Not recommended. Another thriller that is so mediocre that I really don’t have anything to say about it. Except it’s moral implications. The story is about parents who clone their dead child in order to replace their lost love with a child who would be exactly the same. This is a fine premise, one that rings true and is worthy of exploration. The worldview behind the story is physicalism: there is no such thing as human transcendence, and everything is reducible to physical properties, even memories and soul. Physical cells in our bodies contain the memories of our abstract experience. So cloning our cells will create a complete replica of our old selves, not merely physical twins, but a full replica, complete with the same memories. Talk about silly medieval superstition. So what happens if you mix some DNA of an evil boy with the DNA of a good boy? You get a split personality boy who is alternately good and evil. And that’s what happens. This is just irresponsibility if you ask me. There are no “evil genes,” and this entire physicalist naturalist movement is a gargantuan shift of blame away from the human will onto genes. Don’t these people realize that when you negate morality and human responsibility, you create a society of monsters and cruelty? This is not a game, folks. Kids are raping and shooting other kids in schools because they’ve been taught there is no morality, everything is reducible to physics and chemistry and everything is relative; they are merely evolved machines. Well, evolved machines in an amoral universe destroy other evolved machines that get in their way. If morality, soul and even ideas are reducible to physical and chemical properties of the brain or body, then no behavior is ultimately “wrong” or “evil,” just statistical variation. This is Nietzsche’s “beyond good and evil.” Well, if kids (indeed everyone) are being taught they are Terminators, then why do we wonder why they are acting like a bunch of Terminators? Duh. So the movie, when deconstructed, becomes a conflicting contradiction. It is a moral tale about how morally wrong it is to apply science to amoral physical machines called humans. I like the moral part, but the movie undercuts itself with the physicalist worldview. And plotwise, it is just totally stupid that the doctor who helps the couple clone their son, secretly adds the DNA of his own dead son I order to reproduce him. The problem is that this doctor’s dead son was a monster himself who killed his own mother and burned down the house. But the doctor is not portrayed as malevolent himself, but misguided. So why in the world would he want to reproduce his evil son if he is not himself with evil intentions? It just doesn’t make believable sense.
