In movies, anyone who dares to use a newfangled technology to "play God" almost always opens the "gates of hell."
Bad things emerge: Computers take on evil personalities, wars get started, secret matrixes are developed. Godsend, a new film starring Robert De Niro, Greg Kinnear and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, is no different. Jessie Duncan (Romijn-Stamos) and Paul Duncan (Kinnear) agree to clone their son Adam (Cameron Bright), who was killed by a car when he was 8 years old, but wish they hadn't when the clone starts behaving erratically.
The movie is the kind of publicity that people who want to outlaw all human cloning could only dream of. Whether the filmmakers realize it or not, the message is clear: Scientists who want to clone are evil, or mad, or both; cloning should not be done, period.
At least that was the underlying message for a viewer who is immersed in the science and politics of human cloning. Normal people may simply think it's a somewhat entertaining movie they could have probably waited to rent; that is sometimes scary (I jumped out of my seat more than once, but not more than three times); and in which Romijn-Stamos is not just a pretty face -- she's also a believable actor. Kinnear gets to make out with her. And De Niro plays the scientist, Dr. Richard Wells, which is just kind of cool.
To his credit, writer Mark Bomback avoids inserting too much science into the film. But although the press materials for the film say, "the science itself is grounded in fact," the brief description of the cloning process is a tad off.
A voice-over from Wells tells the audience that after shocking cells back into their "stem-cell precursor," they're injected into an enucleated egg and then nature takes its course. Not so much. Stem cells are precursor cells, but they're not required for cloning.
The press materials reveal a bit about where the movie makers are coming from. They quote Dr. Leon Kass, head of President Bush's Council on Bioethics, more than once. The press notes read: "Dr. Kass eloquently explained why the issue of human cloning is so vexing to us as Americans: 'The greatest dangers we confront in connection with the biological revolution arise not from principals alien to our way of life but rather from those that are central to our self-definition and well-being: devotion to life and its preservation; freedom to inquire, invent or invest in whatever we want; a commitment to passionate humanitarianism; and the confident pursuit of progress through the mastery of nature, fueled by unbridled technological advance.'"
The notes go on to interpret Kass' comments, saying that, in essence, the real-life doctor's point is that to be anti-cloning is to be against the American free enterprise system, which made the practice possible in the first place. "It's easy to imagine Dr. Wells, the character played by Robert De Niro inGodsend, agreeing with Kass," the notes say, but this interpretation is downright hilarious to anyone who has followed Kass' anti-technology career.
Plus, all the characters repeatedly say cloning is illegal. It's not, at least in the United States, but the film's plot hinges on this misstatement of fact. Fear of exposure and potential jail time is what forces the Duncans and Wells to keep quiet the fact that they've cloned Adam.
"Illegal? Yes. Immoral? No," Wells tells the Duncans when he's trying to talk them into his scheme.
But the United States is one of the few developed countries without a law regulating human cloning, mainly because legislators refuse to separate the two different types of cloning: the kind to create a baby, as portrayed in Godsend, and the kind that scientists want to use to develop stem cells for potential medicines (aka therapeutic cloning, or cloning for biomedical research).
Conflating the two types of cloning has held up a bill that would ban only reproductive cloning, which almost everyone agrees should be illegal. Legislators are more divided on therapeutic cloning.
As long as all cloning is associated with results like evil Adam No. 2 in Godsend, no one will want any part of it. Will demons appear in the bathtub if a clone is around? Will that clone have nightmares about his past life? As far as anyone knows it hasn't happened to any of the cloned cows or sheep to date.
Granted, Adam's clone was slightly different because of an admittedly intriguing twist in the cloning process. But most viewers won't parse out that detail. They'll leave the theater thinking that cloning researchers run around maniacally saying things like, "If I'm not supposed to do this, Paul, then why is it that I can?" And audiences may believe that they should not, under any circumstances, "play God," so that one day they won't have to say, as Paul Duncan does in the film, "I had a feeling that somehow we wouldn't get away with this."
Source: http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2004/04/63267