REPLICAS

REPLICAS. Jeffrey Nachmanoff, director. Chad St. John (script), Stephen Hamel (story). Keanu Reeves, producer (one of five credited), star. Johnny Breedt, production design. UK | China | Puerto Rico | USA: Company Films et al. (production) / Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures (US theatrical release), 2018 (actual US release: early 2019); see IMDb for full lists.

Set at Christmas, if a warm one in Puerto Rico, and riffing on the Frankenstein theme, the film missed its ideal general-release time of Christmas 2018, with 2018 marking the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Keanu Reeves's scientist is something of a post-modern, mildly cyberpunk "Prometheus"/Victor Frankenstein, Ph.D. (probably), with (going over to the 1931 Whale movie), the Silicon Valley actor Thomas Middleditch as an "Igor" — Fritz, actually, in the 1931 film — though with better posture, education, and sensitivity to ethical and legal dilemmas.

Central to the plot — the "novums": in this case, "Two Big Lies" — are the technologies of human cloning with ex-utero/in-vitro gestation (à la Brave New World et al.), and, far more so, the computer-enabled downloading and uploading of consciousness, including human memory, personality, and all that makes us who we are, including whatever there might be that we can label "soul" (a word spoken in the movie). The initial and final situations involve uploading to a robot; the Middle of the film involves uploading to clones of the scientist's dead family. Most relevant here are the images of containment: • The "pods" that are the aquarium-like artificial wombs of the clones (a goldfish in a fishbowl appears diegetically on occasion to mark the point). • The robot confined in a metal chair, while a simultaneously delicate and Industrial electronic "tiara" is put on him (sic) for downloading the remaining mind of a dead US military sergeant, and the same "tiara" on the heads of clones and Reeves's scientist — and a rebuilt initial robot. • Reeves's scientist in images similar to those of the Tom Cruise character in MINORITY REPORT in the midst of moveable virtual screens in a VR cybernetic system.

There are also a lot of the nearly-totemic SF hexagons, mostly VR but also irregular ones as kind of giant thumb/flash drives. The film may also be useful for study of the themes of immortality (the potential for a series of re-embodiments of indefinite length) and the cinematic motif of reuniting of divided families, with the reuniting here a very high-tech reconstitution of family members.

Note for a mild caution: REPLICAS may be unpleasant for audience members upset by implausibilities — and, more generally, the film was not well received. (The "Initial Compiler" of Clockworks2 was neither impressed nor offended.)

RDE, Initial Compiler, 11Jan19; Title 24Aug19