Replicas (2018)

Replicas (2018), an American sci-fi thriller directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff and written by Chad St. John from a story by Stephen Hamel, features William Foster and Ed Whittle as biomedical research scientists employed by Bionyne Corporation in Puerto Rico. Their goal is to transfer the mind of a deceased soldier, known as Subject 345, into an android with exceptional strength. While Foster specializes in synthetic biology and neural mapping, Whittle’s expertise lies in human cloning. Despite successfully transferring the soldier’s neural map into the android’s synthetic brain, the experiment goes awry when he rejects his new body and destroys it, causing his own death once again. As Jones, their boss, warns Foster that failure to make Subject 345 work will result in the project being shut down by shareholders, he takes his family – wife Mona and children Sophie, Matt, and Zoe – on a boating trip. Tragically, only Foster survives after a car accident claims the lives of his loved ones.

With a fierce determination to revive his loved ones, he convinces Ed to procure the necessary Bionyne equipment for extracting their neural maps and cloning new bodies. Once the maps are successfully extracted, he orders Whittle to dispose of the empty bodies. However, an unforeseen hurdle arises as there are only three available cloning pods, forcing him to make a difficult decision. Ultimately, he sacrifices Zoe, the youngest member of his family, and erases her memory from the remaining maps. Whittle begins the seventeen-day process of creating mature clones for Foster’s family, but warns him that they must quickly figure out how to integrate the neural maps into the bodies before they begin to rapidly age. This task was supposed to be undertaken after android transfer in phase two of their research project, but now Foster is forced to keep it a secret as he and Whittle have committed theft and ethics violations in order to obtain the Bionyne equipment.