Bad science ruins this movie

Rating: 4/10 (19 October 2010)

Bad science ruins this film.
First off, the clones. Unless clones and the supporting technology are ridiculously cheap, why would it be more cost-effective to keep an army of clones in reserve rather than put more people on the moon to take care of the base and each other? Previous hard SF treatments of industrial work in outer space always depended on the eccentricities of people to find those who were willing to work in extreme environments for long periods of time. Robert Heinlen was famous for his "space hardhat" individuals like "The Green Hills of Earth"'s Rhysling and the construction workers in "Delilah and the Space Riggers." J. T. McIntosh's "Hallucination Orbit" even goes so far as to put men in orbit around Pluto for up to seven years, figuring they'd do it for the money even knowing the dangers of such isolation.
This screenplay treats humans as so vulnerable that a three-year stint only light-seconds from Earth is beyond their capacity, and so expendable that the corporation is willing to kill someone every three years rather than spend the money to replace them via ship or just have a few more people around. If the technology exists to fuse He-3 and create clones with implanted memories, why wouldn't it be a simple matter to just replace a crew every few months? What about the original Sam Bell? Why would he be willing to let copies of himself be killed every three years? Rather than a study of what makes a human being, this is more a representation of what happens when human life becomes cheap. Do the clones have no rights? Does Earth even know about this process? Apparently not, given the voice-overs at the end of the movie, which makes one wonder why the corporation is wasting this technology to produce throwaway superintendents rather than getting rich in the medical line.
At only one point did the movie engage my emotions, and that was when clone-Sam-1 had the conversation with "his" teenage daughter and realized that his whole life had just been stolen from him. Maybe if the script had dealt with a few of these side issues, and then focused on how people would truly behave to discover that their lives were a fraud and of no worth, then perhaps we would have had a great film.
Instead, we are left with a superficial treatment that might have made a good 30 minute "Twilight Zone" episode.