MOVIE REVIEW: Replicas (2018)

I’ve been interested in the concept of a transhuman existence ever since my first experiences with science fiction. While the idea is making its way out of the realm of fiction, the outcomes of trans-humanism (enhancement technologies, cyborgs, AI and the technological singularity, eugenics/cloning, etc.) rest squarely within the limited reach of our relatively expansive imaginations. If you’ve been reading on my site, you can find several outlying representatives in pop culture and film like The Lawnmower Man series, Cyber Bride, Creation of the Humanoids, Transcendence, Alraune, and the Japanese TV show “Kamen Rider Zero-One”. We’re adding another one to the list by diving back into the realm of mad science — some real “Modern Prometheus” stuff —with the Keanu Reeves star-vehicle Replicas by starting off with a hoary line of purple prose.

NO BIG NO?: William (Keanu Reeves) could be screaming NOOOOO into the storming skies with the angle of this shot, but he’s a weirdo who would rather steal from his job to clone his family.

It was a dark and stormy night when tragedy befell the Foster family on vacation. They had just moved to Puerto Rico for a big multi-disciplinary science job at Bionyne Systems for the absent-minded patriarch William (Keanu Reeves, the Matrix franchise, the John Wick franchise). His doctor-wife Mona (Alice Eve, Star Trek: Into Darkness [2013], Sex and the City 2 [2010]) was also in the car, with their kids Sophie (Emily Alyn Lynd, Doctor Sleep [2019], “Gossip Girl” [TV-HBO Max]), Matt (Emjay Anthony, Krampus [2015], “Physical” [TV-Apple+]) and little Zoe (Aria Leabu, The Call of the Wild [2020]) when their car crashed and they all drowned except for William. His life was already going downhill as his work in transferring minds, consciousness and memories into a digital format had hit a wall. So William stood in the rain over his dead family…and came up with an idea. While transferring a biological mind into a digital form was still a work-in-progress, Bionyne had cloned animals before and transferred animal consciousness between bodies with no problems. The distraught scientist calls his co-worker Ed (Thomas Middleditch, “Silicon Valley” [TV-HBO], “Solar Opposites” [TV-Hulu]), who’s a specialist in cloning and asks him to break every ethical rule by duplicating the minds of his rapidly cooling HUMAN family’s corpses so he can put them into cloned bodies. Ed hesitantly agrees but there’s some unexpected problems:

• Even though there’s FOUR dead people, Ed can only pull THREE cloning vats for this project. This means William has to choose which family member doesn’t come back.
• On top of that, Ed has to erase all memories from the digitized versions of the memories of those cloned. Without their mental copies, the clones come out as blank-slate minds — no better than adult-sized babies — so he has to be careful when he works on the data. Please note that Bionyne as a company has only digitally copied animal consciousness with any success, and this is the first time anyone has digitally copied HUMAN consciousness. EVER.
• William wants all of the clone bodies to be out of the tank at the same time. With some quick re-calculations and compensations for temperatures and power needs, Ed declares they’ll be ready in 17 days. If the clones stay in longer, they will age noticeably with each day.
• Each member of William’s family had a network of people and obligations in the real and digital worlds, so he has to pretend to be each of them online while making up cover stories for nosy visitors.
• William’s boss Mr. Jones (John Ortiz, Miami Vice [2006], Ad Astra [2019]) is asking questions about “Project 345” — the digital consciousness transference project that keeps failing — and if they don’t get it right for an upcoming donor presentation, the company will be shut down. No pressure.

TRAPPINGS OF MAD SCIENCE: Bubbling liquids, flashing lights, fleshy blobs in nutrient solution? Right next to Ed (Thomas Middleditch), there must be science going on here!

It’s a comedy of existential horrors to get it all right — the clones start having flashback to their deaths, motor function and hand-eye coordination issues, unexplained memories about a bunk bed and who wrote “Zoe” in crayon in their closet — before the hard left turn happens, and we get to see how far one man who’s already broken several natural laws will go for his family.

