Best Keanu: “It’s 2am. Nothing’s open.”

Replicas is some pretty awesome shit.

It also exemplifies why Keanu Reeves is awesome. Or, as my friend would say, “Keanu is the tits.”

Who else would do Replicas, Destination Wedding, and two John Wick movies in the space of two years? What other actor has anything close on their resume?

Of course, Replicas isn’t John Wick — few movies reach that level of perfection — and depending on who you are, doesn’t quite reach the entertainment value of Destination Wedding. But what Replicas offers that those movies don’t is a full roster of deeply interesting ideas.

I can’t say any of the ideas are completely new. But the way they roll out in this movie — through a crazy plot that requires the viewer to suspend disbelief to such a level that you’re like, “ok, this is where we’re going now? Ok, all right…” — worked for me.

It also feels like a Keanu hallmark: interesting ideas, no matter how they play out on film — for better or for worse — are worth exploring for their own sake.

William, Keanu’s character in Replicas, is a neuroscientist trying to implant human consciousness into robots. The technology is imperfect. His family, a wife and three children, die in a car accident. He decides to clone their bodies and transfer their neural imprints. Because of Replicas plot twists, he knows in advance he can only bring back three of the four members of his family, and has to make a decision.

At this point, I want to stop and introduce a spoiler warning, something I would rarely do, except that the choice William makes is at the emotional core of this film. It’s also the entryway to the deeper questions raised by Replicas, should you want to import those questions into the film and not just watch it for the hilarity of some points of dialogue: “I have to go to work. You gotta watch the pods.”

William writes four names on slips of paper, and picks one at random. The name he chooses is Zoe, his youngest child. Reminded by his colleague that he can’t just revive three out of four people without raising suspicion, William does the obvious: deletes memories of Zoe from the neural imprints of his wife and two other children. He also scrubs evidence of Zoe from the family home, although he does so imperfectly.

It is hard to watch a father systematically, actively delete evidence of one child while he’s desperately trying to bring back two others, and their mother.

But here’s the first deep question. William believes he can bring people back to life with enough neurobiology and the right body to put it in. He doesn’t believe that when his family died, they had souls that went off somewhere else. So by deleting Zoe, he’s not only letting her stay dead. He’s erasing the memories others have of her, as if she never existed at all.

Does existence then lie only in memory? As we might expect as a moviegoer, William successfully revives his family. But the memory of Zoe still lingers. His older daughter, Sophie, awakens screaming in the middle of the night, wanting to know if Zoe and Mom are dead. William consoles her, tells her it was just a dream. He keeps up the ruse that there never was a Zoe, giving up the chance he has to grieve unalone, by grieving with his other daughter.

Which is very John Wick of course, at least in a way. As I was typing that last paragraph I could think of no better phrase than, “the opportunity to grieve unalone,” which comes directly from John Wick — there, the character is talking about the dog.

John Wick too seems to think that memory is central to existence. When he meets the Elder in Chapter 3, John says he wants to stay alive to remember his wife: “to remember her. To remember us.”

Either John Wick knows he’s going to hell, where Helen won’t be, or he thinks there’s nothing beyond death for either of them.

[*]

I watched Replicas this morning, 8am on a Tuesday. I ate toast and drank coffee, savoring the days off I’ve given myself before having to switch my mind back to writing for money, whoring out my brain for the sake of digital content.

I also have a midterm next week, for a class I’m taking: philosophy of perception. Which is a lot less interesting than it sounds. Like most things you study in the denser branches of philosophy, it comes down to does C follow if you assume A and B. What if you get counterexample D, which would imply E and F. What, then, do we make of C?

Or something like that — typically anything you think in philosophy that will give rise to an interesting thought experiment basically comes down to argumentation and logic.

I’m only in a class on philosophy of perception because I wandered back into university at some point mid-pandemic, intending to study Cognitive Science. That was before I discovered no one really knows what Cognitive Science is, even those who claim to teach it. It’s a mish-mash of other disciplines, specifically psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, computer science, and philosophy, among others.

Why those? My prof last term said he thought it was a simple accident of history — when people first started thinking about COGS as an area of study, those were the perspectives that fell together.

No one really knows what cognition is. It depends on what question you ask and what you’re looking for in an answer. After abandoning COGS, I elected a double major in philosophy and psychology, as philosophy felt close enough to my ethereal home turf and psychology was a wonderful challenge to ideas I’ve long held about who we are and why we do the things we do.

Psychology has a lot to say about memory, its fragility and power. Psychology also has its own definitions (plural) of consciousness.

It’s probably not the same as the Replicas meaning of consciousness, a meaning that is also vague in the movie. (As it would have to be — after all, William is busy. He has to bring his family back from the dead, grieve, hide from the police, explain to his boss why he’s not at work, maintain the outward appearance that his wife and kids are still alive by hacking their email and video game chats, fight an evil corporation, hold his marriage together, run, run, and run — all in under two hours. Consciousness? No time to think about that now).

The wife and children William brings back are functional, but are they conscious in the way they once were? What about the William by the end of this movie, who exists in both an organic and a synthetic body? These are deep, interesting questions.

And they’re asked in a movie that’s sometimes laugh-out-loud ridiculous, but still immensely watchable.

Replicas ends with William and his family on a dream-like beach. He’s carrying his daughter Zoe, somehow with them in this alternative space, wherever it is. This final scene reminded me a lot of the climax of Contact — one of my all-time favorite movies — when a global effort to send Jodie Foster to meet up with aliens ultimately results in her on a beach having a private reunion with her deceased father.

It’s not actually her father in Contact. It’s an image the aliens piece together using her thoughts and memories, to “make things easier” for her. Zoe’s presence at the end of Replicas may simply be saying it’s all memory, or none of it is memory, or there is a soul, or they found another pod after all.

Whatever it is, I like it. It’s interesting, it’s watchable, it’s Keanu. So it is all good things.

March 2022