Replicas (2019)
Directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff
Viewed in Theatre
Summary: Everything is wrong. Interestingly wrong. So wrong that I wonder how it could have been made this wrong. Check it out!
Should I even be talking about Replicas? It’s not reaaaally a horror movie…but it is a sci-fi thriller…so I guess it’s close enough to count as one, and I am really eager to talk about it. So yes, today I’ll be discussing the new Keanu Reeves science fiction epic, Replicas. Now you probably haven’t heard of Replicas, and if you have then it may be because it was declared the first Box Office Bomb of 2019, making only $2.5 million in its opening weekend on a budget of $30 million, coming in at #13 at the box office. It fared no better critically, with a single digit Rotten Tomatoes score, settling at 9%. Being a fan of Keanu Reeves, and sci-fi thrillers, and outrageously bad movies, I had to give this a watch.
I was not prepared for what I saw. Replicas isn’t just a bad movie, it’s an exploration of how wrong film can be. It feels less like someone tried to make a good movie and failed and more like someone made a movie and knew what they were supposed to do but decided to see what would happen if they intentionally made every design decision wrong. But because of that, Replicas is kind of fascinating, mostly because some of the decisions are so wrong that I don’t understand how anyone could have mistakenly put them in. Before I go any further I will explain the plot a bit.
Keanu Reeves plays William Foster, a scientist working at a lab that is trying to digitize human consciousness and transfer it to a robot, like ya do. When he’s not trying to struggle against God’s design, William is hanging out with his picture-perfect family and enjoying the good life. One day they all leave on a vacation, only to get involved in a horrible car crash that kills the entire Foster family. Ever the mad scientist, Foster calls up a tech friend of his from the lab and convinces him to bring over the lab’s cloning pods, which they had for some reason, so that William can clone his family and then use his mind tech to scan his corpse family’s brains and then implant their brains into the clones.
Without getting any further into the plot, that’s a solid premise for a movie! Man tampering with the natural order for selfish reasons, or selfless depending on your view of William, is a classic setup for science fiction and horror stories and there’s no reason why this premise couldn’t have been made into a good movie. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a good movie, for a large number of reasons, but the most plot-related reason why is that none of the interesting concepts hinted at in the premise were followed through in any meaningful way. Discussions of whether humans should have the power to make copies of humans that already existed? Mrs. Foster’s concerns early in the film about humanity being greater than the sum of its parts? Horrible scientific mistakes caused by William essentially inventing and fusing multiple branches of theoretical science in order to enact his untested plans that could easily go horribly awry? Almost entirely absent from the second half of the movie!
At this point, you might ask, if there is no big scientific or philosophical discussion as to William’s actions, then what even happens in the second half of the movie? Glad you asked! We are treated to a generic and inappropriate action third act. How do we get to an action sequence? Why, someone is revealed, in the clunkiest way possible, to have been a bad guy all along! So now the stakes have been artificially raised because the script just couldn’t handle the idea of raising tension that didn’t involve dudes with guns showing up. It’s so strange, especially because the story has so much room for drama built into it! But the drama that this story promises hinges on one thing that it didn’t have, performances.
No one acted in this movie. Oh, actors appeared onscreen, but not one of them did anything resembling acting. What shocked me is that this includes Keanu Reeves! Now, Keanu Reeves has had ups and downs in his career, but I generally like his performances and think he has some charisma that gets across even when he’s in bad movies. If I had never seen a Keanu Reeves movie before and saw Replicas, I would have had no idea this guy was a movie star. He just seems confused, like he doesn’t know what kind of performance he’s trying to give, so sometimes he’s really serious and sometimes he’s goofy but usually he’s just monotone. Speaking of monotone, Mrs. Foster and William’s boss seem like they had an offscreen competition going on of who could emote less during filming. They both won. The only performance I can think of that was okay was from Thomas Middleditch as William’s put upon tech. And that’s mostly just because he seemed like he was trying.
Now seems like a good time to bring up my theory. As I was thinking about weird plot points and scenes and performances, I kept going back to my thoughts about how could a group of people make this many mistakes and get seemingly nothing correct. Then I had a crazy idea. Is Replicas supposed to be bad? I’m dead serious, so let me give some examples to back up my thoughts; at one point, the lab tech and Will’s boss are having a discussion, and during this we cut from lab tech, who is shot in a standard medium close shot to Will’s boss, who for this one moment is shown in this tilted Dutch angle close up that is just inappropriate and comedic! That was a conscious choice that only served to make the boss speaking in monotone more silly.
Later on, and this is a minor spoiler, Keanu Reeves is going through his family’s gadgets and pretending to be them so that people will think that they’re still alive, and he comes across a text from one of his daughter’s friends which mentioned that someone was talking to her bae. We get this beautiful shot of Keanu Reeves looking genuinely bewildered at this slang and I could not stop laughing, it was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. I understand that a lot of thrillers have comedic elements to break the tension, but this was so oddly placed that it just completely deflated anything that the scene had going for it. And it’s not just that one moment that seemed intentionally comedic, that entire scene was comic relief and, look, I’m no director or writer, but why on Earth would you have an entire comedic relief scene smack dab in the middle of your sci-fi thriller about man overstepping his boundaries and changing the natural order?
Yes yes, I know that probably isn’t what happened. But it’s more fun to imagine that there’s some Producers-esque conspiracy going on here than it is to yammer on and on about a movie that’s been thoroughly covered by every other critic. As it is, Replicas is a mind-bogglingly bad movie, with no real point, whose beginning shows some promise, whose middle is ludicrous, whose climax is insane.and whose ending is head-scratchingly bizarre. Also, it’s got a really bad CGI robot in it. I guess now’s the time where I have to recommend or not so…CURVEBALL, I do recommend seeing Replicas! It is so bizarre, so weird and so confusing that everyone who enjoys bad cinema or who is interested in a cinematic lecture about how small bad decisions add up to BIG mistakes, you should see Replicas. If you can. It’s already down to one showing a day at the one theatre that played it near me.
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