Replicas is a frustrating film that feels like a product of two writers. The first writer is a pretty smart guy that wanted to write an interesting and intelligent science fiction film. The second writer is still trying to finish his 7th grade book report on The Giver because he can’t grasp what a theme is. Consequently, there is a good movie somewhere in here that is buried under an avalanche of moronic bullshit.
Keanu Reeves plays a scientist named Will whose research team has created both human cloning and the ability to transfer a human’s mind into a machine. It’s fucking asinine that one research team would have done both of these things, but whatever. Will’s wife and three children are killed in a car crash and, lacking a nearby Indian burial ground, he decides to bring them back via cloning. Problem is that he only has enough equipment to bring back three of them, so he has to choose who will not return from the grave. Meanwhile, an evil guy at his company is trying to shut him down and steal his research for reasons that I can’t quite fathom.
This feels like two separate movies shoehorned together with the subtlety and grace of a grizzly bear fucking a shark. The idea of a scientist having to choose which family member will remain dead is, in itself, something that could make a good film. He also decides to eliminate all memories of the missing kid before resurrecting the others, so the film could (and should) have simply been about the family realizing that someone is missing and the consequences of that discovery. I don’t quite understand why he chose to eliminate the memory of the kid and don’t really see how he could get away with it. I mean, eventually the kid’s school would become curious about their whereabouts. Or a relative or friend would probably question why the family suddenly only has two children. People tend to notice shit like that. Despite those plot holes, this setup could have led to an interesting film.
But fuck all that because we need a villain. The aforementioned plot holes are likely because the film isn’t allowed to dwell on its own plot because we have to deal with the most unnecessary and vague villain that I’ve seen in quite a while. There is an executive at Will’s company that is trying to shut him down because the board and investors are unimpressed with his work. Let me reiterate that the company’s investors are unimpressed that one fucking guy created human cloning and the ability to put human consciousness into machines. It turns out that the company isn’t just into medical research, but is also into…..evil stuff. Really, the movie doesn’t even specify what they are doing, but literally just says that they do bad things. That’s just good writing. This all leads to a climax that is goddamn baffling. There is really no reason for the human-in-a-machine stuff to even be in the film (it’s irrelevant to the main cloning plot) except to set up an ending with a robot-Keanu fighting unexplained bad guys. The final scenes are so disjointed that I swear that there are entire sequences missing and the final scene is so nonsensical that I still don’t know what the fuck I watched.
Looking at the credits for this movie, it seems that the writers aren’t the problem. The screenplay is actually only written by one guy, which is fucking stunning considering how disjointed it is. But a closer look at the credits reveals the problem: This movie has 20 executive producers. Fucking 20 executive producers. That may be a record. The role of an executive producer varies wildly. Sometimes its just a ceremonial title given to attach someone’s name to a film (Wes Craven did this a lot in the late 90s/early 2000s with stuff like Wishmaster and Dracula 2000). But the actual role of an executive producer is supposed to be as a link between the actual production and the people providing the funding. They make sure that the film is on budget and is likely to make profits for investors. In other words, they are the schmucks that give studio notes like “this needs more explosions” or “could Vin Diesel possibly be in this?” This movie had 20 fucking people trying to ensure that it had as much mainstream appeal as possible. I’m not a Hollywood insider or anything, but I’m guessing that its tough to make a smart science fiction film when you have 20 guys in suits demanding that the film be as simplistic as possible for marketing reasons.
The result is just sad. Replicas is a film with interesting ideas that is worth a look when you can watch it at home, but its certainly not worth a trip to the theater. The film’s investors and army of dickbag producers don’t deserve your ticket money anyway.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicas_(film)#/media/File:Replicas_poster.jpg
