Spoiler alert: to review a sci-fi movie as sci-fi, can't stop with just one spoiler...
William Foster (Keanu Reeves), obsessed neuroscientist along with friend (or is he really?) Ed (Thomas Middleditch) go from being dutiful employees of a mysterious biotech company (or is it?) to mad scientists cloning a dead family in the basement. Includes stealing billions of dollars' worth of equipment from the employer, and seventeen days of no sleep for obsessed and sometimes grieving Foster, who sleeps with his youngest daughter's stuffed unicorn during the basement vigil (a cute, funny, and subtle homage to Blade Runner, where the unicorn was a key). Oh, that youngest daughter? Not part of the original clone party. Drawing lots hurts even for a brilliant neuroscientist. Three plus one (him) yields four, and the fifth member seems lost.
All the relevant philosophical and ethical questions are brought up in the first part of the movie (so don't skip the opening dialog scenes). A horrible crash on a dark and stormy night renders corpses ready for cloning (though who collected the DNA matter isn't explicitly laid out). The special effects used to transfer neural patterns from a brain donor to a host (first and last, a robot, for a nice plot twist) are well done, an homage and further refinement of those used in Minority Report.
Like any creation, however, beautiful wife Mona in the tradition of her nineteenth-century literary predecessor - Frankenstein's Monster - calls her creator on his crap more than once, providing the noble (or is he) scientist a couple servings of humble pie.
But wait! Before the heavy questions can be addressed, much less answered, the thicken plots (pardon the spoonerism). In sci-fi movie tradition, there's the danger, the chase, the suspense, the unmasking of the boss (John Ortiz) as being a nefarious capitalist who hasn't been honest with his intelligent workers about his business plan.
There are a few details, in addition to the unicorn, that show the kinds of writerly touches sci-fi writers employ, such as the name of the uncloned daughter Zoë (meaning life); symbolic use of numbers, in this case 345 (numbers in divine sequence with implication of the importance of the wholeness of the body); and an homage to Johnny Mnemonic, when William Foster hides in the men's room to transfer his own neural network to its little box so it can be transferred to robot William. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick...but you know the boss is going to walk into the men's room just when a neuroscientist needs to have a steady hand.
Continuity flubs happen, so I wasn't looking for those. Even Casablanca has a major one - no, Ilsa wasn't wearing a blue dress in Paris; she was wearing a suit, which Ted Turner's TNT Classic Film coloring revealed. However, there are a couple of plot lapses that go against the science outlined in Replicas that make you go 'hmmmmmm...'
One: If transferring the brain patterns of a person to a halo that's then going to be put on a clone means the brain needs to be intact (hence the boss giving the order to NOT shoot William in the head - did you really think he wouldn't get duplicated himself?) then you have to ask - after blunt force trauma that would cause a TBI thanks to robot William bashing boss Jones against the tile floor, would transferring his neural network to his clone yield a fully functional Jones? Certainly his reptilian hindbrain is left intact...
Second: if the cloning process algorithm is designed to yield a clone of the original person at their same age if incubated for the seventeen required days no more no less no power interruption in cloning goo, then why would an ailing rich man want his own body to be cloned? Or, was his neural network destined for a different clone (which goes against Foster's discovery that the neural network would only work if transferred to a body that would feel familiar, which he creates for robot William by transferring his physical algorithms to the machine)? Then there's the bullet between the eyes for brownnosing Ed (karma's instant) so does someone else have his cloning skills? Robot William?
As a sci-fi writer, I do the best I can to make sure that the science part of my plot lines is consistent and makes sense within its context, even though fiction by its very definition requires a suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader/viewer. It's hard work and yes there can be flaws despite a writer's caution to avoid them. Despite these two gaffes, this movie is good cheesy fun with a few holes like a slice of Emmenthaler, paired with some dialog that gives a yummy and salty taste of ham. Put them between two slices of French Toast and you've got a Monte Cristo sandwich for brunch.
The happy ending gives the impression that all the loose ends have been tied up, but have they? The philosophical questions remain, the ethics still debatable. Beautiful clone Mona questions William's wisdom, recalling Mary Shelley's premise: just because you can doesn't mean you should. As Thomas Brophy Ph.D. said, "the mechanism demands a mysticism" and William Foster, like Victor Frankenstein, in a moment of grief turns to desperate anger and fails to see the truth, found in quantum physics not bioscience, that what makes us human is our soul, not our brain. The ghost in the machine defies the 17th century Cartesian logic upon which the biosciences with their mind/body concepts rely, much to the chagrin of Schrödinger's cat, who walked into a bar and didn't.
