Replicas: A watchable sci-fi film that no one should dream of remaking

Keanu Reeves is the star he is thanks to his edgy film choices, a penchant for the beyond-believable and, of course, his charming looks. But The Matrix star’s latest sci-fi thriller, Replicas, cannot be salvaged despite all that Reeves has to offer. Directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff of The Day After Tomorrow (2004) fame, Replicas is a film that should not be replicated.

 

Reeves plays the character of William Foster, a brilliant neuroscientist working at a biomedical company in Puerto Rico. Five minutes into the film, we realise that the project at hand is one that fascinates many: imprinting the biological or human mind onto a synthetic or robotic one to create clones. His first attempt is a disaster, with the robot tearing itself apart.

 

Foster lives with his wife Mona, played by Alice Eve, and three kids. The film kickstarts when the family is all set to go on vacation but meets with a car accident, fatal for everyone but Foster. Physically unscathed, his expression of emotion at this devastating encounter with fate is interrupted by his irrepressible genius. He realises he is smart enough to bring his family back to life. Here begins the story of Foster recreating his family from scratch, with amino acids and all the other dope needed to create a human being. He is helped by his assistant, actor Thomas Middleditch, whose sadness at the death of the Foster family members is greater than what Foster is allowed to display.

 

The film makes creating “replicas” seem so easy that I felt I could do it in the basement of my house. Even though the dialogues teem with scientific jargon, the simplistic processes on display feel like a laughable farce. The pods needed to create the Foster family and the batteries needed to keep the pods charged all make their way into the Foster home with bewildering ease, attracting no unwanted attention from neighbours or even the police.

 

Other such obstacles in the plot are countered with quick, too-simple solutions. For instance, Reeves simply deletes the memory of his third child, Zoe, from the minds of his wife and kids because he has only three pods at his disposal. Similarly, when the replica of his daughter, Sophie, has a bad dream, about the car accident that took place in real life, he sedates her and deletes that memory too. The cut, copy, delete options are so arbitrarily applied to the minds of Foster’s family that it equates the complexity of the human mind to that of a machine.

 

The film tries to establish a connection between human consciousness and the body by suggesting that what makes us human is the fact that we feel things. Which is to state the obvious. When Foster grapples with how to imprint his wife’s biological mind onto the replica’s without her tearing herself apart, he realises that the touch of his hands sends signals to her blank brain. His eureka moment about skin and touch took me back to fifth-grade biology.

 

Everything goes swimmingly for Foster till he is threatened by his boss, played by John Oritz. To divulge more details here will be to kill the already too-thin veneer of drama and tension in the film. A short car-chase, a dose of honesty and a tiny surprise wrap up this fairly straightforward watch. While there is nothing wrong with being straightforward and I wasn’t exactly bored, the created genius of William Foster made the end predictable. He was a man who knew too much, who had a solution to all problems. It has long been an excellent narrative device, but suspension of disbelief has its limitations — and limits — too.