I will tell you, though, that whatever stigma was once attached to movies about clones has long since vanished for me.
Spoiler alert for movies about clones you might not have known were about clones, so if you want to be overly cautious you can stop reading. However, only in a few cases are these movies secretly about clones, and if you are a reasonably accomplished cinephile you will likely have seen these anyway. I'm only going to mention five titles so it's not a huge risk. Though, as the newest, mild spoilers for Dual in any case.
Making a movie about clones was once a guarantee that you had made a shit movie. Either the technology laughably disappointed, or the story did, or both. I think it was both in The 6th Day, my lowest ranked film of 2000. I didn't even bother to see Multiplicity, which came out a few years before that.
There are still plenty of bad ones I'm sure -- Gemini Man would be one example -- but the subject matter alone no longer leaves a stink on a film. In fact, I think the subject matter makes me more optimistic than it does pessimistic. Even some cloning movies that are legitimately mediocre, like the Keanu Reeves vehicle Replicas, have a certain charm for me.
Maybe it all changed in 2009, when I named Moon my #1 movie of the year. Since this is the main spoiler choice here, I won't go too much into who is cloned and why or how. But come on, this great movie has now been out for 14 years, so if you haven't seen it, that's on you.
The next movie I'm going to mention in my trend was just from last year, so it might not seem like a very urgent trend -- but don't worry, Dual makes three, and every editor knows that three equals a trend. That was Swan Song, the one directed by Benjamin Cleary on AppleTV+ (as opposed to the one directed by Todd Stephens about an older gay man). I found that film's dealing with the existential issues related to cloning enormously moving, as the protagonist (played by Mahershala Ali) signs on to have a clone replace him without his family knowing when he contracts a terminal illness. Anyway, that movie was my #5 of the year.
Dual -- streaming on Netflix as of last week -- has a similar premise, but does new and more comical things with it. Like Swan Song, the technology is used to replace the dying, but without fooling the family in this case. The family willingly takes on the clone as a way of softening the blow of losing the person, and may even come to like the clone as much as the original person and keep them around past the grieving phase. Of course, issues arise when the terminal patient is suddenly no longer terminal, and the clone has developed its own personhood, so the two must battle it out to the death to see which one continues the life in progress.
A ding against the movie standing tall on the strength of its clone themes is that my favorite thing about it is Stearns' deadpan sense of humor. The humor actually didn't work for me in his last film, The Art of Self-Defense, though I appreciated what he was trying to do. His film before that, which I did really like, was Faults, about a brain-washing cult -- and while there was certainly eccentricity in it, it was a lot more of a head trip movie than a comedy, deadly serious at times.
He's gotten both the head trippiness and the deadpan humor on the same page in Dual, and it's now my favorite of his three films. Karen Gillan and Aaron Paul both kill it with the absurd line deliveries, as does the rest of the cast. There's a definite artificiality in that dialogue and in the affect behind it, but in this case that's a good thing.
And yes, it gives me interesting new things to consider about the point at which a bag of inexperienced meat resembling a person becomes that person, or at least an entity unto itself deserving of basic human rights. If you had practiced becoming a woman in order to ease the grieving for her family, and possibly live out the remainder of her natural life for her, but were then told after quite a long time that your services were no longer required, it wouldn't really be simple, now would it?
I won't spoil any more of Dual than I already have.
But I did think it was worth spoiling as much as I have in order to give the movie a very strong recommendation to you, my dear readers, as well as to let you know that The Audient is open for business on movies about clones.
