Review: Cerebrum

(No spoilers.)

The first time I ever seriously considered the potential consequences of a brain transplant, I was in the eighth grade. It was 1983. I knew it could never work, because you couldn’t look in the mirror expecting to see yourself and have it be someone else. You’d go crazy. The end.

Of course, here we are most of four decades later, and though I’m not particularly well-versed in neuroscience, I know it’s just a bit more complex than that. We—the collective we—understand that the brain reads and writes much like a computer, even if we’re not particularly close to fully understanding the biological basis for it.

But what if someone—oh, let’s say, a discredited genius with lots of cool gizmos in his barn—figured out how to download and upload the contents of the human brain?

This is where Cerebrum starts.

Cerebrum is on my radar because I have known the screenplay’s cowriter, Gary Houk, for many years. He has been understandably excited to see its release, and I’ve been eager to see it and review it, while also recognizing a certain peril in critically evaluating the work of your friends and acquaintances. (Happily, I needn’t have worried.)

So we have the aforementioned mad scientist, his estranged son, and a surrogate daughter/ex, respectively, as the main players. It’s difficult to talk too much about the plot without giving pieces away, but there are a lot of intriguing questions raised about how we might deal with this ability to treat brain contents as any other portable data.

(We’d probably best be about answering them, too. I don’t think anything depicted in this film is decades away.)

There is a little misdirection. There is greed. There’s a bit of seduction. There’s a desolate desert setting that contributes a couple of lovely panoramas, and also poetically isolates the action. There’s a score that reminds me of the ’80s in all of the right ways. And congratulations to my friend Gary, who has now been paid for something he wrote! The screenplay is definitely well-lubricated machinery here.

Cerebrum is a solid pickup and worth the handful of scratch it will cost you, either for the DVD or at Amazon.com.

6/10

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