While I wrote about “Slender Man” last year, I mentioned 
that trying to analyze a movie so completely devoid of quality 
was similar to going into a dissociative 
state. All of what I thought I knew about 
movies suddenly meant nothing, because 
nothing 
meant 
anything. 
Sure, 
shoot 
every single scene of the movie without a 
light on. Completely abandon characters 
and plotlines. Kill Joey King with a tree. 
What the hell does it matter? I thought 
that would be my greatest challenge as a 
reviewer: putting into words that “Slender 
Man” wasn’t just a bad movie, it was a 
nothing movie. Enter “Replicas.”
Keanu Reeves (“John Wick”) stars as 
William Foster, a brilliant scientist who 
is this close — this close — to a world-
changing breakthrough in transferring 
human consciousness from a biological 
subject to a synthetic one if his family and 
his boss would just get out of his way with 
their “ethical questions” and their “board 
meetings.” Luckily for him, his family is 
quickly killed in a car crash, providing him 
with not only a relief from those moralistic 
voices of reason but with new test subjects. 
Retreating to his home, he clones his 
family and begins the work that will see 
their consciousness transferred from their 
old bodies to their new ones. What could possibly go wrong?
Everything.
Everything could possibly go wrong.
In order to get at the heart of the journey “Replicas” takes 
you on, you almost have to break it up into chunks. Trying to 
digest the whole thing at once can only lead to pain. First, let’s 
go back to before the beginning. The film was shot in mid-2016 

— produced by the not-at-all-fake-sounding Company Films 
— and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in 
September of 2017, where it was sold to the very-real-why-do-
you-ask Entertainment Studios Motion 
Pictures. The first trailer dropped Oct. 
of that same year, promising the sort of 
movie that you’ll 
find on Reeves’s 
IMDb ten years 
from 
now 
and 
say out loud, “He 
was in that?” In 
lieu of a release 
date, the trailer 
just 
promised 
“Replicas” 
was 
“coming soon.”
A 
year 
and 
a 
half 
passed. 
To 
put 
it 
in 
perspective, 
Barack 
Obama 
was 
still 
president 
when 
“Replicas” 
was 
shot, 
and 
candidacies 
for 
the 2020 election 
were 
being 
announced when 
it was released. 
It took a while. 
Curiously, 
“Replicas” 
didn’t 
undergo 
any 
reshoots that would necessitate such a 
long wait, and by all appearances, it’s 
the same movie that was screened at TIFF 2017. Expectations 
weren’t low for “Replicas,” because by the time it found its 
way to theaters, everyone had basically forgotten it existed. 
Another trailer dropped, and again as befitting a Keanu 
Reeves 
movie 
that 
doesn’t 
begin with the words “John 
Wick,” 
everyone 
basically 
shrugged.
Now we can get to the movie. 
That lack of expectations may 
have played a role in my initial 
reaction to the film, or at least 
its first act, which takes the 
form of a trashy Frankenstein 
homage that, while not exactly 
high 
art, 
is 
entertaining 
nonetheless for its willingness 
to commit to tropes usually 
found in horror movies. It 
plays like a SyFy original 
movie, but you know what? 
There’s nothing wrong with a 
little dumb fun every once in a 
while.
Then 
everything 
starts 
changing. Plotlines drop like 
flies; in the most egregious 
example, the bodies of Reeves’s 
deceased 
family 
members 
simply 
disappear 
between 
scenes. 
Director 
Jeffrey 
Nachmanoff (“Traitor”) starts 
listening to his worst instincts, 

