Many of my favorite films of recent months revolve around the same two questions. What does it mean to be human? More specifically, does the meaning of human life ultimately boil down to the will to survive? Ex Machina is the most explicit: the film presents a Turing Test of an artificial intelligence, and the computer scientist says that if the android manipulates the tester to survive then she passes his test. Slow West and Mad Max: Fury Road both show us people so desperate just to survive that they have to compromise their humanity, but who strive to reach a place of peace that allows them to care about more than survival. As I understand the film’s messages, Ex Machina answers the second question with a cynical “no” while the other two leave an opening for a deeper meaning of humanity.
Now, Self/less joins the discussion. The film presents a classic science fiction scenario: what if you could download your mind into the brain of another body as you got older, thus achieving a kind of immortality? It’s the ultimate survival strategy, though inevitably very expensive and controversial. In Self/less, Ben Kingsley plays Damian, a New York real estate tycoon and a proud man laid low by cancer, who elects to go through the procedure. He awakes in Ryan Reynolds’s body and, after some rehab to get his bearings, begins to enjoy his new youth.
All seems wonderful, except for the vivid, disorienting hallucinations that come if he misses his medication. Those visions point to a sinister truth. (Spoilers ahead, but nothing the trailers don’t reveal.) Damian’s new body wasn’t grown in a lab like the doctors told him, but had previously belonged to another man. His brain wasn’t a blank slate before he got there, but putting his mind there meant replacing another man’s. The hallucinations are glimpses of that man’s memories re-asserting themselves.
So, Damian has paid a significant cost to survive, but he finds himself faced with an ethical dilemma. Is his survival worth another man’s life? No, he decides, as he tries to find and help the lost man’s family. Thus ensues the action of the film, since the brain transfer procedure is illegal and done in secret, and the doctor and his goons try to hunt Damian and the family down. After starting as a thought-provoking science fiction film, Self/less becomes a thrilling action movie as this family tries to escape the killers.
Unfortunately, the film doesn’t work as a character study. In the first scenes we see of Damian, he maliciously tears down a competitor and then fails to connect with his estranged daughter. The film sets him up as a terrible megalomaniac, but then once he starts to realize the consequences of his new life he becomes an admirable, virtuous soul – he moves from self-centered to selfless, and we are supposed to follow him with sympathy. I could do that if I saw some process of repentance for Damian, some reason for him to change, but it’s presented as an instinctual switch for him. Of course he fights back against the evil doctor and tries to save the man’s family. But I don’t think the Damian of the Kingsley scenes would have that instinct.
The doctor’s initial selling point to Damian is a provocative question. Do you feel immortal? After a painful, shameful medical episode, Damian calls him back and says, “I don’t feel immortal” to initiate the procedure. We Christians must grapple with this question too. We believe in immortality – though the details of the Christian afterlife-belief differ in important ways from that Hellenist concept – but we often don’t feel immortal. Thankfully, the doctor who offers us life after death is far less shady than in Self/less, and calls us into the open with our decision rather than the dark.