It Had Better Be (The Last Airbender Review)

Nickelodeon's popular TV show "Avatar: The Last Airbender" came a little bit too late for me.  I hadn't watched Nickelodeon since "Doug" and "Rugrats" were on, with my affiliation mostly shifting to Cartoon Network upon learning about the existence of "Reboot", "Dragon Ball Z", and "Gundam Wing".  Nickelodeon was a kid's channel, and I wasn't a kid anymore.  I was in middle school.  Nickelodeon wasn't for middle school kids.

I knew about "Avatar: The Last Airbender", of course.  Commercials for it aired all the time, and kids with Avatar tee-shirts sprinted joyfully through the local Target store without a care in the world, at least until I moved my shopping cart into their paths and enjoyed a brief but lively "KSSSHHH" sound of metal carts suffering sudden impact.  I just wrote "Avatar" off as a silly kid's show trying to pass itself off as an anime.  Something about American cartoons emulating the anime style bothered me.  "Teen Titans" was the same way.  I decided that I would stick with "Dexter's Laboratory" and "Johnny Bravo", thank you very much.

That being said, I was intrigued by the live-action movie's teaser trailer, in which the Airbender stood in a circle of lit candles and bent air around them while a fleet of imposing ships approached outside, but I heard nothing more of the movie until late last year, when James Cameron's Avatar came out.  I was extremely confused because I mistook James Cameron's Pocahontas in Space! for the live-action adaptation of "Avatar: The Last Airbender", not knowing that the later had been forced to change its name to simply The Last Airbender to avoid the very confusion I was now experiencing.  I would see previews of a movie concerning big blue kitties and futuristic army men and think to myself "that looks WAY different than what I've seen of that Nickelodeon show..."  Well, once I got myself straightened out, I started following The Last Airbender, partially because the trailers looked really cool, and partially because my twin sister goes to the tae kwon do studio where the casting crew discovered Noah Ringer, who would go on to play the lead role in the film.

This winter, the TV show's first season popped onto Netflix's instant queue, so my wife and I sat down and watched all 22 episodes, and I must say, it's an excellent show.  It follows Katara, a young girl with the ability to manipulate water with specific martial arts movements, and her big brother Sokka.  They live in a world where four nations - water, earth, fire, air - once lived together in harmony.  But a century ago, the fire nation attacked the other three, wiping out the air nomads.  In this world, one person is born amongst one of the nations with the ability to master all four elements - the Avatar.  He (or she) becomes a vital player in the world's politics, and for whatever reason, when he dies, he is reborn in the next nation in the cycle (air-water-earth-fire).  When the fire nation attacked, the Avatar simply disappeared.  Now, 100 years later, Katara and her brother find a member of the air nomads encased in ice, but as they find him, he awakens and breaks out.  His name is Aang, last known member of the air nomads, and, conveniently, the long-lost Avatar.

There's so much depth to the TV show that to talk about it here would be a disservice.  Having nearly 500 minutes of showtime for the season gives you plenty of time to get to know Aang, Katara, Sokka, and the Asia-inspired world in which they live.  These are great characters, and this is a great show for kids, particularly boys.  No episode lacks in the action department, yet it still manages to encourage the viewer to treat others with respect, to not judge a book by its cover, and, above all, to advocate peace.  Go watch an episode.  Check out the behind-the-scenes on how they created the bending movements of each of the four nations.  Do whatever you can... except for seeing the movie.

I'll admit that this movie had been my most anticipated film of this entire year.  The trailers looked friggen' epic, and I knew how good the plot would be because the show was filled with great characters, subplots, etc.  And to top it all off, it was being directed by M. Night Shaymalan, one of my favorite directors.  Sure, Lady in the Water was pretty crappy, but for some reason I liked it.  I never saw The Happening, but surely it wasn't as bad as everyone said it was.  M. Night just had a few off-moments with his past movies.  This was something way different.  He'd do great.

No.

