Back to the mad scientist and the crazy politician
Jacques COULARDEAU | OLLIERGUES France | 07/18/2010
(4 out of 5 stars)
"That film is not a masterpiece, for sure, even as an action film. But this film goes along with many films with Schwarzenegger that are dealing with the future. We of course think at once of Terminator. But it also deals with another theme that is popular with him: the use of technology and science to enslave humanity, I mean true real human beings. At times this "technology and science" is coming from outer space like in Predator. In this case, like in Total Recall or The Running Man it is coming from humans themselves. In this case it goes slightly further than in other cases. We are not speaking of robots, of the misuse of television and so on, but we are speaking of cloning. What happens when the inventor of a new technology that enables the cloning of a man in twenty minutes, including his mind, memories, etc by the recording of all that via an eye scanner, is using the technology to reproduce himself and his associates? What happens if that inventor is able to inject into each clone a fatal disease that limits his life span to five years maximum, and only the very few at the heart of the plot would be free of that fatal gene or could be cloned again without it? The story of course does not answer these questions really because Adam Gibson (a good old name for the one who will regenerate the creation of God, the creation of the first Adam on the sixth day of his work) self-appoints himself as the one who is going to clean up the plate and he does. The details are in the film. The film adds on this plate the fact that Adam Gibson had been by mistake cloned and then two Adam Gibsons have to cooperate and to survive together, a good lesson of humanity for which the family is the inalienable unit that any man in this family has to defend. Slightly man-centered, but that is no real accident. The man portrayed here is slightly old-fashioned. That's why he is against cloning and that's why he is a slight but gallant male chauvinist. Just watch the film for the action and do not compare with memories of yours. This film borrows a lot from various other films or from novels.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID
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