Taglines: Some pumans are unstoppable.
William Foster and Ed Whittle are biomedical research scientists working for Biodyne corporation in Puerto Rico, attempting to transfer the mind of a dead soldier into an android with superhuman strength, codenamed Subject 345. Foster specializes in synthetic biology and mapping of the mind’s neural pathways, while Whittle’s speciality is reproductive human cloning.
Foster successfully captures the soldier’s neural map and transfers it into the android’s synthetic brain, but the experiment fails when the soldier recoils in horror at the android body and destroys it, killing himself again. Foster’s boss Jones warns him that if he cannot get Subject 345 to work, the company’s shareholders will shut the project down.
Foster takes his wife Mona and three children Sophie, Matt, and Zoe, on a boating trip, but on the way all but William are killed in a car crash. Determined to resurrect his family, he coaxes Ed to bring him the Biodyne equipment necessary to extract his family’s neural maps and to clone replacement bodies for them. He successfully extracts their neural maps and tells Whittle to dispose of the bodies, but the first major obstacle to his plan presents itself: only three cloning pods are available, forcing him to choose one to sacrifice.
He chooses Zoe, the youngest, and erases her memory from the neural maps of the other three. Whittle starts the seventeen-day cycle required to create mature replacement clones for Foster’s family, and tells him he has only that long to solve the problem of integrating the neural maps into the cloned bodies, or else they will start to deteriorate by aging at an abnormally fast rate.
Integrating the mind into a biological clone was phase two of the research project, to be solved after android transfer. Foster is forced to keep this secret, since he and Whittle have stolen millions of dollars of Biodyne equipment and are breaking biomedical ethics. He spends the seventeen days removing evidence of Zoe’s existence from his home, and creating cover stories of illness to explain his family’s absence from work, school, and social media contact.
When Foster notices his wife’s central nervous system reacting to his touch, he realizes that Subject 345 failed because the mind expects connection to a biological body with heartbeat and respiration, rather than a synthetic one. He knows now that transfer into the clones will not be a problem, and the failure of android transfer can be solved by programming a simulated mind-body interface to make the android body appear biological. He successfully transfers the minds of his loved ones into the cloned bodies, then goes back to work creating a synthetic mind-body interface.
When the next dead body he receives has suffered too much brain damage to be viable, Foster resorts to recording his own mind for the android transfer. Meanwhile, Sophie has a nightmare of her death, and Mona catches Foster erasing her memory of the event. He confesses that they died in a car crash and that he resurrected them. The family soon discovers evidence of Zoe’s existence that he missed, and he admits that he couldn’t save Zoe and erased their memories of her.
Replicas is a 2018 American science fiction thriller film directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff and written by Chad St. John from a story by Stephen Hamel. The film tells the story of a neuroscientist who violates the law and biomedical ethics to bring his family members back to life after they die in a car accident. It stars Keanu Reeves, Alice Eve, and Thomas Middleditch.
It was shown at the Night Visions International Film Festival in Finland in November 2018, and was theatrically released in the United States on January 11, 2019, by Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures. The film was panned by critics, who criticized the writing, plotholes and acting.
Replicas (2019)
Directed by: Jeffrey Nachmanoff
Starring: Alice Eve, Keanu Reeves, Emily Alyn Lind, John Ortiz, Thomas Middleditch, Emjay Anthony, Amber Townsend, Nyasha Hatendi, Aria Lyric Leabu, Amber Rivera, Sunshine Logroño
Screenplay by: Chad St. John
Production Design by: Johnny Breedt
Cinematography by: Checco Varese
Film Editing by: Jason Hellmann, Pedro Javier Muñiz
Costume Design by: Julia Michelle Santiago
Set Decoration by: Monica Monserrate
Art Direction by: Fernando Carrion
Music by: Mark Kilian, Jose Ojeda
Distributed by: Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures
Release Date: January 11, 2019
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