“In this suspenseful sci-fi thriller, Keanu Reeves stars as William Foster, a neuroscientist on the verge of transferring human consciousness into a computer when his beloved wife (Alice Eve) and children are tragically killed in a car crash. Desperate to resurrect his family, William recruits a fellow scientist (Thomas Middleditch) to help secretly clone their bodies and create replicas. When William learns that he can only replicate three of the four family members he makes a decision with fateful consequences.” – Official Synopsis
The story asks what would happen in the beginnings of technological innovation that allowed for the transfer of consciousness. It explores some of the ethics and possibilities of resurrection, while trying not to be as defeatist as Shelley’s classic Frankenstein. However, the film remains to be pessimistic about the people who would pursue this technology.
I do have some issues with elements of the plot. There are going to be some spoilers ahead, so be warned.
In the first scene where they try to transfer someone’s consciousness into a robot, the cyborg dissociates and attempts to kill itself. For starters, why didn’t they have a psychologist on this project? They had to assume that something like this would happen where someone would psychologically reject their new body. Later in the film it was revealed that the reason the cyborg dissociates is because the subconscious parts of the brain were trying to regulate organs. When they didn’t find any, the brain assumed it was dying and panicked. Which sounds reasonable. Why didn’t anyone think that this might happen earlier, though?
There’s also a “twist” at the end where the antagonist admits that the company Foster works for “isn’t a biomedical company”. Which is just ridiculous. They are a biomed company. Just because they are working for military purposes doesn’t mean that they aren’t a biomed company. Plenty of medical innovations have come out of the military.
Honestly, I don’t have enough time to go through and air out my dirty laundry with the plot issues in this film.
The script was pretty ham-fisted. Plenty of times the characters would just say what the audience was supposed to get from the scene. For example, there were a few scenes when characters would say that Foster didn’t look good, nevermind he didn’t look that different. There were also some purely unnecessary monologues.
The characters were there. Most of them were pretty flat, but the story isn’t about how these people grow and change together. Reeves’ character was the most interesting because he might have been somewhat of a sociopath. He mostly fails to have empathy for anyone other than his immediate family and one other character. He deletes the family’s memories of the youngest daughter so that he doesn’t have to explain that he couldn’t resurrect her. He sabotages his family’s social health as they are being reincarnated. He throws caution to the wind and tells his wife about her death, which should have caused severe mental health issues.
Some of Reeves’ deliveries felt stilted or just off. I have to admit that I don’t know Reeves’ repertoire well enough to know what his best performances look like, so I can only infer from what I’ve seen.
The cinematography felt very “by the numbers”. There were zooms to “heighten” the action. There were “cool” Dutch angles to make scenes feel stilted and odd. There were even a couple shots using a low focal length and dissonant shot compositions to make the scene feel more tense and dramatic.
Personally, I would rather the shots dwell and allow the actors to showcase their abilities. These are almost all world-class actors, why would you want to force the emotion of a scene using the camera?
The special effects were God awful. There were plenty of shots that had an augmented reality user interface. These were the only good shots with CGI. Everything else looked terrible. From a helicopter to the Dubai skyline.
The poor CGI completely ruins most of the scenes with the cyborgs. Supposedly they had a fairly low budget. But they put a fair amount of work into props, so why wouldn’t they be able to apply that to making a good looking robot?
All in all, this film was ok at best.
