Keanu Reeves' Replicas

[crookeddy]

Plot: "After a car accident kills his family, a daring synthetic biologist (Reeves) will stop at nothing to bring them back, even if it means pitting himself against a government-controlled laboratory, a police task force, and the physical laws of science."

It's probably a bad movie because it's being release in January, and it has had a review embargo. Still, an original sci-fi movie deserves to be discussed here IMO.

First review: "Replicas is an insane tale directed without a fixed direction that is more comical than tragic, intelligent or, already less, interesting."

Anyone planning to watch this?

 

[Q2UnME]

Is it on Netflix?

*ducks*

 

[od0_ital]

I saw it last night.

It has an interesting idea - how far will you go, what choice will you make, what will you do to save your family? - and it has cool scifi concepts - human cloning, robots, brain mapping for computer download - but it is a mess of a movie with bad dialogue, poor cgi, huge plot holes, and a wtf was that ending.

 

[stj]

It looks cheap, all the action scenes are incompetent and Thomas Middleditch is there. There aren't any huge plot holes. The cgi is minimal. The ending was perfectly logical, but maybe not satisfying (not the same thing.) The science gestured feebly at plausibility, largely by making plot points of how you make a clone that isn't a child but a replica, and accepted that a downloaded copy of a mind is a copy. Then it went on to accept a copy in a clone as being as good as the original. This appears to have been an outlandish concept for many viewers but I was instantly reminded of Jack Vance's To Live Forever.* SF is rare in the movies so I liked it, if only for novelty.

(Love Jack Vance's SF, none of which is very hard. To Live Forever, The Languages of Pao, The Gray Prince, The Blue World, Emphyrio, The Last Castle, The Dragon Masters, Son of the Tree, Houses of Iszm, the Monsters in Orbit novellas, even Nopalgarth. The big series, Durdane, Cadwal Chronicles are a little bloated but still quite readable. All forgotten, I think, it's only Dying Earth and Lyonesse fantasy that survives.)

 

[od0_ital]

Well, it only lasted a week at the AMC Lufkin. Good thing I went to see it when I did.

 

[Silvercrest]

What's wrong with Nopalgarth?

 

[stj]

What's wrong with Nopalgarth?

Absolutely nothing, in the sense that I really enjoyed reading the book. I was very pleased to order a used DAW copy of Nopalgarth, Son of the Tree and Houses of Iszm in one. The premise is very much like that Rowdy Roddy Piper movie about the glasses. And the scientists/heroes remind me a lot of John W. Campbell heroes (no, not Don A. Stuart heroes.)
I suspect anyone who read Nopalgarth before any other Vance would never read him again. Some things you love because of who made them.

 

[Silvercrest]

Well, for what it's worth, I have that same three-set, it was the first Vance I ever read, and it didn't put me off. Though I've gotta say that his writing is really dense and I generally have to study it carefully before I can gather what he's saying. It took me a very, very long time to get into "Planet of Adventure", but once I did, it became one of my favorite books. (And after enough re-readings of the three-set, my favorite of those three changed from "Nopalgarth" to "Son of the Tree.")

Still have not succeeded in getting into "Lyonesse", though. And I haven't gotten around to most of the others yet.

 

[Morpheus 02]

can you post your problems with the ending in spoilers...may consider it on Redbox...