Replicas

Year 12, Day 292 - 10/18/20 - Movie #3,678

BEFORE: OK, so I took stock of what's left unseen in terms of Stephen King movies - after I review "It: Chapter Two" next week, there's really just "Pet Sematary" (the recent remake), "Children of the Corn", and something called "A Good Marriage", which is on AmazonPrime.  Also some lesser works like "Graveyard Shift", "Creepshow" and the original Salem's Lot, which is technically a mini-series, and I usually try to discount those, but the original version of "It" was a TV mini-series, and I counted that one.  But then if I let in all the mini-series, I'd have to watch "The Stand", "The Langoliers" and "The Tommyknockers" - but those longer series don't really feel like movies, so I guess the cut-off is that any mini-series longer than two episodes doesn't belong here - I may still watch them at some point but this is a movie review site, not a TV series review site.  (Though apparently I'll make an exception for two-part TV movies...) 

All in all, that's not too bad, I've already knocked out a ton of movies based on King's stories over the years.  However, with the recent success of the "It" films, there are many more currently in production - so the struggle continues.  Something to worry about next year, for now I just want to get to the end of October and then not think about horror films for a while - I've got a few months before I need to think about possibilities for a 2021 horror chain, based on what I didn't get to in 2020.  

"Replicas" is another film like "Birds of Prey", meaning that it's been rescheduled several times this year - I was going to include it with "River's Edge" and "Between Two Ferns" back when I thought that the "Bill & Ted Face the Music" movie might get released on time, but then of course movie theaters didn't open up in June.  Then when "Bill & Ted" got re-scheduled for a September release, I could have used this one to link between "Once Upon a Time in Venice" (via Thomas Middleditch) to "Bill & Ted 3", which would have linked back to "Killing Hasselhoff" via Kid Cudi.  Then, since movie theaters in New York City didn't open up like they did in other cities, I had to drop the plans to see "Bill & Ted", which meant dropping "Replicas" from the schedule, too, and fortunately Ron Funches was in both films on either side of the Keanu double-play, and thus the chain just closed up around where this one would have gone, and the linking was preserved.  Moving "Replicas" to October was the next best move, combined with "Birds of Prey" and "Doctor Sleep", all three films replacing three OTHER films that I would have had to rent from iTunes.  With a little effort, the schedule just finds a way to work itself out, it seems. 

Emily Alyn Lind carries over from "Doctor Sleep".

THE PLOT: A scientist becomes obsessed with bringing back his family members who died in a traffic accident. 

AFTER: Because this film ended up in October, when all was said and done, I'm going to regard it as a spin on the classic "Mad Scientist" story, of which "Frankenstein" may be the most well-known example, however there are plenty of others.  I ran out of Frankenstein-based movies years ago, so this may be the closest I get to anything like that this year.  (How else can I work in my annual reminder that the book's title refers to the SCIENTIST, not the MONSTER.  If you see that big figure with the green skin and the bolts in his neck, and you call him "Frankenstein", you are wrong.  He was not officially given a name in the classic novel, though he made a reference to wanting to be called "Adam". I find myself correcting people on this point every single year.)

Doctor Frankenstein, of course, took many body parts from different sources, stitched them together, and allowed that new-fangled thing called electricity to bring his creature to life.  Modern medicine has come  a long way since then, and here we find our mad scientist, William Foster, working to bring dead subjects back in a different way, by placing their brain patterns into robot bodies.  The success rate is not good, however, every cyborg implanted with human brains seems very confused and has an urge to self-destruct.  With a funding deadline looming - somebody must need a cyborg army very badly, is it the company that will someday become Skynet? - Foster decides to get away with his family on a boating trip. Sure, if it's crunch time, logically that means it's a great time for a vacation, right?  

But the family never makes it to the boat, a car accident takes the lives of Foster's wife and three kids, he's the only one who walks away from the crash - but instead of calling the police or an ambulance, he calls his lab assistant to come and record the brain patterns of his family, so I guess he has the intent of putting them into robot bodies?  Already this isn't making much sense, because over the next few days he manages to perfect human cloning by instead growing new bodies for them in "pods", but if the company was working with cyborg bodies, why did they have cloning pods on hand?  Isn't that a completely different approach to body-making?  And if cloning was possible, why wasn't the company doing that instead?  So many questions here, but the chief question among them is probably - HOW?  

It's notable that Foster asks his assistant to dispose of the bodies, so he doesn't seem to have much respect for his dead family members, but perhaps that's because he's so focused on bringing them back in some fashion.  There are a lot of Tony-Stark like shots of Keanu Reeves working with 3-D models of what are supposed to be his wife and kids' brains, because he wants them to wake up with no memory of the crash, so that means getting in there and removing specific memories, which of course is completely beyond the scope of current technology.  My understanding of how the brain works is limited, I'll admit, but I'm pretty sure you can't scan a human brain and locate and remove specific memories, that's a bunch of hogwash. 

