“Disturbing for the Sake of Being Disturbing”

This is a hard movie to rate. On the one hand, Godsend is an excellent movie when it comes to acting, directing and screenwriting. However, it’s so dark and disturbing, and devoid of any kind of virtue or edification, that the natural tendency is to grade down. This isn’t the first time a movie of this genre has been produced, and there certainly have been finer examples, (i.e. The Sixth Sense and What Lies Beneath), but the fresh angle here is the salient topic of cloning and genetic manipulation.

If there’s any saving grace to Godsend, it’s that it paints a graphic picture of the potential terrors that await us as scientists continue flirting with genetics. Whereas Jurassic Park was frightening because it revealed the dangers of cloning dinosaurs, Godsend is even more terrifying because it deals with re-creating a human being.

Here’s the scenario: Paul and Jessie Duncan (Greg Kinnear and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) loose their eight-year-old son, Adam (Cameron Bright), in a car accident. At Adam’s funeral, Dr. Richard Wells (Robert DeNiro), approaches the Duncan family and offers them a chance to get Adam back through a cell cloning process he has recently perfected. Reticent at first, the Duncan’s break down and ultimately agree to go through with the process. Eight years later, after the second Adam (the symbolism is as subtle as a 2X4 to the head) grows past the experiences of his predecessor, new memories and behaviors begin to emerge. It’s later discovered that the new personality comes from Dr. Wells’ deceased son—Wells introduced some of his son’s D.N.A. into Adam’s—who just happened to be homicidal and suicidal (he burned a school to the ground around him along with other students and teachers). The ending doesn’t really resolve anything and leaves everything wide open to individual interpretation, making it the weakest link in an otherwise thought-provoking script.

The first half of the movie is a bit slow, but does a good job of painting the main characters, their dilemma and their fateful choice. But, the second half of the film is little more than a horror movie in the vein of Bad Seed or The Good Son. Godsend services the audience by presenting a human cloning experiment gone horribly wrong, but it does a disservice by remaining morally ambiguous—presenting a case where cloning was bad “in this instance” because of D.N.A. tampering. It’s one thing to clone an animal and quite another to clone a human, or to put it a different way, we can clone a body, but can we clone a soul? This is the kind of moral/religious question the movie conveniently avoids, and maybe the safer route is the better one—after all, it’s just a movie.

Godsend is anything but, and manufactures goose bumps with haunting dream sequences, musical flourishes and things that jump at the camera. It’s a wild ride, but certainly isn’t for the faint of heart.

Rating: 2 1/2

Tags: Drama, Horror, Sci-fi