"Replicas" Review: Keanu Reeves' New Sci-fi Movie Exists Many Plot Holes

Replicas is the new sci-fi thriller that follows the story of Will Foster (played by Keanu Reeves), a neuroscientist working for a secret US facility. Will Foster is working on cloning and preserving human’s consciousness on a computer and also transferring it into robot bodies. Even though the success rate of Will’s work is not good as the transplanted human’s mind keeps rejecting the robot bodies, Will and his fellow researcher, Ed (Thomas Middleditch) do not give up on the project.

The project turns out to be convenient when Will Foster wants to "replicate" his family after they died in a car crash. Grief-stricken, Will clones his wife and kids’ bodies and moves their consciousnesses into those robot bodies with the help from Ed.

The experiment is successful, and Will has his family back. Unfortunately, not all of them. Because Will has to steal cloning pods from the facility and there are only three of them, Will decides not to bring back the youngest daughter. Of course, the memories about her also have to be deleted from other family members’ minds as well.

Undoubtedly, in this kind of movie, something has to go wrong, and firstly, it was the resurrected family of Will Foster. They soon start to get "glitches": the wife’s pain in the chest without any injury mark, the son’s lack of control over his hands, and the older daughter’s nightmares. Moreover, the evil boss of the facility where Will Foster works wants his stolen properties, the bodies of the resurrected family, to be killed. To handle this problem, our main character has an idea of transferring his own consciousness into a new robot so that he can take care of the bad guys with his new super-efficient body.

There are more plot holes in this film than in cheddar cheese. The cloning process happens correctly without any flaws and succeeds right at the first time, even though before that Will Foster has a relatively low success rate.

Every event in the film doesn’t feel natural, and the dialogue is weak. Funnily enough, the resurrection process is explained as thoroughly as possible. Meanwhile, some plot points are sloppily and hastily executed. The acting doesn’t bring any wonders either, and Keanu is on autopilot. Alice Eve, playing the wife of Will Foster, has an emotionless and rigid performance as her only expressions are "slightly happy" and "slightly worried."

It’s sufficing to say that despite good visual, this film is somewhat painful to watch. Replicas should have been made into a cutting edge horror/slasher film for such a storyline. However, it seems that the director wants it to be the blandest sci-fi film ever, and reasonably saying, he has marvellously achieved that.