady’s gone and has sex with the splice. (Good thing that 1/6 human splice ended up with a 100% human torso!)

A lot of people got upset about this when the movie came out. For whatever reason (not his genetic material, stupefying boredom from the ersatz domestic drama) this didn’t particularly bother me at the time it happened. This was largely because I made the mistake of thinking this was hubris for which he would be punished, loving his own creation too much, etc. At that point, anything that wasn’t them sniping about how to take care of their creature-kid who lives in the barn in her mother’s conveniently-abandoned farmhouse was okay with me.

Then I saw that it was really the bad-mommy, who was now an indifferent scientist on top of everything else, was going to be punished for everybody’s sins, because of course it was her lack of sexual availability that made him turn to Dren in the first place, so that will teach you…something!

Then Dren seemingly dies, and neither of them goes, “Hey, should we maybe make sure of this instead of just assuming she’s not in a gender-switch coma like those other beings we made earlier in the film who ended up both male and then bloodily murdering each other all over our stockholders?”

Instead, they bury her and wait for Adrien Brody’s brother, who has exactly his haircut, to show up and be inexplicably Canadian. (Not that being Canadian is inexplicable – we all know about geography and also about how babies are made, so how one is Canadian sort of falls right in there.) But Adrien Brody isn’t Canadian himself, and by this point in the movie you hate everyone so much that you’d prefer to think about how you get one Canadian brother out of a pair than think about what is about to happen.

Because what is about to happen is that instead of just having a deathmatch with his creators like any normal Frankenstein, the now-male Dren kills the two expendable supporting players, the questionably-expendable Adrien Brody, and then decides to rape his mom instead, after using his first words, “Inside you.” That would be disgusting and creepy – and it is disgusting and creepy, more so than I can describe – but by then I was so completely over what this movie was trying to do that I was just thinking, “So you develop vocal cords right around the time you get the multi-tier hang-glider wing mutation. Why?”

Someday, someone will make the movie this movie was trying to be, and present a pair of postmodern scientists who create a Frankenstein for some boutique industry that’s bred teacup Yorkies to the size of a fingernail and wants the next big thing, and both of them will eventually be devoured by a horde of unimaginably tiny feral ponies or something. That movie will be able to do everything this movie couldn’t do, and, unlike this movie, might end up being more ambitious than flawed.