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Cedar Rapids, 2021. In the City of Cedar Rapids, Carter a police officer is married to school teacher Amelia Summerland and they are both looking forward to having children but then tragedy strikes. During a family outing, Amelia suffers a brain aneurism and is taken to the hospital where she sinks into a vegetative state. Devoted husband Carter tends to her through the years as she becomes healthier. He appeals to technology company, Wesley Enterprises, about their medical bills and piques CEO Paul Wesley’s interest which leads to him looking for a subject to test his mind upload process. During the experiment, Carter agrees to have Amelia’s mind uploaded into a computer, her body is incased in an android, and her biologic body is set to perish. Wesley and his team are determined to make Amelia live again, and with such intentions, they successfully do the unthinkable. It is, however, noted that her memories were jumbled and she didn’t know who Carter was for the time being. In the meantime, Republican senator Thaddeus Williams begins a campaign to pass laws to stop mind upload.
Amelia 2.0 is a directorial debut of Adam Orton. The picture did some minor play but hasn’t been viewed by many people.
In the last few years we have chances to watch several movies about the theme of artificial intelligence as people started to worry about it more and more in real life. Some of these are Her (2013), The Machine (2013), Automata (2014), Chappie (2015), Ex Machina (2015) Morgan (2016), Tau (2018), Zoe (2018), and Westworld (2016-). The number of movies about mind upload is much less – the ability of a human mind to get converted to data and then uploaded to a computer or the internet. There are a few adaptations, but the attempts have never been very successful in cinemas – such as Ghost in the Machine (1993), Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (1996), Transcendence (2014), to some extent Replicas (2018) and Archive (2020), which wasn’t bad.
The entire concept of mind uploading has yet to be given a benchmark film, much in the same fashion The Matrix (1999) did for Virtual Reality. Unfortunately, I must report that Amelia 2.0 is not that film. It tries to accomplish this, but themes such as this are, without a doubt, far too complex for scriptwriter Rob Merritt.
Ben Whitehair with his wife, Angela Billman in a coma after the hospital visit in Amelia 2.0 (2017)
Comatose Angela Billman beside her husband Ben Whitehair at the hospital.
There are still many important matters left unaddressed concerning Mind Upload – what is a personality within a machine? If so much of the emotions we feel are responses to stimuli, how would a machine devoid of biological systems perceive emotion? Would it simply simulate emotions, or would it be rolling in a filing cabinet somewhere? Humans have difficulties with memory far too often, what might a machine capable of containing memories in files and having their knowledge base expanded through web connection think? Most wouldn’t consider that to be human thought.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that Rob Merritt has not bothered to do any reading on the Mind Upload discussions that occupy a multitude of forums and has instead settled on cliches. For example, the film does not distinguish between the concept of Amelia 2.0 as an uploaded human and her version as an android. You would think that if anthropomorphic robots were so ubiquitous, they would be more socially accepted. But somehow, the future five years from when the film was made only sees them as sex dolls.
After uploading the title character into the internet and then downloading her into an artificial body, the film constructs the straw man, a conservative senator who stirs up controversy by trying to ban mind upload on the basis that it is anti-Christian. The film believes this point of view is inaccurate and even includes a part near the end where the senator is suffering from cancer and is very clearly dying. We are very much meant to think “hah, you know perfectly well you could have been uploaded,” when it is revealed he is deathly ill.
Amelia (Angela Billman) uploading into her android body in Amelia 2.0 (2017)
Beyond that, we are not provided with any clearer explanation for his motivation other than the idea that she no longer possesses the necessary essence, that of ‘humanness’ (whatever those are).This is the crashing conceptual disappointment of the film. Through the lens of Alexei and Cory Panshin’s 1989 work, The World Beyond the Hill, I would describe this the same way I described Frankenstein’s experiments in Frankenstein (1818): “He lit wastebasket fires just to see the flames, and then instead of running and hiding, they poured water on them.” This means that it is a film that attempts to ignite an idea and then flees from its possible shocking repercussions– There is no attempt to capture the question of whether what was in the machine could be human, whether some people might want to preserve their lives that way, what sort of emotions or thoughts the machine would have, all of these questions simplified into one person making barebones decisions to remove life because of his self-loathing. It is almost laughable how completely disconnected it is from the reality of most computer engineers, who do the very thing that we show in the epilogue: create a set of backups.
