Mark Reviews Movies: REPLICAS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 11, 2019

Replicas starts, stops, and restarts more times than are worth counting. It begins as the story of trying to transplant a human consciousness into the synthetic brain of a robot and ends with a series of generic, anticlimactic action sequences. That progression is the norm for a piece of Hollywood science-fiction. Such movies usually start with a promising idea and, when the screenwriter runs out of ways to develop or evolve that core concept, lazily resort to action to conclude a story without really resolving it.

This movie, though, is something different. It possesses maybe three or four core ideas, all of them somewhat united—by the general conceit of replicating a human mind into something else—yet different enough that the end result seems far removed from where the story begins. Along the way, there are several secondary ideas, which have to do with the ethics of such scientific endeavors, the clunky way in which our protagonist tries to hide his experiments, the secret motive of the company for which he works, and questions about identity, memory, and the nature of what makes a human being actually human.

It's about all of this, and it's also, by way of how half-heartedly St. John and director Jeffrey Nachmanoff actually explore these multiple ideas, about none of it. The movie is an odd contradiction. You can sense St. John's brain working in the way the movie presents so many ideas, but you also get the sense that he's making all of it up as he goes. There are so many ideas here that the movie never decides upon a single one to follow through on to the end.

At the start, it's about Will Foster (Keanu Reeves), a brilliant scientist within an unspecific field who works for a major company in Puerto Rico (The various locales on the island make for an admittedly unique backdrop, but if we're talking about the relatively normal settings within a science-fiction movie, something has gone terribly awry). He and his team of other scientists, including right-hand man Ed (Thomas Middleditch), are trying to transplant the minds of voluntary "donors"—usually dead soldiers—into a synthetic brain, housed inside a super-strong android (Making the vehicle for the resurrected consciousness super-strong seems like a bad idea, and well, it turns out to be one).

The experiments keep failing. Will's boss Jones (John Ortiz) is threatening to shut down the project if Will doesn't start producing results.

Shortly after the introduction to this particular story, the movie shifts into a new one, when Will's entire family—his wife Mona (Alice Eve) and their three children (played by Emily Alyn Lind, Emjay Anthony, and Aria Lyric Leabu)—is killed in a car crash. Will calls Ed, who brings a consciousness-nabbing device from the lab, and the two secure the neural data from each member of Will's recently deceased family.

At this point, we get both the third and fourth story ideas, which has Ed setting up three cloning tanks (because, one supposes, a lab working on a project completely unrelated to cloning might as well have such technology—for reasons), meaning Will has to decide which family member he won't save. Then, he has to make excuses for why his entire family has gone missing, while still leaving room for when three of them suddenly return to existence.

How does he plan to explain the complete disappearance of one of his children? Why, he deletes memories of the kid from the other family members' minds, of course. As for the rest of the world, well, he's not exactly competent in any of this, in case that fact isn't obvious by now.

It's rather astonishing how dumb Will turns out to be—from ignoring the obvious questions about his family's disappearance, to forgetting to erase all physical remnants of the child that isn't resurrected via clone, to just telling the new model of his wife that she's a clone, to overlooking the fact that his company might have protocols to prevent such a thing, to so many other things that it would take too much space to list. To be fair to this fictional character, a lot of these obvious mistakes can be placed upon St. John, who, instead of examining the moral and ethical and philosophical dilemmas of Will's actions, would rather focus on the attempted suspense of having his protagonist juggle so many procedural issues.

Any one of these core ideas might have held some promise for an intelligent, provocative, and troubling tale about hubris in the face of limitless, technological power. Replicas, though, suffers and fails on account of its own hubris—not to mention the limits of its imagination.

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