Double Vision

All unplanned by me, this week’s scifi dose on screen and page had parallel plot elements:

Replicas (2018)

Despite the star power of Keanu Reeves, whose John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum is currently raking in box office cash, I hadn’t heard of this movie until Amazon recommended the DVD to me. I now understand why. Replicas is easily a candidate for a future Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode.

William Foster (Reeves) is a scientist at Biodyne where he is attempting to reanimate the dead. His method is to scan the brain of a recently deceased body, upload the deceased’s personality and memories into a digital storage device, and then download the whole works into a robotic body. The experiments do not go well; the robots self-destruct. Meanwhile his fellow Biodyne scientist and friend Ed Whittle (Thomas Middleditch) is working on cloning, though so far not on humans. When William Foster’s wife and three children are killed in a car accident, he scans their brains and convinces Ed to clone new bodies for them. Foster believes the problem with the robots is that they are robots; he is betting that if he downloads the scans of his family into copies of their own bodies everything will be hunky-dory. Ed has only three handy-dandy cloning tanks, however, so William has to pick by lot one family member not to bring back: his youngest daughter Zoe. To spare the others the pain of missing her, he removes their memories of Zoe because…well, he’s a scientist and can do that. So Ed sets up cloning tanks in Foster’s garage, and, presto-chango, in just weeks most of the Fosters are reborn. Ed is so good at his job that the three Fosters come out at the same time all at the appropriate ages and even with the same haircuts. They don’t even know they were gone. Uh-oh, Biodyne might be less in the dark about their employees’ extracurricular activities than William imagines.

The dialogue is ludicrous and there are plot holes big enough to fly an Antonov-225 through. No friend or neighbor wonders where Zoe is? What happened to the crashed car? The re-animated family doesn’t notice the changed date? Through all of it Reeves plays his part with intensely earnest seriousness. The result is unintentionally hilarious. Rotten Tomatoes reports 10% approval by critics and 37% by audiences along with the remark that it “isn't even bad enough to be so bad it's good.” I disagree. It is plenty bad enough. One simply ought not go into it with false expectations of genuine merit. I think the disappointment at Rotten Tomatoes comes from viewers who hoped for something like The Matrix or John Wick. It’s not.

Split score: Thumbs down if judged seriously. Thumbs up for the unintended laughs. (The trailer, btw, fails to capture the full absurdity.)

**** ****

Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty

In the future minds can be uploaded into computers and downloaded into clones. The minds of the clones can be imprinted with false memories and secret directives, but the main point of the technology is immortality: you keep a spare body in the fridge, and if you die your consciousness can be downloaded into your spare and you can go on your merry way. Of course, you’ll be missing a chunk of memory between your last brain scan and your death, but that is a good reason to update your scans regularly. Certain social questions arise for which rules have been written, but rules and ethics are not the same. For example, suppose you committed a crime between your last scan and your death. Should your next body be held legally responsible even though the new you has no memory of the crime and, strictly speaking, didn’t commit it? Future law, according to Lafferty, does hold you responsible but many moralists are uncomfortable about it.

Questions of this type figure into the events aboard a peculiar type of sublight generation starship en route to Artemis. The passengers are to remain in hibernation the whole flight, but the crew of three women and three men must stay on the job. They are to live out repeated lives on the long trip by growing clones. Each downloads into a new cloned body when he or she dies. One day all six wake up in their cloning chambers only to find their previous six violently dispatched bodies floating around. Someone (perhaps the last or next to last survivor) had activated the emergency system to awaken the new clones. Having no memories since their last scans, the crew has no idea what happened. Presumably one of them is a murderer, but why? And will the same person strike again?

Of course I won’t reveal the resolution to the murder mystery. I will say, however, that the events strike me as having been instigated by (given the scale of the action) petty motives, but humans can be petty, so this doesn’t too seriously undermine a novel that otherwise is well plotted and presented.

Thumbs Up. Not way up, but up.

**** ****

The downloading of individual minds into new bodies, whether robotic or biological, has been a staple of science fiction at least since the 1950s in literature, movies, and TV. (Of the many 21^st century examples, my first pick would be Cory Doctorow’s 2003 Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.) Why does the idea recur so often? In the short-lived (but very good) TV series Dollhouse (2009-2010), the scientist Topher, as he downloads an electronically stored mind into a young new body, is asked, “So, we can give you life after death?” Topher answers, “Only if we really like you.” Inherent in the exchange is both the central fantasy and the central concern. The fantasy is, of course, to cheat death. (Whether a “download” really achieves that or just makes a totally different person/machine think it is you is usually an unaddressed question.) The concern is over who will be manning the toll booth. The fantasy is not going away, so I have no doubt there will be abundant scifi to come with the same plot device. I’ll bet money on that. Should the technology ever become real, I also have no doubt there will be a very pricey toll booth operated by all the wrong people. As for the chance of it becoming real…well… I wouldn’t bet money on that.

Replicas Trailer