Movie Review: Replicas

ReplicasTech Evening News, January 20, 2019

Times Of India's Rating : 2.5/5

Avg. Users' Rating : 2/5

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CAST:	Keanu Reeves, Alice Eve, Thomas Middleditch, John Ortiz, Emjay Anthony, Emily Alyn Lind
DIRECTION:	Jeffrey Nachmanoff
GENRE:	Sci-fi / Fantasy
DURATION:	1 hours 46 minutes

• Replicas Movie Review

Critic's Rating: 2.0/5

Neuroscientist Will Foster (Keanu Reeves) is working on transferring consciousness from a human brains to synthetic brain in a secret US facility in Puerto Rico. He doesn’t have a good success rate, though, as the transplanted consciousness rejects the robot bodies. When he loses his entire family in a car crash, he gets the brainwave to transfer their consciousness into replicated or cloned bodies. With the help of his friend and fellow researcher Ed (Thomas Middleditch), he steals cloning pods from his facility, and puts three of them in his garage. Since there isn’t a fourth one, he decides not to bring back his younger daughter. He even erases her memory from the consciousness of his wife, elder daughter and son. Seventeen days later, they are reborn, the memory gets transplanted successfully and we wait for things to go wrong. There are signs they would. His wife remembers feeling a searing pain in her chest but can’t find any injury marks. The son lacks slight control over his hands. The daughter keep getting nightmares. We wait for the horror to begin but nothing untoward happens. The only hurdle the resurrected family has to worry about is that they are the property of the science lab Keanu Reeves works in and his boss for some reason wants them killed. So Reeves has this crazy idea of transplanting his existence into a robot so that he can have a super efficient other self to take care of the bad guys...

The film has so many plot holes that it feels like the role model for the screenplay was cheddar cheese. Nothing goes wrong during cloning, which is being attempted for the first time and which wonderfully gets completed in mere seventeen days. The consciousness transfer too is flawless despite the fact that Reeves wasn’t able to make his process foolproof. The characters are mostly one dimensional and there is no remorse felt by anyone despite breaking so many moral, ethical and legal codes. The protagonist not only plays God but gets away with it without even a scratch to show for it. Keanu Reeves has made a career out of playing stern-jawed characters even in the midst of most inane of plots. Here too he enacts with full conviction, never breaking stride even for a while, even while doing a Minority Report (2002) like analysis. Mind you, that movie came out seventeen years before so one would expect the CGI to look upgraded but it’s still the same. Given the nature of the storyline, Replicas could have been turned into a cutting edge horror/slasher film. But the director’s goal perhaps was to make the blandest science fiction movie ever and he has spectacularly succeeded in that.

TRAILER : REPLICAS