Replicas is the first big deal that’s come out of the Toronto film festival and it’s supposedly such a good film that five offers were on the table after the screening. The deal that was brokered finally was by Entertainment Studios for $4 million to gain the North American rights. This deal is also including a wide release.
Keanu Reeves plays the part of William Foster, a neuroscientist that’s been mapping the human brain seeking a way to cure Alzheimer’s. Or that at least is what he believes he’s doing. In truth he’s been recreating the human brain bit by bit through his research. When his family perishes after a car attack he alters his research just enough so that he can recreate each of them and bring them back. It’s a new twist on an old story that might be worth watching once it’s released.
This kind of subject is a very popular premise for any movie since it hits right at the core of many people and makes them think about what they would do if they were faced with similar circumstances. Losing your family is a horrifying proposition for anyone, and yet movie goers tend to pay more for films about tragedy and grief than any other film. It’s a propensity of most humans to gravitate towards powerful emotions that are considered to be infectious and therefore somehow attractive, no matter how morbidly so.
Yet we all know how these films tend to go. The scientist will grieve for his family or his love or whoever has passed. If they are the type of scientist that has anything to do with biology of any sort they tend to want to fix the problem so that they can make it better. In this case Reeves would be bringing back his family by copying their brains and then possibly putting them into different bodies, which is my theory since not a lot has been released about the film yet. Something along those lines seems to be feasible enough however that it could very well happen. After all, any movie that has to do with a scientist messing around with the brain or the body in general usually has something to do with death or something immoral that wouldn’t ever be allowed in the real world.
To be honest it almost seems like another version of Flatliners, which has received a reboot that will be coming to theaters soon. The premise is very different but the idea of bringing someone back from the dead is something that has been done repeatedly throughout movie history. One might call it the Frankenstein-complex or the God-complex that makes movie scientists think that they can navigate around the laws of life and death but one thing we’ve always seen and know to expect is that somehow, some way, it always ends poorly.
Replicas will be coming to the New York Comic-Con where clips of the movie will be shown and Reeves and his film making crew will hold a panel in order to answer any questions.
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