resulting in silly directing choice after silly directing choice, 
like cheesy zooms before obvious trailer lines that resulted in 
my first unintentional laughs of the movie.
They would not be the last.
From here, it’s hard to discuss 
what happens without delving into 
spoilers, and given that I think 
“Replicas” is a film that has to be 
seen to be believed — and by that 
same token, should be seen with a 
couple of friends and more than a 
couple of beers — I wouldn’t want to 
rob you of the impact of seeing some 
of this for the first time. So in the 
most general of terms, the horror 
stylings give way to the cliché sci-
fi thriller you’d expect from a movie 
with the tagline “Some humans are 
unstoppable.” It’s bad, but more 
than that, it’s simply boring.
Then everything changes again. 
Where the first shift was a slow 
decline from trashy B-movie to the 
sort of snooze-fest Januaries are 
made of, it’s possible to pinpoint 
the exact moment that “Replicas” 
seals its fate as one of the most 
memorably bad movies in recent 
memory. From this moment on, there 
are more shots at canted angles than 
there are normal shots, as if the 
cinematographer passed out halfway 
through production and was clinging 
to the camera for support. There are 
multiple conspiracies, multiple heel 
turns and multiple laugh-worthy 
moments — all before the killer robot shows up, because of 
course there’s a killer robot. I’d say the effects used to bring 
it to life look like something out of a video game, but frankly, 
I’ve been playing a lot of “Red Dead Redemption 2” lately 
and I think my go-to pan for bad effects would be insulting 
to video games if applied here. It looks like the effects artist 
took their kids’ box of crayons and just drew a robot on the 
screen. By this point, “Replicas” barely resembles a real movie 
as much as it does a movie pitched by a fictional character in 
a scene meant to satirize everything wrong with Hollywood. 
If Keanu Reeves ever starred in a sequel to “Tropic Thunder,” 
this is the fake trailer they’d show before the movie.
I don’t know what to say about “Replicas” besides what I 
already have. You have to see it to believe it. There’s no way 
to properly quantify it. Even describing in exact detail what 
happens on screen wouldn’t do it justice because there’s 
no way to capture how quickly it moves between different 
sorts of bad — from affable trash to boring trash to a sort of 
transcendent trash that forced me to reconsider how I think 
about movies. If a movie has some highs, does that rectify 
the fact that it also has some of the most abysmal lows I’ve 
ever encountered? Or does its slow descent into madness taint 
everything that came before it? Was I wrong to think there 
was any good in it to begin with or was everything I thought 
was remotely remarkable just the result of me believing these 
things would pay off later or that the writer knew what a pay 
off was? Are there any lessons to be learned here or is the 
whole thing just a trial sent by God to test the faith of film 
fans?
I don’t know. I just don’t know. I feel like Luke Skywalker 
trying to decide if Darth Vader can still be redeemed even 
though he blew up a planet. “Replicas” is good. “Replicas” is 
bad. “Replicas” is all.
ENTERTAINMENT STUDIOS MOTION PICTURES

Ann Arbor’s music scene is 
one of tradition and variance. 
Specifically, the venues in Ann 
Arbor play a crucial role in the 
city’s musical history. Hill 
Auditorium, in conjunction 
with the University Musical 
Society, is known for hosting 
some of the most legendary 
orchestras 
of 
all 
time 
— 
the New York and Berlin 
Philharmonics, to name a few. 
The Blind Pig brings in a wide 
variety of punk, popular and 
local musicians to a historic 
venue that big names of the 
past have walked through. 
But one of the most intimate 
venues that Ann Arbor owes a 
significant part of its history 
to over the last 50 years is The 
Ark. The Ark plays an integral 
role in bringing folk music to 
Ann Arbor, hosting over 300 
different acts of varying styles 
throughout the year, from 
folk to jazz to bluegrass and 
everything in between.
Founded 
in 
1965, 
The 
Ark began as a nonprofit 
organization, 
and 
has 
remained 
the 
same 
since, 
aside from a brief stint in the 
’70s. Times had become tough, 
and the venue had to rely on 
ticket sales to keep afloat. The 
Ark was able to get back on 
track, able to return to their 
mission with the initiation of an 
idea in 1977. That idea was The 
Ann Arbor Folk Festival.
“Those first couple of Folk 
Festivals sort of came out of 
desperate measures and these 
artists coming together saying, 

‘we’ll do this show and support 
this 
venue 
that’s 
important 
to us as performers as well as 
the community’,” Barb Chaffer 
Authier, the marketing director at 
The Ark, said in an interview with 
The Daily. Since then, the festival 
has remained an important aspect 

of The Ark’s legacy.
A few things have changed since 
1977, when the festival was held 
on only one night in the Power 
Center. It wasn’t until the mid-
’80s when the festival switched 
over to Hill Auditorium, bringing 

