The idea of making a film about how a person meets themselves without traveling in time came to me back in 2008, when I hadn’t seen a single movie that explored this topic in any way.
Since then, I have seen five films that touch on this theme in one way or another: Moon, Cloned, Coherence, and Rewind. I can’t quite remember the title of the fifth film, but I’ll write about it too.
The film Moon is somewhat unique. First of all, it features a fairly well-known actor, Sam Rockwell—he played in The Green Mile and several other famous films. The cast of this film is incredibly small; mostly, Sam is the only actor. He plays a scientist astronaut who “watches over” the moon. At one point, he finds himself, and that’s where the moral dilemma begins—who is the real him. The film is somewhat slow and too long for what is shown, but the idea is brilliant, and it’s still interesting to watch. I won’t say more, as I recommend watching it.
Cloned is also a chamber film with just a few characters, and it raises moral issues as well. The plot is simple: three guys come to an island to relax and end up at the villa of a scientist who invented a cloning method… To clone someone, all they need to do is go to the bathroom—and from the DNA in the sewage full of secret chemicals, clones of those who have been in this bathroom are created. An unconventional approach, but it ends rather tragically for some of the participants.
And if Cloned shows people meeting themselves because, well, they were cloned, in the film Coherence mysterious phenomena occur. It’s a chamber film, there are no famous actors in it, but it looks absolutely wonderful! I highly recommend it; it’s a beautiful film with unexplained phenomena.
The last film is about a fairly large group of young people who gather for a loud party and start encountering their doppelgangers. I don’t remember if a comet passed by or some other mysterious event was the cause of such duplication, but everything in that movie was very intense.
What interests me in these films is that, in all of them except Moon, murders occur. In Cloned, the first pair of clones kills their originals, but then in this and all the other films, the originals kill their copies. This is very curious, because, although it’s clear that the murders are committed by completely normal people who, perhaps, would never have killed anyone, and although it’s itself wild, one can’t help but ask the question: well, what else could be done? After all, these are not formal copies, these doppelgangers are unpredictable, and it’s unknown what they might do, how they might ruin our lives. I’m not encouraging anyone to kill, but the topic is very interesting.