During her later life she’s played by Delphine Chanéac, who looks quite strikingly alien thanks to some fancy performance capture that rearranges the structure of her face (see this article from Popular Mechanics to find out more about how it was done or try this one from Animation World Network or maybe this one from Wired, since they’re mentioned in the film a couple of times if that’s still too complicated, watch the featurette below). Her anatomy is the structure for the story, affecting the situation with each new growth: Elsa takes centre stage during the babyish early “years” (her growth is conveniently accelerated by a quirk of her genetic make-up), while Clive mopes and doubts until Dren slinks into sexual maturity. The spliced creature, named Dren, herself goes through so many developmental stages that there’s always some new surprise ready to spring from her body. But this mash-up of familiar things hides its fair share of spikes, wings and stings. Other clichés and conventions abound – the corporate end of the scientific complex will be populated with unscrupulous slimeballs, a woman chased through the woods will bang her head and fall over, and the cute little alien thing you just spawned in a lab will not stay sweet and cuddly forever. We know for instance that they will not resist their curiosity, will not abort the experiment, and that things will all go horribly wrong. We know this, because we’ve seen other science fiction movies where people in white coats go a bit mavericky and “play god”. The intricacies of this process are shown to using a montaged bunch of whip-pan, fast-cut sciencey bits (lots of wireframe models, scans, incubators and test tubes that give the impression that these tech people know what they’re doing), so that you can get beyond the how and focus on the what if? Moral considerations? Yes, there are. Breaking away from the roadmap set out for them by their corporate sponsors, they are trying to see how far they can go, just out of curiosity, with creating a new lifeform spliced with human DNA. “There are moral considerations,” says Clive (Adrien Brody) to Elsa (Sarah Polley) as they’re arguing over the course of the secret scientific experiments they are conducting.
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