There's no need for me to list the failings of The Last Airbender here.  It's been ripped to shreds already by everyone else, like on GoldenPigsy's blog, or at IGN.  My wife and I made the mistake of seeing a 10:30 showing at night, when approximately 0% of the audience would be children, the target audience of the film.  I can understand laughing at moments of poor acting, or bad writing, or even bad directing, and believe me, that happened.  But the audience that night contained a few happy (read: drunk-out-of-their-minds) people who laughed at the most random points that even I could not understand, and this coming from a guy who had just spent the past few weeks watching - and lampooning - two of the three Twilight movies. 

No, instead, what I would like to do is make a list of the reasons I could think of to see this film, short as that list may be.  So, here goes:

-The trailers looked amazing.
-Dev Patel (the main dude from Slumdog Millionaire) plays Prince Zuko, the series' most interesting character.
-The girl playing Katara is very cute.
-The girl playing Princess Yue is also very cute.
-The special effects - done by George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic - were incredible.
-The plot didn't steer away from that of the TV show.
-Apa and Momo - the flying byson and lemur, respectively, are both voiced by the guys who did them for the TV show.
-Slow-motion was used well in the fight scenes.
-They did a good job of adapting the "spirit world" to the film, since a live-action version of what's in the TV show would have been downright terrifying.

That's about it.  To date, this has been the most disappointing movie of the year.  I know I held it to impossible standards, but there you go.  I love "Avatar: The Last Airbender", and I love M. Night Shaymalan, but I should have known how poorly the two would mix.  If they try for the second and third films, I dearly hope that they get a new director, but from what I've heard in interviews, M. Night sees this as HIS project, so unless the studios take a risk and fire a director with such a well-known name and get someone not as famous, don't expect the sequels to be any better than this.

But you know what disappointed me the most at this movie?  Alamo Drafhouse raised its prices.  Now it costs as much as any other theater.  I should have known at that moment that that night was going to be a crappy night.

A Girl's Choice Between Necrophilia and Bestiality (Eclipse Review)

In the weeks leading up to the release of Eclipse, my wife and her female coworkers planned to watch Twilight one week, New Moon the next, and then go see Eclipse the following week when it came out, and I decided to join them for each foray into the dark and "exciting" world of Forks, Washington.  Save for one of the girls' boyfriends appearing for New Moon, I contained the only Y chromosome in all our viewing parties.  Being a psych major and working in a children's research lab, this really wasn't much new to me, though I found it funny that the other boyfriends and such made it a point to have Starcraft LAN parties during these viewings.

Watching Twilight and, to a less extent, New Moon with a group as opposed to alone was kind of like watching an episode of "Mystery Science Theater 3000", the brilliant show where a guy and his two robot pals are forced to watch the worst old movies ever made but just end up making fun of it the whole time.  Both Twilight films are positively atrocious for more reasons than I could possibly write here.  I'll just sum their faults up by saying that the acting was a crime against humanity, the directing embarrassing to watch, and the writing positively painful.  Essentially, Bella Swan is a wholly unremarkable girl who moves from Arizona (where her mom lives) to Forks, Washington (where her dad lives) and suddenly becomes the heartthrob of the school for no reason other than that she's new.  She takes an interest in Edward, one of five adopted children of the town's doctor, Carlisle Cullen.  After a while, she discovers that Edward is a vampire, and they sit and smell each other and adore each other until some outside vampires who dine on humans (the Cullens only eat non-human animals) enter the area and, of course, take after Bella because apparently her smell is intoxicating.  There's a chase, a very stupid fight, the kiddos go to prom, and voila!  You have Twilight.  New Moon is basically the same, only in this one Edward leaves town and Bella instead takes up with Jacob, who is a werewolf.  They repair motorcycles together and generally have a good time until Bella goes cliffjumping and then has to go save Edward from being killed in Italy by Dakota Fanning and some other "evil corporation" type vampires.  She does, and they go back home to Forks, where Edward asks Bella to marry him.  And that's New Moon in an incredibly lame nutshell.

Geez, Twilight and New Moon sound even more ridiculous than I realized.

Well, our viewing group had a great time with these two.  Try watching Twilight and New Moon imagining that Bella smells really, really bad.  Just try it.  And boy did we have a field day when Edward, who can read other peoples' thoughts, can't read Bella's ("It's because she doesn't have any!" we'd yell at the screen, though of course Edward couldn't hear our thoughts, either).  Vampires are really fast, but the "speedy running" special effects, as one girl put it, made Edward look more like Sonic the Hedgehog.  And don't even get me started on the fact that sunshine doesn't kill vampires; it just makes them sparkly.  Or the other fact that werewolves don't require a full moon to transform, but they tend to when angry (HULK HOWL AT MOON!!!)  What made this so much better was that, as I mentioned, the whole group sans me was female.  It wasn't that the plot was so bad for Twilight and New Moon - I mean, they're no Hunger Games, but I've seen far worse - it's just that they are truly terrible movies.  After we watched Twilight, my wife claimed that it was the worst movie she's ever seen in her life.  I reminded her that we watched Dune (1984) last year, so she rightfully amended her statement to being the "second-worst movie I've ever seen".  The plot could have been anything, but the actors were so incompetent and the direction so worthless that it just didn't matter.  You know it's bad when Bella's dad, who's only in a handful of scenes, was voted "most (and possibly only) endearing character" by us.

So our hopes were low for Eclipse, as you can imagine.  Alamo Drafhouse's pregame show was mostly full of spoofs, like an SNL digital short involving a girl falling in love with one of the "Franks", a family of violent, green people with zippers across their foreheads, and a Jersey Shore spoof that was just plain stupid but generally involved guys with sparkly abs.  The Drafthouse also showed several documentary clips of people who actually do live in Forks and what their lives are like now that the books are so popular.  The mailman keeps mail sent to Bella and Edward for tourists to see.  The general store occasionally intercoms for "Bella Swan" to come to, say, the kayak department (or wherever a sale is going on).  The high school principal receives emails from "parents" explaining that Edward isn't feeling well and won't make it to school today.  They were really quite good-natured about it, and I was glad to see that so many of them coped so well.  My favorite story was from this elderly Native American guy who was eating at the diner and noticed a young girl staring at him.  After he finished eating, he walked over to her and introduced himself as Jacob's grandfather (he even knew the character's name).  Totally made her day, and his eyes lit up as he told the story.  Very cute.

From the get-go, we knew that Eclipse was a different beast altogether.  While the book is told purely from Bella's point of view, the movie borrows scenes from Stephanie Meyer's new book, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, to explain visually what the villains are up to, and it works pretty well.  What shocked me about Eclipse, and what made it actually bearable (and in fact, enjoyable) to watch, was that the characters outside of the Bella-Edward-Jacob love triangle actually got screen-time this time around.  The new director (David Slade, bless him) managed to craft an interesting, suspenseful film.  The back-stories of some of the other Cullen vampires are revealed, and frankly, ALL of the characters are more interesting than Bella.  I'm beginning to suspect that her atrocious acting is mostly her fault but is also at least partially due to the lame character.  Bella works alright as a narrator for the books, but you just can't make a film and expect it to have the same internal depth of character that its source material has.  It doesn't work.  That's why the 1984 Dune movie is the worst film that my wife and I have ever seen: Dune the book is even MORE internal than the relationship-fest of the Twilight Saga.  Anyway, this movie proved that the other actors (the Cullen vampires, the werewolves) really do have some acting talent in them.  Jackson Rathbone in particular stood out as Jasper, who had all of maybe two lines in the first two movies combined.  He gets quite a bit of screen-time in Eclipse, and the movie is all the better for it.  Also, the new director must have hired a new makeup department, because the vampires finally look like they didn't just step out of kabuki theater.  I know it's a random thing to notice, but it's true: the vampires looked less fake and more what I would think a natural vampire really would look like.  I hate myself a little bit for writing that.  Damn you first two movies.  Damn you.

Really all that you need to know about Eclipse's plot is that someone in Seattle is forming an army of newly-made vampires - called "newborns" - and plans on hunting down the Cullens in Forks.  The Cullens, therefore, team up with their hated enemies, the werewolves, in order to fight back.  Meanwhile, Bella has chosen Edward but tries to maintain a friendly relationship with Jacob even though she loves him, too.  Their triangle wasn't nearly as annoying as it had been in the previous two films, but it was still an annoying weakpoint here (with the exception of one scene involving a tent, which I thought was hilarious).  As I guy, I find Bella very difficult to love, but since she is Stephanie Meyer writing herself into her books, naturally these two fire-and-ice suitors fall all over her.  I think that's why Eclipse was actually a good movie: it would have worked as a fantasy film if Bella's character didn't even exist.  Just cut out the love triangle.  Evil vampires are going to attack a small enclave of non-human-eating vampires?  Sure, sounds fun!

We all left the theater in shock.  Like, jaws-on-the-floor shocked, weakly muttering "I can't believe that was actually a good movie..." in the same way that people probably left the theater of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back muttering "I can't believe that Darth Vader is Luke's father..."  I can't pinpoint exactly what it was; I think it's just that so many little things that went wrong in the first two movies suddenly went right in this one.  I understand that the Twilight filmmakers are taking a leaf from Harry Potter's (far superior) book and are making Breaking Dawn, the final book in the series, into two movies, and all I can say is that I hope they keep the same director.  And Ashley Greene.

No matter what the movie did, though, I could not stop giggling whenever they talked about the "newborn army".  They were very careful to explain what a newborn was in this context, sure, but still my mind decided to visualize an army of screaming babies armed with, say, teething rings and pacifiers, and David Wenham narrating lines from 300 about how "terrible in battle" this deadly army was.

What the Heck Does Alignment Mean, Anyway? (Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber Review)

Welcome to the second edition of "Filling GoldenPigsy's Trough", wherein I review something upon his request.  This goes both ways, of course, as I make requests of him for his own blog (check it here, if you dare).  Dunno what he calls his segments; but doubtless he'll find my own title positively perfect.  My first post of this nature was here, for the Playstation 2's Disgaea: Hour of Darkness.  Today's post is, similarly, a review of an old strategy game, so if you don't like the Nintendo 64, then you can stop reading now.

Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber (released in America on October 7, 2000 for the N64 and March 29, 2010 for the Wii's Virtual Console) has the distinction of being the only game I ever bought using money won from gambling.  My brother's father-in-law used to co-own a condo at the race tracks outside of town, so sometimes we'd all go out there to "watch" a NASCAR race (honestly how anyone can sit there and watch dozens of blurry cars turn left for an entire day is beyond me; I'd spend the day playing Army Men games on the N64 and then come out whenever I heard the shouts of rapture that indicated a crash).  At one of the races, we started a pot and picked cars, and out of the 20 or so people there, my car got 2nd place, which was good for $50.  I instantly went and picked this game up.

Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber is a real-time strategy RPG for the Nintendo 64 in which you create squads of 5 guys and send them marching around different maps, wresting town after town from the enemy's grasp until, eventually, you reach the map's enemy stronghold and take down its boss.  You beat him, you watch the story unfold, you fine-tune your squads on a world map, you enter another area, and repeat for about forty missions, each of which can take over an hour.  Your squad of 5 guys (and/or girls) is arranged on a 3x3 grid.  When they engage another squad, you don't control your men directly; rather, they attack based on their stats and location.  So, for instance, your knight standing on the front line of the 3x3 grid will attack twice per squad-battle, and your sorceress will attack twice when in the back row, but both will only attack once when their positions are flipped, and those attacks will be much weaker.  This forces you to plan ahead and mix and match to create the best squads who can withstand getting surprised from the sides or back as well as the front.

As I mentioned earlier, for each map, you essentially take over town after town until all that's left is the enemy stronghold.  Taking over all the other towns before the enemy base isn't necessary, of course - you could just make a bee-line straight for the boss if you really wanted - but, as you'll see, that's not a great idea.  To take over a town, all you have to do is knock the enemy squads out of it and then stop your own squad within its walls, but each town has a different "alignment" on a scale of 1-100, and you will "liberate" or "capture" the town depending on whether or not your squad's leader's own alignment is roughly the same as the town's.

Sound confusing?  It is, and in fact, Rockman24 didn't even know about alignment the first time he played through.  You are allowed up to ten squads out on the field per battle, but what Rockman24 did on his first play-through was use one squad to defend his home base and one super-powerful squad to go out and fight everybody until he sliced his way to the map's boss.  Upon beating the game, he and I learned something very important: Ogre Battle 64 contains multiple endings (six, to be exact) depending on your final "chaos level", which is determined by the choices you make during the story segments as well as "liberating" and "capturing" towns.  Make good decisions and liberate lots of towns, and you'll be fine.  Capture too many and make poor decisions, and your chaos level goes down, as Rockman24's most definitely did.  As an added punch to Rockman24's freefalling chaos level number, apparently it also goes down for each town that is still in enemy hands when you defeat the boss.  Suddenly, Rockman24's strategy of ripping a hole clean through the enemy lines until reaching the map's boss doesn't sound quite so brilliant, does it?

He got the worst ending possible.

By this point, I had secured my own copy of the game thanks to the only good to ever come from NASCAR racing, so when I played through, I made sure to do things right and liberate all the towns.  This is more complicated than you may think.  First of all, you have to have squads with alignments across the whole spectrum: a paladin trio with a pair of clerics ("good alignment"), a dark knight with a bunch of mages and a ninja ("bad alignment") and a small but lively host of sword masters and puppeteers ("neutral alignment", and yes I said puppeteers).  If you kill a paladin or cleric, your alignment usually goes down, and vice versa for dark knights or bezerkers.  If you take out an enemy several levels higher than yourself, alignment goes up, and vice versa for destroying puny weaklings.  Your squads' alignment is constantly in flux, so if, say, a holy paladin is blocking your path to a town with a really high alignment, you'll have to plan ahead and send some ninjas or mages

I got a much better ending than Rockman24.  Where his chaos level was a solid 2 (making for more than a few poo jokes), mine was closer to 85.  On a scale of 1-100, that's a bit of a difference, and all from something that the game never even explains to you.

The storyline itself is typical Japanese insanity.  Magnus Gallant is a blue-haired new captain in Southern Palatinus who quickly discovers that the rich are oppressing the poor, so after a few missions he and his buddies (one a hothead named after the Greek hero Diomedes) defect to the Revolutionary Army.  When the Revolutionary Army starts to win the war (thanks to you, of course), General Godeslas of the Southern Army, under direction of Sir Baldwin from the Holy Lodis Empire (whom I call Arec with a Kim-Jong Il accent whenever I see him), takes extreme measures and summons forth ogres from the nether realms.  Darkness consumes more and more of the land until the only human army left standing is that of Magnus.  Or something like that.  Mostly, it's just crazy demon stuff that gives the Japanese artists a chance to draw huge ape-like things with hammers.  Silly Japanese.

Beyond the main plot, Ogre Battle 64 is rife with countless subplots involving recruitable characters.  There are the foreign knights from other Ogre Battle games who will only join you if your chaos level is high enough.  There's the father who will only join you if you had found his daughter - a young cleric - during a particular mission.  There's a centurion, a rather dishy sorceress, and even a vampire.  And then there's the actually relevant subplot involving Prince Yumil, a real pansy of a guy who was childhood friends with Magnus.  In true Japanese fashion, this white-haired weeny strives as best as he can to be just like Magnus: strong, brave, charismatic, even though he is patently none of those things.  His insecurities drive much of the plot, and even though he is far too whiny for my tastes, his character development is certainly one of the more fascinating elements of the game, psychotic demon-ogres excluded, of course.

Ogre Battle 64 scored high with critics upon its release, but for some reason gamers didn't feel the same way.  It didn't sell very well in America, and nowadays I'm quite shocked to see a copy sitting in the local game stores.  The Ogre Battle series has several other games available in Japan, but this and Tactics Ogre for the Game Boy Advance are the only two that I know of to hit American shelves.  A shame really.  They're brilliant games.  I would love to see more.

It should say something about Ogre Battle 64 that it is now the only Nintendo 64 game that I still play.  Its replay value is incredible.  This is due to its high customization: since there is no voice acting (thank goodness), you can name Magnus whatever you want, along with all of your recruits and even your army itself (its default name is the Blue Knights, but I prefer Ass-Kickers).  This makes for some highly entertaining "accidents", like when my friend's little brother named Magnus after himself but in all caps, so every time someone referred to Magnus they appeared to be yelling (Sir, may I introduce FRANK Gallant).  Coincidentally, Pokemon is much the same way.  You can name your little critters whatever the heck you want, so instead of seeing "Go, Pikachu!" at the start of a battle you may see "Go, dammit!" which I think is a much more accurate sentiment.  I'm a terrible sucker for being able to name your characters.  It anchors you emotionally to your recruits and gives you a reason to keep playing (I just need Jack O'Neill to level up one more time, and then I'll work on raising Darth Vader's alignment before giving T-Pain a few more rounds of training).  Making 5-man squads based on your friends or favorite TV shows is a great way to prove to yourself that you have too few of one and watch too much of the other.

So next time you want to name a meteor-throwing mage after Man v. Food's Adam Richmond and pair him up with Aragorn the sword master, Conan the bezerker, SBD the ninja, and Mr. Deathypants the scythe-wielding dark knight, go to a used game store and find Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber, or download it to your Virtual Console on the Nintendo Wii.  It's the N64's greatest RPG, and my personal favorite for the entire system.  As IGN put in in their recent review of its Virtual Console iteration, Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber "was (and still is) lordly indeed."

A Note on My Failure

I'm sure the hundreds of thousands of you reading this are wondering where my posts have gone to lately, what my thoughts are on Prince of Persia, A-Team, and Jonah Hex, and how my month of summer classes went.

I guess you could say that all of these are related.  My summer class is over and gone now.  The joy of taking a course at a community college after having spent the past few years at a state university is that, for my first test, I drove to campus after work, picked up my textbook (last one in stock, whew!), skimmed the first 11 chapters for a few minutes, then went in and got a 100 on my test.  This class was stupidly easy, but it did take up a fair amount of my time (that first test aside), giving me less nights on which to see the movies I've dedicated myself to seeing for the sake of this blog.  Also, during this time my wife and several of her co-workers (all female, it's worth noting) spent three Tuesdays in a row watching each of the three Twilight movies, thus taking up more nights that would otherwise be spent watching dudes parachute to safety in a CGI tank.  Add this to the fact that Jonah Hex was in - and out! - of theaters faster than it takes my 18-pound thundercat to make it to the kitchen upon hearing the food hit her dish, and voila!  I have my first trio of missed movies!

I think A-Team, at least, is still in a handful of theaters somewhere in the city, but since I've already missed Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Jonah Hex: The Nail in Megan Fox's Career's Coffin, I figure I might as well make a trilogy of my failures and just wait until the three of them hit Netflix in the fall.  The way I see it, as long as I watch the movies before the year's end, I still win, so don't you worry: at some point this year, you'll finally learn exactly what I think of these TV show, videogame, and comic book adaptations, respectively.  In the meantime, if you need to find me, I'll be busy seeing Inception.  And Predators.  And Toy Story 3.  And Despicable Me.  And whatever the hell else comes out this month.