I’ll be honest, I almost forgot about this movie and that’s by design of the distributors. This movie was released in the post-Oscars period in January 2019 and quickly forgotten, though I can imagine how anyone could forget making a $30 million movie that only made back less than $10 million. I only remembered because I purchased this on YouTube Movies and planned to review it many years ago but was sidetracked; a lot was happening in those days. The reviews from other critics didn’t help, but because of the transhumanist angle, I set myself to watch it. After watching the film, I have to say it was a mixed bag of quality.

While the CG was bare-bones and poorly composited, the idea was an amazing one that’s touched on in most science-fiction stories. If a story has cloning as a story element, the best ones give clones with a fully formed psyche (defined by Freudian psychoanalysis as possessing an id, ego, and superego) and only a few memories missing on average with psychogenic/dissociative/functional amnesia as an option. As Star Trek has people digitized in transporters for perfect physical and mental cloning on the spot, Phantasy Star has cloning with memory backups, Dune has gholas, and Altered Carbon has cortical stacks to transfer consciousness and memories to a new body, cloned or not. If a transhuman agenda is to be pursued, this particular hurdle must be aggressively tackled — preferably with a humanist bent — to ensure all parties have their mental faculties where possible no matter how many times they are copied.

CHOICE CUTS (spoilers beyond this point):

• Alice Eve’s dead-eyed stare is perfect for this film; it makes her performance as a clone more believable.
• When Mona confronted William about what it means to have memorable experiences and emotion, the latter replies it’s all just electrical impulses and chemistry. Mona is quite sure it more than that — there is the matter of the soul. I suppose it’s a conversation worth having because it’s important to solve to advance a successful transhuman process.
• The reveal of Project 345’s mental imprint as William (AKA “Robo-William”) was fun, but the imprint was made before he knew his family was in danger from Mr. Jones. I guess he passed that info on to Robo-William when extracting the algorithm.
• In helping William clone his dead family, Ed has seen all of them naked.
• The toilet scene nearly made me throw up and the levels of unsanitary and unsafe the whole scene was. It leaned more towards a dystopian cyberpunk future than the positive hopes for transhumanism.
• Why was the android body of Project 345 not secured? It threw a technician across the room within a minute of activation — it’s like they didn’t even plan for the worst while hoping for the best. They didn’t make that mistake with the rebuilt 345 body, as Robo-William burst those bonds with ease.

CYBER-DAD: Robo-William, saving his family and clogging the future with people who could afford to cheat death.

• The 17-day turnaround time on cloning was much faster than the Kaminoans’ 10 years for making Galactic Republic Clone Troopers in the Star Wars movies or the single year for Spaarti cloning cylinders in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, and that franchise has space wizards with laser swords.
• When the clones of William’s family come out of the growth fluid, they take their first breath with no problems — which makes no sense. If the growth liquid was intended to work like amniotic fluid, then the clones’ lungs could work at breathing and develop muscles and patterns for breathing BEFORE being removed from the cloning tank. The growth liquid they were in was NOT amniotic or aerated, meaning all the clones’ lungs would be under-developed for Earth’s atmospheric pressures at sea level and they would not be able to breathe properly.
• The final scene lends itself to a dystopian future where Bionyne becomes the sole cloning company on Earth for anyone that can afford the process. It’s Altered Carbon all over again.
• William was able to wipe the clones’ problematic memories with swipes and clicks, leaving huge dark gaps in the neural pathways. They might have been born literally yesterday, but the clones are gonna notice something’s missing (and they do).
• Finding our Mr. Jones was a US government spook was a very nice twist!
• “From the producer of Transformers” HINT HINT
• Shout-out to Scott the Black technician (Nyasha Hatendi, “Casual” [TV-Hulu], Narcopolis [2015]), just because.
• Mona should have divorced his ass for this foolishness.