In vitro fertilization may have gotten its due from the Nobel Prize committee recently, but most filmmakers still find reproductive science unsettling. “Jim”, an independent sci-fi film that opened this month, is no exception.
Against a bleak backdrop, a worker drone named Jim Kotofsky (Dan Illian) is foundering in despair after his wife’s death. Jim, unemployed and faced with mounting debts, enlists a biotech firm’s help in creating a genetically enhanced child using his wife’s frozen eggs, hoping that tinkering with his son’s DNA will give his child the advantages he has never had. The film periodically cuts to a clone in the future (Abigail Savage), who is mysteriously linked to Jim and somehow possesses memories of the past that hold particular interest to a shadowy ruler.
“Jim” is director Jeremy Morris-Burke’s first feature film, and it shows. The acting is amateurish, and there are lots of conversations consisting entirely of dull exposition. The plot lags; we spend a lot of time watching Jim flail around in despair, and his decision to have a genetically enhanced child comes out of nowhere, at about three-quarters of the way through the film. There also seem to be several movies mashed together here: the scenes at Lorigen Engineering (including a faux advertisement, shown below) are kind of funny, but jarring and hokey viewed next to American Beauty-esque scenes of suburban soullessness and the dystopian futurescape.
It’s interesting, though to consider how this movie neatly combines two of the main fears about genetic manipulation; namely, that the children produced by these techniques will either be too superhuman or too mindless. However, given that ten years after the completion of the Human Genome Project we have yet to get a full grip on how genes can influence intelligence, the prospect of enhanced humanity becoming a practical ethical concern is still much farther in the future.
Jim is playing in limited release in both New York and Los Angeles. In New York, it is running at the Quad Cinema until October 21st.
And now, a message from Lorigen Engineering: