The intriguing scene appears in the middle of the plot, Alice and the little clone girl (her daughter in the simulation experiment) in the process of crossing the ice test site, accidentally came to the clone production workshop. In the footage, thousands of clones hang on the assembly line, shuttle like puppets, including Alice's own clones. Facing this scene, the heroine showed panic and helpless eyes, and faced the little girl's question, "Mom, isn't that you?" "Are you my mother?" It's Alice's nightmare, and the lingering nightmare of modern people, inserted into the film in a way that seems to deviate from the "Resident Evil" theme.
Since entering the industrial age, people are proud of the unprecedented material wealth they have created, but they suddenly find that they are no longer the masters of things, but have become slaves of things. Or rather, the convergence of things. In an industrial society that operates like a machine, the individual is small and lacking in dominance. He has become a replaceable part of an industrial machine, a product on an assembly line shaped for a certain function, and his intelligence, appearance, and even personality have also become a commodity that can be exchanged and sold at a price. This process, which Marx called "alienation", undoubtedly led to the loss of the individual self and the anxiety and panic that followed. Perhaps as early as Chaplin's "Modern Times", we have been able to capture this emotional mapping. In the post-industrial era, with the advancement of science and technology, especially the development of cloning technology, panic has further evolved into a nightmare. Because once cloning technology is used for human beings, the "productization of human beings" is no longer just a metaphor by scholars, but a very real fact. The scenes depicted in this film are not isolated. In "Escape from the Clone Island" and "Cloud Atlas" and many other films, we have seen the repetition of this scene again and again, just like the repeated haunting of nightmares. If cloning technology has only led to concerns about the body, will the secret of the soul also be lost? If one day, our memories can be copied at will, as in "The Sixth Day", or indoctrinated and even tampered with, as in "Total Recall", how can we be sure of our true selves? Could my life be just a lie that was instilled, or, as in "The Truman World," a fake show? Even as in this film, just some experimental subjects that have been imported into a certain "setting" and placed in a specific scene? Such doubts and fears are usually suppressed into the subconscious of the whole society due to the need to maintain the functioning of society. However, just as the individual subconscious manifests itself in dreams, so does the social subconscious manifest in human-made dreams. This dream is a movie. Although today's movies mainly weave dreams that allow people to further escape from reality, sometimes, the dreamer can't control the dream.
The highlight of the film is that it not only recreates this fear unconsciously, but further explores it. In the film, when Alice escapes from the proving ground, she comes to the "container" where her clone is used as a test subject, where she meets the little deaf girl who calls her "Mama". So is she the girl's mother? According to rational disclosure, it should not be. She is not the biological mother of the girl, her body has not even seen the girl, but her experience of cloning remains in her mind with some kind of spiritual resonance. Even the "mother-daughter relationship" between her clone and this little girl is nothing but a "plot" set up by the system for the needs of the experiment, a fake memory. The little girl herself, as Ada points out, is a clone that can be replaced at any time, "there are clones like her in the cold storage, maybe hundreds more". In a word, her relationship with this girl was built on falsehood. However, when the girl rushed over to call her "Mom", she couldn't refuse, and finally decided to take her to escape, even risking her life for her on the road. Why is this? Is it the momentary germination of maternal instinct? Is it compassion and protection for the weak? Or does she seem to have realized that there is some kind of "truth" among all the falsehoods and deceit...
As mentioned above, the main function of movies in modern society is to provide "a way of escape". Hollywood's business Blockbusters are even better at helping viewers escape the cruelty of reality through "dream creation", and use strong sensory stimulation to relieve insensitivity under high pressure. However, it is really intriguing that modern people's worries and thoughts about their own situation are reflected in such a bad popcorn film even in Hollywood commercial films. Perhaps this is precisely the proof that the self has not yet disappeared, and that hope still exists.
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