Isabeau Vollhardt Author, sci-fi/detective e-book series The Casebook of Elisha Grey
William Foster (Keanu Reeves), obsessed neuroscientist along with friend (or is he really?) Ed (Thomas Middleditch) go from being dutiful employees of a mysterious biotech company (or is it?) to mad scientists cloning a dead family in the basement. Includes stealing billions of dollars' worth of equipment from the employer, and seventeen days of no sleep for obsessed and sometimes grieving Foster, who sleeps with his youngest daughter's stuffed unicorn during the basement vigil (a cute, funny, and subtle homage to Blade Runner, where the unicorn was a key). Oh, that youngest daughter? Not part of the original clone party. Drawing lots hurts even for a brilliant neuroscientist. Three plus one (him) yields four, and the fifth member seems lost.
All the relevant philosophical and ethical questions are brought up in the first part of the movie (so don't skip the opening dialog scenes). A horrible crash on a dark and stormy night renders corpses ready for cloning (though who collected the DNA matter isn't explicitly laid out). The special effects used to transfer neural patterns from a brain donor to a host (first and last, a robot, for a nice plot twist) are well done, an homage and further refinement of those used in Minority Report.
Like any creation, however, beautiful wife Mona in the tradition of her nineteenth-century literary predecessor - Frankenstein's Monster - calls her creator on his crap more than once, providing the noble (or is he) scientist a couple servings of humble pie.
But wait! Before the heavy questions can be addressed, much less answered, the thicken plots (pardon the spoonerism). In sci-fi movie tradition, there's the danger, the chase, the suspense, the unmasking of the boss (John Ortiz) as being a nefarious capitalist who hasn't been honest with his intelligent workers about his business plan.
There are a few details, in addition to the unicorn, that show the kinds of writerly touches sci-fi writers employ, such as the name of the uncloned daughter Zoë (meaning life); symbolic use of numbers, in this case 345 (numbers in divine sequence with implication of the importance of the wholeness of the body); and an homage to Johnny Mnemonic, when William Foster hides in the men's room to transfer his own neural network to its little box so it can be transferred to robot William. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick...but you know the boss is going to walk into the men's room just when a neuroscientist needs to have a steady hand.
Continuity flubs happen, so I wasn't looking for those. Even Casablanca has a major one - no, Ilsa wasn't wearing a blue dress in Paris; she was wearing a suit, which Ted Turner's TNT Classic Film coloring revealed. However, there are a couple of plot lapses that go against the science outlined in Replicas that make you go 'hmmmmmm...'
One: If transferring the brain patterns of a person to a halo that's then going to be put on a clone means the brain needs to be intact (hence the boss giving the order to NOT shoot William in the head - did you really think he wouldn't get duplicated himself?) then you have to ask - after blunt force trauma that would cause a TBI thanks to robot William bashing boss Jones against the tile floor, would transferring his neural network to his clone yield a fully functional Jones? Certainly his reptilian hindbrain is left intact...
Second: if the cloning process algorithm is designed to yield a clone of the original person at their same age if incubated for the seventeen required days no more no less no power interruption in cloning goo, then why would an ailing rich man want his own body to be cloned? Or, was his neural network destined for a different clone (which goes against Foster's discovery that the neural network would only work if transferred to a body that would feel familiar, which he creates for robot William by transferring his physical algorithms to the machine)? Then there's the bullet between the eyes for brownnosing Ed (karma's instant) so does someone else have his cloning skills? Robot William?
As a sci-fi writer, I do the best I can to make sure that the science part of my plot lines is consistent and makes sense within its context, even though fiction by its very definition requires a suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader/viewer. It's hard work and yes there can be flaws despite a writer's caution to avoid them. Despite these two gaffes, this movie is good cheesy fun with a few holes like a slice of Emmenthaler, paired with some dialog that gives a yummy and salty taste of ham. Put them between two slices of French Toast and you've got a Monte Cristo sandwich for brunch.
The happy ending gives the impression that all the loose ends have been tied up, but have they? The philosophical questions remain, the ethics still debatable. Beautiful clone Mona questions William's wisdom, recalling Mary Shelley's premise: just because you can doesn't mean you should. As Thomas Brophy Ph.D. said, "the mechanism demands a mysticism" and William Foster, like Victor Frankenstein, in a moment of grief turns to desperate anger and fails to see the truth, found in quantum physics not bioscience, that what makes us human is our soul, not our brain. The ghost in the machine defies the 17th century Cartesian logic upon which the biosciences with their mind/body concepts rely, much to the chagrin of Schrödinger's cat, who walked into a bar and didn't.
Isabeau Vollhardt Author, sci-fi/detective e-book series The Casebook of Elisha Grey