Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Replicas

I found the trailer for Replicas to be very intriguing so I decided to see as part of my Friday night double feature.  Unfortunately, that decision was a mistake because this is a terrible movie.  William Foster (Keanu Reeves) is a scientist working at Bionyne who is trying to transfer neural pathways in the brain from a human host to a synthetic host.  His latest effort has been unsuccessful and he is feeling pressure from his boss (John Ortiz) and faces losing his funding.  When Foster takes his family on vacation they are involved in an accident that kills his wife and three children.  Grief stricken, he saves their neural pathways and coerces his colleague Ed (Thomas Middleditch) to clone their bodies so he can transfer their memories to their new brains.  When they are successful he learns the true nature of the company he works for and that his boss considers his family to be the property of Bionyne.  He figures out why his experiments have been failing and successfully transfers his own neural pathways into the synthetic host so it can fight everyone tracking his family.  While the concept for this movie is really interesting, the execution is filled with flaws.  The plot makes absolutely no sense.  How did Foster survive a car crash that killed his entire family with only a scratch on his forehead?  How was Ed suddenly able to clone three human beings after minimal success with animals?  How was Foster able to survive mapping his own neural pathways when his previous experiments required a donor who had died?   With a story this implausible I am sometimes willing to suspend my disbelief if I am given a reason to care.  There are big themes here but there is absolutely no exploration of the ethics involved in playing God.  The acting is abysmal.  Reeves is known for his flat monotone delivery but some of his line readings in this movie are so bad they elicited laughter from my audience (for the wrong reasons).  The CGI is a complete mess and the scenes where the synthetic robot attacks the bad guys (who are all wearing black suits so we can tell that they are villains) are so bad I had to wonder about the budget for this movie.  Even if you thought the trailer looked interesting definitely give this a miss!

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