more science fiction here than in star wars.....

If they can clone a sheep, only ethical considerations prevent cloning a human. Perhaps we can't literally grow complex critters in a test tube or vat, but I'm sure there's plenty of women who'd rent their wombs for the right amount of money. If a mouse can grow a human ear, it's not so far-fetched that animals could serve as surrogate wombs (apes? pigs?).

While the plot of The Island is superficially similar to the plot of this film, the conclusion that I draw from this is that plots are far less important than the way they're presented.

Secondly, as the previous poster mentioned, artificial clones are obviously possible. I'd be more amazed if someone, somewhere had not secretly made an illegal human clone, than to hear they had.

The biggest problem I had with this film lay in the central premise: the idea that people could believe that artificial clones lacked "souls," and proceed to breed and murder people on that basis. Nobody believes that natural clones (identical twins) lack souls, so why would anyone believe that artificial clones were different?

(If my life depended on it, then perhaps I could convince myself of this convenient lie, like the characters in the film, but I like to think that I wouldn't.)

Then again, just four hundred odd years ago, the Catholic church held the Valladolid inquiry into the question of whether the indigenous peoples of the Americas had souls. (<sarcasm>Apparently they do.<sarcasm>) The fact that I find this issue so absurd and so risible just might suggest that Western society has made some ethical progress since then.

That said, I liked this film.

You're missing the point. Science fiction is not about having robots running around and guys with light sabers fighting each other on distant planets. Science fiction is (and has always been) a way to explore social and human issues of our times by creating extreme or scientifically unlikely situations to highlight those issues.

The how is not as important here as the consequences of the cloning. It's not a movie about science, research or medicine. It's a story about what it is to be human and what makes us human.

Not saying the movie is perfect, far from it but scientific accuracy is not the issue.

For every lie I unlearn I learn something new - Ani Difranco

Star Wars isn't really science fiction to begin with. It's a fantasy story that just happens to take place in space.

I am a God

I think you should do some research on colonisation and residential schools. Used all over the world, and highly effective at turning a once proud and strong people into a self-hating, weak, and powerless people. When you control children during their brain imprinting years (usually until 6 or 7 years), you can program in anything you want, and they will be unlikely to ever unlearn it. Tell them something is a requirement of life, and they will believe. Tell them they are not humans (e.g. slavery in the USA) and they will believe and not rebel.

Throughout history tyranny carries on uninterrupted by the masses, that is reality, not fantasy. Humans (and other animals) will put up with horrendous living conditions if they were raised into them.

While I personally *WANTED* to see one of the characters resist the system, in reality it would be a very rare occurence and unlikely to be worth anything. They had no practical wilderness survival skills, no practical street survival skills (always kept at a distance from regular people), the media would be blasting their images, they'd be socially awkward and out-of-place in public, they would have no source of food and water, they just would not survive long on their own at all and get caught.

I think if they did have one of them try to resist the system it would have turned the movie into a fight against a tyrannical system, which this movie was not about at all. It was focused on a simple moral/sci-fi premise, and they followed the characters through some average lives within the imagined system. Not every movie needs a superhero.