X-Men Meets Alien? (Splice Review)

Ever wonder what would happen if you turned a guinnea pig inside-out, made it the size of an angry beaver, and gave it a stinger that could come out its mouth?

Neither had I, but apparently someone out there did, as this is basically the first thing you see in what I will admit has probably been the most mis-judged movie on my 2010 preview list thus far: Splice.  This is one of those movies that is probably better the less you know about it, so if you have any inclination of seeing Splice, then I suggest that you don't read on beyond the end of this paragraph.  For you, I will simply say that I found it to be a surprisingly well-made movie despite Adrien Brody's naked behind.

For those of you NOT interested in seeing Splice (and I suspect that's most of you), here's the rundown.  Two scientists - Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) - are experts at splicing genes, and together they develop a new animal out of the DNA of various creatures and plants.  From this animal they aim to solve virtually all medicinal problems in farm animals.  Naturally, Clive and Elsa wish to extend this research to humans so that they can find cures for cancer and birth defects and all those other fun problems caused by heavy drinking during pregnancy and/or extensive inbreeding.  This, however, is quickly shot down by the company funding their research since it would be too similar to cloning, so our rebellious scientists at the NERD compound (seriously, that's its name) take matters into their own hands and splice a human gene with the inside-out guinnea pig monstrosity they had already created.  A creature is born, and voila!  You have Splice!

The surface plot is simple enough, in the way that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is simple.  Doctors create misunderstood monster.  Monster makes life difficult for creators.  Things don't turn out so well.  The end.  But Splice, at its heart, isn't at all about Dren (the creature).  It's about Elsa, the lady splicer.  Never before have I seen a film that so expertly picks apart the psyche of a broken woman.  Elsa had a dysfunctional childhood.  Her mom was crazy.  What makes this movie so brilliant in this respect is that it doesn't explicitly tell you any more than that.  There's a line or two said in passing that suggest this, and at one point you see Elsa's childhood room (little more than a flea-ridden mattress on the floor), but that's it.  All the rest you gleam from Elsa's actions.  Her character was so well-written, and the movie's depiction of her so well-filmed, that I got chills.  Her character is so complex, yet perfectly-portrayed, that I could spent pages and pages talking about her, so just take my word for it: in terms of character development, I don't know if I've ever seen a film do a better job.  Ever.  From the way she dominates her relationships to her adamant stance against having children to her obsession with her work...  It got a touch disturbing at times.  But such is this movie: complex, psychologically beautiful, and disturbing.

Splice is hard to watch at times.  It's sort of a thriller, but not really.  This isn't like Alien, where you have a monster slowly picking off castmembers until there's only two or three left.  In Splice, the entire cast list is only about six people deep.  Splice is more psychological drama than it is science fiction thriller, despite what the trailers would have you believe.  I suspect that many pubescent boys went in expecting copious amounts of bloodshed and death.  Splice delivers on both, but perhaps not as much as they would have liked.  It does, however, present you with a naked female mutant in what may actually be the most bizarre sex scene I've yet encountered (and that includes the ones from MacGruber), so I'm sure their feelings were mixed.

To sum up, Splice is NOT a prederatorial thriller where a dozen hapless scientists are slowly picked off one by one.  See this film if you are a psychology major and don't mind some blood, creepily attractive mutant women, or, in a similar vein, Adrien Brody's ass.  Do not see this film if you don't appreciate seeing animals die onscreen, small Canadian casts, hopeless endings, crazy people, tense scenes, the birthing process, inside-out guinea pig creatures that look more like flesh pillows than animals, wide-set eyes, transgenders, rape, or if you generally possess a sunny disposition.  You might just come out of the whole affair as messed up as Elsa - or, at the very least, (in the words of Prince Humperdink) very put out.