Such sad, emotionally stunted people.

It's such a sorry state of affairs that in order to attempt to do any kind of science fiction film dealing with science instead of some 13-year-old fantasy, the main characters have to exhibit some seriously psychotic personality flaws to drive the story.

In Splice, Elsa is so emotionally damaged that you have to wonder what the hell was wrong with Clive that he married her in the first place.

Someone on the board here speculated about Canadian minds being so much bigger than those of Americans {laughing}, and taking a look at the conservatives in the US, especially those in the media it would be a reasonable question, but I digress.

There is a paucity of good speculative fiction writing that makes it to a final film product, but the root cause of this is two-fold. The first lies in audiences who have been spoon-fed sci-fi destruction porn with no nuance or depth for several generations now. 2001: A Space Odyssey would fare very poorly at the box office today with far too many complaining that, 1) they didn't get it, and 2) there wasn't any action in it making it "boring."

The second reason good writing rarely gets made is because the studios are so risk-averse that anything that hasn't been done to death, or lacks easily recognizable sci-fi memes, will not get approval by the suits controlling the purse strings.

Isaac Asimov said, "Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all."

And to add to what Asimov said, the most imaginative ideas created in the service of the speculative "what if" are rarely of the "Hulk smash" variety.

They often tackle ideas about how we as a species will react to a scientific breakthrough that isn't as spectacular as a carnivorous, DNA-reconstructed dinosaur rampaging through San Diego.

Given how studios manage their current financial models, science fiction rarely survives on television if the ratings drop the least little bit; Stargate Universe, Firefly, et cetera. Or, if the series writes itself into a corner like Continuum, Extant and Helix did. So audiences are not exposed to stories that require a little more cognition than that needed for The Real Housewives or ___________ <-insert city, or even something like The Walking Dead.

There's a minor movement to go back to the hard science stories like in Red Planet or The Martian, but even The Martian film's initial premise is completely scientifically flawed (not a dense enough atmosphere on Mars to generate the storm that strands Matt Damon's character). The fact is that weak writing shortcuts are enough to force reasonably educated people to jar themselves out of suspending disbelief enough to enjoy the story.

But back to my original point, I'm completely over crazy-ass, impossibly flawed characters in sci-fi movies, invented to gin up completely implausible plots.

Suffice it to say, with Splice I'm never going to get back that hour and forty-five minutes I spent searching for any laudable effort to both entertain and not insult the viewer's intelligence. Besides, isn't this plot a rehash of the Species series when you get right down to it?