Blu-ray Review: Matt Smith & Eva Green In CLONE

Clone (or Womb as it is also known) is a science fiction drama starring Doctor Who’s Matt Smith and Bond Girl Eva Green. It’s a morbidly depressing movie that fails to ignite audience attention, it shuffles down an extra mile of monotony and even makes incest boring.

Clone follows Rebecca and Tommy, two childhood friends who go their separate ways, only to reunite and fall in love twelve years later. The romance is cut short when Tommy dies in an accident. Rebecca then decides to clone him, give birth to him and fall in love with him (her son?) all over again. Yeah, it’s as weird as it sounds, but sadly not as exciting.

Smith’s fans from Doctor Who shouldn’t go into Clone with the expectation of seeing their favourite time-traveller, although Smith is playing a similar man-boy, albeit less successfully. The film moves at a languid pace, effectively taking place in one location. The cast is mainly made up of Smith and Green, both of whom appear to have been sedated before each scene-taking…long…pauses…between…each…line. Director Benedek Fliegauf’s film raises some interesting questions about cloning, but it doesn’t attempt to answer them, it’s as if he’s more interested in capturing the sound of silence than the attention of his audience.

The film is filled with inconsistencies, the largest being that Green doesn’t age over the course of a twenty year span-not one bit. Smith’s character grows from boy to man, whilst the Dark Shadows actress fails to get a wrinkle or a grey hair. It’s a small niggle, but noticeable in a film which draws on its subtleties. The upswing is that Fliegauf has created a certain mood for the film through its staging and its cold bleak setting works well with the subject matter. It’s just a shame that the script can’t match it.

There’s little to recommend about Clone-if you want to see more of Smith and Green, then I suggest that you dig deep into your DVD collection before catching this.