Anna to the Infinite Power

From the first time I saw this movie I was haunted by the content & the extraordinary performance of Martha Byrne who was only 12 at the time. Martha didn't have to say much, all you had to do was watch her expressions to know what the child was going through. The writing was excellent & the actors were awesome (especially Ms Byrne). Although I saw this movie at least 15 yrs ago, I never forgot it & have often wondered why it isn't being shown on TV now with all the DNA & cloning in the news. It's taken me 15 yrs to get a copy of the movie & when I watched it again tonight, it was even better than I remembered. This movie would be a classic if enough people were able to see it. Mark Patton plays the older brother who doesn't quite know what to make of his genius but precocious sister. Watching Anna discover herself & gain the respect & help of her brother was a beautiful example of what siblings (even squabbling siblings) can be when love is present. This is a movie that I've never been able to get out of my mind & now that I've seen it again, I never want to forget a moment of it.

I think directing was poor, acting severely lacking. But the story premise was 20 years ahead of it's time. A clone movie dealing with a girl as the heroine, the contextual elements of parentage and coming of age. The bones are there to be a good movie, and scifi that when it was released nothing near it for at least a decade though some argue about the ethics and scientific merit of much of this, it's still about as topical today? I really would like this re-made and I think it would do well.

I caught it last night, and was struck immediately by the very direct similarities between it and "Eve", a first-season X-Files episode, about (you guessed it) little girl clones who have many of the same problems as Anna, only they also kill people, and don't seem to have human emotions. And an older clone shows up to monitor the progress of her "sisters". And the evil scientist (played by Jack Gilford!) has a greenhouse almost identical to an evil Nazi scientist who appeared in a later X-Files episode. The plot points in common are too numerous to be coincidence, and I kind of gasped at the end when Anna says she's going to change her name to "Eve".

Obviously Chris Carter saw this movie, and passed the ideas on to the writers who did "Eve". It's an old pattern for him.

If you like "As The World Turns" you will like this movie which stars the actress who plays Lilly Walsh. In this movie she is still a child actress but demonstrates that she is a fine actress. The movie is about an experiment dealing with the cloning of a girl. There are a large number of her.

The story is well-written, but the overall movie suffers from poor directing, acting and cliche characters.

The acting comes to first note. Through the entire film it's as if the actors are reading their lines from boards across the stage. Early Anna comes across as someone trying to portray an annoying brat rather than just an annoying brat. That said, it is interesting to see the actress show some chops as she progresses to her later stages, where she seems more relaxed and normal. I can only guess that comes from either growing experience in front of the camera-- or a personality more suited to her normal person.

But down to the last scene the acting of all seems forced, word-by-word without any improvisation. As I find it hard to believe they'd manage to have that many bad actors by coincidence, I have to believe it's the directing that causes such an amazing phenomena.

The plus side is a story with a reasonable plot, sensible progression, and lack of jump-the-shark stupid moments (common to this type of movie these days). The story held right to the end, without any sudden or unexpected letdowns (even if it did leave things slightly in the air, the possible outcomes were plausible and it was a decent conclusion).

One lack of logic was the climax near the end. Since cloning is not against the law (in the United States; it is banned in some other countries), there was really no reason for what was portrayed in the movie (spoilers withheld). That issue didn't ruin the movie, but it did make astute viewers question the motivation and extreme actions (or intended actions) of some characters. Since all this was done under full disclosure with willing participants, there was no reason for well, the entire last 10 or 15 minutes of plot. That was the one place I noticed where the ball was dropped a little. Nevertheless the story continued of its own right and worked out reasonably well.

Side note: I found it interesting that they used Apple II as their primary computer-on-set, since by 1983 the IBM PC had taken the market by storm. However the Apple was still going strong and had solidly immersed itself in the educational and publishing community (it took IBM some 15 years to break Apple's strangle-hold in those areas), so historically, use of that computer system that was a fairly accurate portrayal and pegs the time during which the movie was made.