Replicas movie cast: Keanu Reeves, Alice Eve, Thomas Middleditch, John Ortiz
Replicas movie director: Jeffrey Nachmanoff
Replicas movie rating: 1.5 stars
Can’t fault Replicas on ambition. A perfect family (father scientist, mother doctor), a perfect location (Puerto Rico), a perfect friend (who will bury bodies for you), and some perfected science (brain mapping, cloning, coma-inducing, robot-creating, you name it). It could also have had a perfect story: exploring can a life be recreated, or can a life be erased by killing all memory of it?
But no. Director Nachmanoff, with more TV credits to his name than big screen, squanders most of his time filming some futuristic science that has Reeves moving his hands about a lot as a virtual map of presumably a brain pops up when he wears a headgear. Reeves is scientist Will Foster, who at a facility called Bionyne is seeking to map biological brains of dead persons into synthetic bodies (robots) — the dead persons being soldiers. As he fails repeatedly, wife Mona (Eve) tells Will it’s wrong to think one can bring back dead people.
There are two clues right there, for people watching closely.
The film presses on with its elaborate attempts at making this laughingly about science when all you want is to see what happens the morning after, when all those experiments are done and dusted. And also wondering how much Foster will put his friend, who is also his colleague at the lab (Middleditch) through in his increasingly implausible and incredulous breaches of logic, morality, and ethics.
More worryingly, even while they discuss it, none of those concerns pauses anyone in Replicas.
