Replicas (2018)

Film review #632

Director: Jeffrey Nachmanoff

SYNOPSIS: William Foster is a scientist working on a project to transfer the consciousness of a person into an android body. When he is involved in a car crash with his family and he emerges as the only survivor, he decides to bring them back using his research of transferring consciousness, combined with cloning research being undertaken by his colleague. With the experiment a success, Will’s attempts to keep the secret from his family becomes ever more difficult, and when his employers find out about them, they see them as nothing more than experiments and test subjects, and Will must fight to save his family…

THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Replicas is a 2018 sci-fi film. Starring Keanu Reeves as Will Foster, a scientist who is working on a project to transfer human consciousness into an android body. Unable to figure out the final part of the problem, he is on the verge of losing his funding. During a drive, Will and his family are involved in a car crash, which kills his wife and three children. This leads him to come to the decision to copy their consciousness and to enlist the help of his colleague Ed Whittle, who works in cloning, to create new bodies for him to upload their consciousness too. If you think that’s an absolute mess of a premise, and a a bit of a stretch that the one guy who is working in uploading consciousness just so happens to have his own family killed in the most cliché car-crash-over-a-cliff-on-a-rainy-night. That his next step after dragging them out of the water is to think about cloning them new bodies is a bit of a stretch, and just makes him seen deeply unhinged, and not really the kind of guy you should be rooting for. I get that after such an event he is probably not thinking rationally, but the way he immediately comes to this decision without him ever having any success really just doesn’t flow narratively. Thematically, the way the film just jumps from androids to cloning is a bit disjointed too: you could easily just pick one or the other, but here they’re just put in a blender and thrown about all over the film, never approaching either subject with consideration or depth. You could certainly make a film that deals with the concepts of mind (consciousness) and body (cloning), which I think is maybe what the film is trying to do, but it nowhere near makes any kind of point on it.

Will erases the parts of his family’s memories of the crash, so they don’t remember, and because he only has three cloning pods and can’t clone their youngest daughter, has to erase their memories of her as well. This is where the plot-holes start to really pile up, as Will has to wipe out all trace’s of his Daughter’s existence. He can perhaps erase the memory of his family members by deleting parts of their memory, but what about everyone else that knew her? Her school? There is no way he could have thought this was going to work, and the film barely addresses it. Again, we have to accept he is not exactly thinking rationally, but the fact that he does attempt to account for his family’s absence by contacting their schools, employers etc. shows that he is aware of the problem. It just seems that the film ignores the huge task it opens up to itself with this.

Keanu Reeves is not the ideal lead for this sort of film: if you’re not going to adequately dive into the philosophical issues surrounding cloning, consciousness, evading death and the like, then you need to be able to deliver an emotional impact and show the grief that the lead is going through having lost his family. Unfortunately, Reeves just cannot deliver that level of an emotional performance. Combined with his wholly illogical and unhinged behaviour, and it makes it difficult to root for him or understand what is going on in his head. The finale of the film has Will and his family on the run as the company Will works for wants his family eliminated, as they are experiments that have fulfilled their usefulness. This whole action sequence just feels unnecessary too; there’s no build up to this, or any similar sequence earlier in the film, so it just comes out of nowhere. It tries to build up to something, then just…stops, as Will and the villain reach a deal, and everyone just lives happily ever after. After the absolute mess of the film and Will’s absurd decisions, the fact that everything’ ends well is perhaps the biggest leap of all. The CG is all really bad too: as the android moves about in such an awkward way there’s no way you’ll believe the actors are actually interacting with it.