in headliner Bonnie Raitt. Back 
then, headliners consisted of local 
artists, as opposed to the huge 
names that are brought into town 
today.
In 2003, the festival added a 
second night. “Hill Auditorium 
went 
under 
renovation 
in 
2003, which is the year we 
moved back to the Michigan 
Theater,” Authier explained. 
“And because we now had 
a crowd of over 3000 that 
were attending the festival 
… that’s when we started 
doing two nights.” When the 
festival moved back to Hill 
Auditorium, The Ark decided 
to keep the festival two days 
long due to the success of the 
previous year.
Having 
more 
time 
for 
different acts, the festival 
decided to push the boundaries 
with some of the artists they 
brought in. “You hear Folk 
Festival and you might be 
thinking ‘Kumbaya’ or singer-
songwriter 
or 
something 
like that, but it really gave 
us the opportunity to put a 
bigger variety of music on the 
lineup,” Authier explained.
The 
Ann 
Arbor 
Folk 
Festival has not only allowed 
The Ark to remain nonprofit 
by becoming one of its biggest 
fundraisers, but it has also 
made Ann Arbor one of the 
most well-known spots in the 
country for folk music. The 
Ann Arbor Folk Festival takes 
place this Friday and Saturday, 
Jan. 25 and 26, at Hill Auditorium. 
In addition to the festival, many 
of the artists on the lineup will be 
returning to The Ark this winter 
and spring. Tickets for those 
shows are on sale now.

FILM REVIEW
‘Replicas’ is terrible, but it’s also pretty terrific

JEREMIAH VANDERHELM
Daily Arts Writer

42nd Ann Arbor Folk 

Festival

Friday, Jan. 25th & Saturday, Jan. 
26th

Doors @ 6 p.m.

Hill Auditorium

$42-$60 single night,

$75-$110 series

COMMUNITY CULTURE PREVIEW
Folk Fest to be fully fantastic

RYAN COX
Daily Arts Writer

Like the entirety of 
Vice News, “Temptation 
Island” 
nags 
at 
my 
inability to resist trivial 
media. A reboot of the 
2001 hit, the show centers 
on four couples who are 
questioning 
their 
relationships 
and 
places 
them on an 
island 
with 
a handful of 
hot 
singles 
whose 
sole 
purpose 
is 
to 
get 
the 
couples 
to 
cheat on each 
other.
If 
“Temptation 
Island” 
sounds 
like 
it 
was 
genetically 
modified 
in 
a lab to be as scandalous 
as 
possible, 
that’s 
because 
it 
definitely 
was. One moment I’m 
getting “Jersey Shore”-
style 
bickering, 
the 
next 
moment 
I 
have 
tension inspired by “The 
Bachelor” — all of this is 
only made better by the 
host Mark L. Walberg. 
This 
man 
makes 
me 
think he would’ve hosted 
“Survivor” 
if 
only 
he 
didn’t get too “in his 
feels.” The show might as 
well include a disclaimer 

warning the audience that 
the show is best viewed 
while scrolling through 
your Instagram feed in 
one hand and typing a 
half-finished essay in the 
other.
Despite the low barrier 
of 
entry, 
“Temptation 
Island” isn’t a bad show. 
In fact, I was sufficiently 

entertained 
while 
watching it. The vicarious 
nature of watching other 
couples potentially cheat 
on another gave me a 
giddy, omniscient feeling. 
Watching 
“Temptation 
Island” is akin to being 
the cool kid that everyone 
tells their secrets to, yet 
not being expected to 
give any dirt in return. 
This 
sometimes 
blurs 
the line between genuine 
and 
scripted 
reactions 
but if you actually stop to 
think about it you realize 

it doesn’t matter because 
it’s “Temptation Island,” 
and who cares.
Though 
“Temptation 
Island” exists solely to 
fulfill our need for gossip, 
comparing 
the 
2000’s 
version to this current 
rendition, an interesting 
conversation about how 
reality 
television 
has 
changed 
before 
our 
eyes 
is 
provoked. 
Today, it is 
expected 
that 
everyone 
who appears 
on 
reality 
television 
will 
be 
palatable 
enough 
to 
be 
deemed 
attractive by 
the 
average 
viewer.
However, 
if 
you 
compare the 
singles who appeared on 
the 2000’s version and the 
singles in the reboot, you 
can see plainly the drastic 
shift in our expectations 
for who can be on a show 
that is supposed to be 
present reality. It’s almost 
as entertaining as the 
show itself to watch USA 
Network dictate what the 
“ideal American” bachelor 
and bachelorette looks, 
dresses and acts like. And 
if that means cheating on 
your significant other, so 
be it.

ELI LUSTIG
For the Daily

The latest tempting TV

“Temptation Island” 

Season Premiere

USA

Tuesdays @ 10 p.m.

TV REVIEW

“Replicas”

Ann Arbor 20 + IMAX, Goodrich 
Quality 16

Entertainment Studios Motion 
Pictures

To put it in perspective, 
Barack Obama was 
still president when 
“Replicas” was shot, and 
candidacies for the 2020 
election were being 
announced when it was 
released.

5 — Friday, January 25, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com