What's worse is that he's got four dead family members, but only three pods.  So he can't bring them all back, because he's decided that he's only got one shot at this.  But WHY?  NITPICK POINT here, if he's only got one shot to get this right, that's a very non-scientific approach.  Why not try resurrecting ONE family member as a test case, then if that works out, he could then use the three pods to finish the job.  OK, that would take twice as long, but then there would be less need to get into all of their brains and move memories around (which, again, is impossible) - or there's no valid reason why he couldn't bring back the other daughter in the second round, after using all three pods once.  It just feels like an unnecessary complication here, because then he's got to go around the whole house and remove photos of the younger daughter, plus get rid of her bed, plus the very large prominent pillow with her name on it.  (It was so prominent, I was sure this was where he was going to slip up...)

NITPICK POINT 2: Instead of tinkering with the memories of three family members, wouldn't it have been easier to just tell those three people that there was a car crash, they were injured and therefore don't remember it, and the younger daughter died in the crash?  Sure, this might be a little painful for them to deal with, but it seems easier than causing them the distress of feeling like they lost something without being able to quite put their finger on why, or risking possible brain damage to them by deleting pieces of their memories.  

For a scientist, Foster's also not very smart, apparently - while hiding his family's deaths, he didn't think for one second about the effects of his wife not showing up at the clinic where she volunteers, or his kids not showing up at school, or nobody in the family being on social media for like two weeks.  So he's got to sign on to all their accounts, log into their phones (umm, how does he know their passwords?) and try to keep the illusion of having a family going while their clone bodies are growing.  Then he's got to take those brain engrams and implant them into the clone bodies so they can just wake up one day and continue on with their lives as one big happy but slightly confused family.  And that's essentially what happens, they move forward as if nothing had gone wrong, and live happily ever after.  Just kidding.  

Eventually Foster's wife and kids realize something is off, when nobody can find their cell phones or remember what they did over the last fortnight.  Which leads to some interesting questions - like if you can't remember last week, did it really happen?  Or did you become a clone at some point without anybody telling you that you died?  I recently watched the whole Netflix series "Living With Yourself", where Paul Rudd plays a guy who gets cloned against his will, and that covered some of the same dilemmas seen here.  In that show a clinic claims to rejuvenate people, but they're actually creating a younger clone, similarly imprinting the same brain patterns and memories into the clone, and disposing of the original body.  Only in that case the original was only mostly dead, came back to find himself buried in a shallow grave, and then came back to society to confront his younger, better (in some ways) clone.  

Something similar is also going on right now in X-Men comics, where after the last story reboot, all mutants (heroes and villains alike) have dropped out of human society to live on the island of Krakoa, and a combination of the powers of five specific mutants works to insure that no mutant ever really dies, their brains are constantly backed up by Professor X, and if any major character should die in battle, they'll just clone a new body and put the last back-up into that clone's brain, so bingo, in a few days that superhero is back in action.  Essentially it's an admission that this is what comic books have always done, kill off this hero or that one as a shock event to drive up sales, and then find some new creative way (time-travel, magic, teleportation just before the moment of death) to bring that hero back a year or two later.  Some clever writer just devised a way to do this on the regular, which really just streamlines the whole process. 

But in all these cases, there are valid scientific and ethical questions. Sure, we've theoretically undone death from a story standpoint, but even if it were medically possible in the real world, is that really the practical application of this?  Is the cloned body with implanted brain patterns the same person as before, or should that be considered a new being, from a legal standpoint, or even a medical one?  Secondly, undoing the effects of the death doesn't mean it didn't happen, because it did.  You can rebuild your house after a fire, but it's never going to look or be exactly the same, even if you try to make it so - and a human body and brain is probably a lot more complicated than a house.  Something's always going to be a bit OFF, even if you could imprint brain patterns and memories from a specific point in time, pre-accident.  A clone body is identical, down to the genetic level, sure, but once it starts living and thinking on its own, there's bound to be some form of divergence, you can't just snap your fingers and go back to the way things were before.  They would know, or SOMEBODY would know, deep down, that this person is just a copy, right?  

We may never know for sure, because the scientific community has forbidden all experiments in the human cloning arena - however that doesn't mean that somebody isn't doing it somewhere...  There's no rapid aging of clone bodies like in the movies, so we might not know for decades if some scientist pulled this off.  So I can't really take this film seriously, it's little more than a thought experiment to me.  

Also starring Keanu Reeves (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Alice Eve (last seen in "Please Stand By"), Thomas Middleditch (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Venice"), John Ortiz (last seen in "Ad Astra"), Emjay Anthony (last seen in "Krampus"), Aria Lyric Leabu, Nyasha Hatendi (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Amber Rivera, Luis Gonzaga, Jeffrey Holsman, Sunshine Logroño, Angela Alvarado. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 pancakes