Replicas
A bunch of mixed messages here, particularly the ending that fixes (almost) everything.
Clearly evil corp has a site in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, but this was filmed after the telescope went down, so there are only generic lush forest establishing shots instead. Our boy Keanu is the lead scientist there, with the other dude from Silicon Valley as his lieutenant nerd. They are trying to transfer human consciousness into some crappier I, Robot humanoid thingamabobs, while the other team fully automates human cloning.
Imprint number 345 fails, again, and the boss is getting anxious, funding will get cut soon. Still, it’s a cushy 9 to 5 job, so Keanu is going on a boat trip with his family over the weekend anyway. Apparently, on route there, there’s a tropical storm going on, but their plans remain the same, even after almost being crushed by an 18 wheeler. Eventually their car is it by a tree branch, crashes into a ravine and all but Keanu are killed.
But wait, our scientist buddy sees a wait to kill two birds with one stone: clone his family and transfer their memories to the new bodies, that will save the research. It’s a miracle, they steal millions of dollars of equipment from work, plug it into regular plugs in the basement, and the fully automated human cloning gear works, building some gooey people in a fortnight.
The only major setback was that there were only 3 cloning machines, and he had three kids (and the wife), so the young one was left un-cloned. He just deleted the memory of her from their memories, no biggie.
Alas, this was just too easy. The company was a spook front, they detected the heist but let it play out to get the results they wanted: super soldier building blocks. Goons kidnap their property, even if the wife (a surgeon) zaps the tracking devices from their spinal cords using a mere defibrillator.
All is good in the end, since Keanu copies his brain to the bot, that kills the goons, clones the main antagonist for PR purposes, and sells the tech to dictatorships like UAE, to revive old rich dudes. This allows Keanu to finance his missing daughter, and they all live out their lives like kings, in some tropical resort. The End.
Keanu’s nerd buddy was shot in the head so that the bad guys know they meant business, and they acted like reviving people was something that just couldn’t happen. He was half-against the idea at first, but when it happened, he was ecstatic. Not a blood relation to the main dude, so he stays dead.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.