Dual

I know there’s going to come a day when, for the first time, an artificially-intelligent machine tells another artificially-intelligent machine a joke, and they laugh. This movie might be that joke.

Karen Gillan plays Sarah. Like Cameron (Mahershala Ali) in SWAN SONG, she’s been diagnosed with a terminal illness and elects to have a clone carry on in her absence.

“Most people cry when doctors give them bad news, which is why doctors are depressed,” says her gastroenterologist (June Hyde). “You should decide on what type of funeral you want.”

Talk about awful bedside manner!

There’s always a window of time where the person can change their mind, but in this case her boyfriend, Paul (Beulah Koale), dumps her for the clone just before Sarah is told she’s in remission and will live.

Sarah confronts her clone, “You’re pretending to be me, while I’m still alive?”

Now that the clone has prematurely assumed her existence, the 28th Amendment to the Constitution requires that Sarah must kill her clone in physical combat for the right to be herself again. This presents all sorts of awkward situations. At one point, the clone tells Sarah, “Peter and I will probably make love tonight. As you know, I tend to be loud. I wanted you to be aware.”

As she prepares for her duel to the death, Sarah enlists the aid of Trent (Aaron Paul) to learn combat techniques. There’s one genuinely funny moment in the movie, when you think Trent’s soliciting sexual favors as payment for the combat lessons, but instead he just wants Sarah to teach him hip hop dancing.

I waited for the punchline to be something to the effect that everyone except Trent (a survivalist) has been replaced by clones. Even Sarah talks like a clone. Instead, nothing is made of it.

If the entire movie worked like that, where Trent the survivalist is the only sane person, it could be darkly hilarious, but everyone, even Sarah, speaks without a hint of emotion—which begs the question: are they all copies of copies of copies? Is that why they’re such bad facsimiles of human interaction? Instead, it’s the same gag repeated for two hours without an underlying thesis.

And that sounds an awful lot like the kind of movie an A.I. might write.