Writer: Chad St John (Screenplay) Stephen Hamel (Story)
Starring: Keanu Reeves, Alice Eve, Thomas Middleditch, John Ortiz, Emjay Anthony, Emily Alyn Lind
Plot: A scientist becomes obsessed with bringing back his family members who died in a traffic accident.
Tagline – Some Humans Are Unstoppable
Runtime: 1 Hour 47 Minutes
There may be spoilers in the rest of the review
Verdict: Sci-Fi Questions
Story: Replicas starts as we see genius scientist William Foster (Reeves) who has seen his work of bringing people back from the dead in synthetic robots, struggling to achieve the required results, seeing him face the potential of losing his funding. Trying to spend some time with his family Mona (Eve), kids Matt (Anthony), Sophie (Lind) and Zoe (Leabu), they get caught in storm, which sees them have an accident, with William’s whole family killed.
William doesn’t want to accept this, he turns to his partner Ed Whittle (Middleditch) to help him clone and bring his family back to life. As William works on returning his family, he is left to make difficult decisions, while covering his tracks.
Thoughts on Replicas
Characters – William has been working on transferring minds into synthetics, he nearly has this ready to work, but things are always going wrong just when he sees things working out. He is already working on a tight rope and after his family dies in a car crash, he wants to break all the laws of his science by bringing them back to life, meaning he will work day and night to fix the problems, not even considering the side effects of his work. Mona is the wife to William, she dies in the accident and is cloned and has her memories placed into the new body. Ed Whittle is the partner that has been working with William for years, he agrees to help with the revival and will change him on the moral grounds of what he is doing. Jones is the man that William works for, he is pushing him to get everything he wants even if he might have his own reasons for the technology William is working on.
Performances – Keanu Reeves in the leading role doesn’t do much wrong, but does struggle to show all the emotional trauma his character must go through. Alice Eve doesn’t get a chance to do anything of any difficultly, while both Thomas Middleditch and John Ortiz are both fine with what they do.
Story – The story here follows a scientist that sees his family die in an accident, only for him to use his own project to bring them back to life even if the technology might not be ready to use. This is one of those stories that does look to dig into the ideas of whether if you could, would you bring family members back to life as clones, we get plenty of the discussions about the ethics behind it and what could go wrong if you got found out, while we do dig into the concept of trying to pick and choose what would be remembered by the loved ones. This side of the story is the most interesting because the final act of the story just seems to be thrown in here to try and make us have an action packed ending to the film.
Sci-Fi – The film uses future technology that could be used to bring clones of loved one back to life, showing us just how science is always moving forward and how they could be looked at more in the future, keeping everything feeling like the realms of possibility.
Settings – The film is set in Puerto Rico which I am guessing is used to try and show us how the laws of science at looser in this country.
Special Effects – The effects in the film are interesting with the synthetics looking unique, but never looking like they are operating correctly.
Scene of the Movie – The choices William must make.
That Moment That Annoyed Me – The action tagged on story.
Final Thoughts – This is an interesting sci-fi movie that does offer big questions about technology in the future and shows how desperate somebody would be to try and fix something out of their control.
Overall: Sci-Fi 101