The Reconstruction of William Zero

2015 "You can't run from yourself"
5.4| 1h38m| NR| en
Details

A geneticist wakes up from an accident with only fragments of his memory intact and is forced to relearn who he is via his twin brother. But as he digs deeper, he discovers he might not be who he thought at all.

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Reviews

WasAnnon Slow pace in the most part of the movie.
VividSimon Simply Perfect
ShangLuda Admirable film.
Senteur As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.
knoppfa So a father who accidentally killed his son makes a clone of himself. The whole film I was wondering why he just didn't make a clone of his son. He made the clone of himself so he could run away, which he could have done anyway. That clone then made a clone of himself because. the movie needed a twist. That is at least the only logical explanation I could find. Also bad acting and directing. The main characters action was hard to understand. Especially the second William. And the twisted face of the second William was just weird. All in all I lost interest after 30 minutes but I endured to the end.
charles000 Briefly, the story evolves around the concept of clones, and a situation is conjured up as a sort of platform to deliver a plot theme centered on this arena of potential ethical questions.It could have been a fantastically compelling film, but just didn't quite get there.No spoilers here, so it's a bit difficult to focus on some of the key elements which are the demise of this effort.What stood out the most, perhaps, was the absurdly overdone emotional moments of the key clone character(s), which came off as just being syrupy, like emotional molasses oozing out of the screen.I know, it was supposed to represent the emotional neediness and psychological challenges of the main character(s), but it just came off painfully slow and pedantic.Just a wee bit too much on the self absorbed delusionary role playing . . . and a bit light on the actual functionality of the overall plot premise.Perhaps this might be remade somewhere in the future, with a different treatment.The concept is certainly interesting . . . but this version, well . . .
view_and_review It took me three attempts to watch this movie. Five minutes into the first attempt I went to sleep. Of course that's not fair. No movie is that bad. OK, very few movies are that bad. On the second attempt I got to about 20 minutes in before falling asleep. On the third attempt, after being well rested, I completed the movie.By now you're probably wondering why was I so committed to watching this movie. I don't know. So, the one word I have for this movie is: somniferous. That is to say sleep inducing."The Reconstruction of William Zero" was a movie about cloning, and not a good one. Dr. William Blakely is the subject of the cloning and two wrongs don't make a right. In other words, if you take one lifeless character and clone him what do you have? Yes, that's two lifeless characters.The story was thrown together. There was a little twist in there but that did nothing to save it. Somehow we were supposed to care about he and his wife whom we saw for all of five minutes. It was just one slow, drawn out drama detailing number 5,362 of why cloning is bad.
zmail-77704 The premise of this story is very promising - a thriller based on the concept of an apparent twin who turns out not to be all he, at first, thinks he is.At the risk of not wanting to spoil the movie, I won't say more about how things turn round, but the focus is always on the lead actor, Conal Byrne, who has to play William and William Zero and another allied character with enough distinction between the three that you can keep up with exactly which one he is meant to be.Thankfully Conal is up to the task and switches characters enough to be identifiably 'different' until the last chapter of the movie when the distinctions deliberately become blurred. As William Zero he has to appear practically clueless as to what is happening to him in the beginning and he almost pulls this off.Unfortunately the script advances too quickly for us to get a real feeling for the dilemma in which he finds himself and the progression, from what seems to be amnesia to the dawning of understanding exactly what he is, happens abruptly and without enough reaction to be credible.Similarly the reactions of the other characters in this story are also hurried and, therefore, appear unrealistic. Amy Seimetz, as the (ex) wife, does her best but isn't given enough dialog to carry through her predicament. In the end her conversion to the version of reality that she sees is too sudden and hardly seems in character.Overall I felt the screenplay was generally too predictable at times, whilst leaving a lot of questions unanswered at others (presumably to try and engender a feeling of mystery). There are twists and turns in the plot which, with better direction or a superior screenplay, could have been more entertaining, even shocking.The denouement is laughably simple (and requires another improbable leap of faith) and turns out to be what you might have been expecting all along. Of course there's no other outcome that could happen, but to give so many clues along the way, I felt, was unnecessary and leaves a limp ending.I'm left wondering how many scenes were heavily cut and are left littering the cutting room floor? The progression of the story feels heavily edited and this is the sort of movie where a typical preview of a more twisted, mysterious version might have elicited comments of 'I didn't understand it', forcing a different direction before the launch.This should have been a movie which throws up more questions, especially moral ones, than there are answers but, in that respect, it fails. On the thriller side it also doesn't score as highly as it could have done. At the end I was just left feeling that this could have been so much better.