Replicas (2018)

William Foster and Ed Whittle are biomedical research scientists working for Bionyne Corporation in Puerto Rico, attempting to transfer the mind of a dead soldier into an android with superhuman strength, codenamed Subject 345. Foster specializes in synthetic biology and mapping of the mind’s neural pathways, while Whittle’s speciality is reproductive human cloning. Foster successfully captures the soldier’s neural map and transfers it into the android’s synthetic brain, but the experiment fails when the soldier recoils in horror at the android body and destroys it, killing himself again. Foster’s boss Jones warns him that if he cannot get Subject 345 to work, the company’s shareholders will shut the project down.

Foster takes his wife Mona and three children Sophie, Matt, and Zoe, on a boating trip, but on the way all but William are killed in a car crash. Determined to resurrect his family, he coaxes Ed to bring him the Bionyne equipment necessary to extract his family’s neural maps and to clone replacement bodies for them. He successfully extracts their neural maps and tells Whittle to dispose of the bodies, but the first major obstacle to his plan presents itself: only three cloning pods are available, forcing him to choose one to sacrifice. He chooses Zoe, the youngest, and erases her memory from the neural maps of the other three. Whittle starts the seventeen-day cycle required to create mature replacement clones for Foster’s family, and tells him he has only that long to solve the problem of integrating the neural maps into the cloned bodies, or else they will start to deteriorate by aging at an abnormally fast rate. Integrating the mind into a biological clone was phase two of the research project, to be solved after android transfer. Foster is forced to keep this secret, since he and Whittle have stolen millions of dollars of Bionyne equipment and are breaking bioethics. He spends the seventeen days removing evidence of Zoe’s existence from his home, and creating cover stories of illness to explain his family’s absence from work, school, and social media contact.

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Alice Eve, Thomas Middleditch, John Ortiz,

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