SnoopyStyle Paul (Greg Kinnear) and Jessie Duncan (Rebecca Romijn) are married celebrating their son Adam (Cameron Bright)'s 8th birthday. Adam is killed hit by a truck. Jessie's old professor Dr. Richard Wells (Robert De Niro) of The Godsend Institute offers to clone their son. After the new Adam reaches eight, he starts having nightmarish visions of another boy named Zachary.Even if I buy the premise, this thriller has no tension. The start is so low energy. The movie may as well start later in the story or compress the introduction more. It turns into some sort of ghost story but the investigation isn't that compelling. This is a second-tier horror movie without any thrills or frights. The solid actors are left with nothing good.

thepinkrabbit first to respond to a previous reviewer 7 aren't C's ! Here is how it works ( in France and others European countries you get marks from 0 to 20 not letters as letters are to subjective and scientifically irrelevant ). so A is 16 to 20 that means 8 to 10 on a 10 scale, B is 13 to 15 = 6.5 - 7.5 C is 10-12 that is 5 to 6, D is 7 -9 means 3.5 to 4.5 , E is 2-3 F, is 0 to 1.5 . ( of course you can tweak it with + ,- and 0.5 points). so a C means 5 to 6 on IMDb not a 7. This movies is just awful for any scientific atheist. In a word if you are not an American then this movie was not made for you. It's a just the same old moralist science against Christians.. Don't do God job or you'll be in trouble. that kind of stupid crap they are so fond of in Texas and all catholics / religious crazy states. It's also a spin off of a small budget UK movies : in that movies 2 parents lost their children, a religious guys comes to help them : they should provide a bone to recreate the child, but the child must not be dead for more than 12 months. they proceed , but the child becomes devils and kill the mother : the reason was they lied to the "priest" as the child was dead for more than 12 months. Here it's about the same story but on a SF-scientist point of view. so really a waste of time.

wes-connors After he gets a new pair of sneakers, older-looking eight-year-old Cameron Bright (as Adam Duncan) gets hit, and killed, by a car. His devastated parents, teacher Greg Kinnear (as Paul) and photographer Rebecca Romijn-Stamos (as Jessie), receive an invitation to clone young Mr. Bright, from doctor Robert De Niro (as Richard Wells). Ms. Romijn-Stamos was once Mr. De Niro's undergraduate student. Since the cloning procedure is illegal, Mr. De Niro requests the family relocate to "Riverton"; thus, friends and neighbors won't see the duplicate Bright growing up all over again.Suddenly, it's eight years later… Sporting a different hairstyle, Romijn-Stamos has one very sexy underwear scene. But, more important to the storyline, cloned son "Adam" begins to act creepy. He gets into trouble with peers at school, and spits in the teacher's face. "Godsend" De Niro and the DVD sleeve help explain the problem: "Reaching the age at which the original Adam died, the new Adam begins to change, and a new sinister personality emerges." It's all unoriginal and nonsensical. But, director Nick Hamm, the sets, locations, and Mr. Kinnear's lead performance are good.***** Godsend (4/30/04) Nick Hamm ~ Greg Kinnear, Cameron Bright, Rebecca Romijn, Robert De Niro

Michael_Elliott Godsend (2004)* 1/2 (out of 4) Paul Duncan (Greg Kinnear) is at the top of his life with a wonderful job and a family that loves him dearly. His wife Jessie (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) and young son Adam live in a high-class apartment in New York City where Paul works as a teacher at an inner-city school. Everything seems to be going great until the day after Adam's eighth birthday when he is stuck by a car in the street and killed. Paul and Jessie are heartbroken but the day after they run into a scientist (Robert DeNiro) who says he has something important to discuss with them.The scientist explains that he's involved in genetic experimenting and if the parents want to see their son again then he can make that possible by cloning. Without putting too much thought into the grieving parents agree and the experiment goes through without a problem. The first eight years of their new sons life goes off without a hitch but when the date arrives that the first Adam died, this new Adam starts to change mentally. At first it appears this is just due to nightmares but soon the parent begin to fear that this new son is starting to have memories of his previous life. The new Adam on the other hand starts to think that someone from his past is after him. Could it be the old Adam coming back to life? For the past thirty years various films have dealt with children being possessed. Everything from Rosemary's Baby to The Exorcist to The Omen has dealt with the subject matter used here but those films at least tried something different and didn't just recycle stuff seen in previous films. Godsend tries to be exactly like those films and even mixes in a bit of The Shining but in the end we're left with one extremely bad film that doesn't have a single thing going for it, which is a shame since the story could have been a whole lot better.The direction and screenplay really killed any hopes of a good movie. The screenplay has a pretty good ideas going and since cloning is such a hot topic today it seems like you could make an interesting story out of anything but that doesn't happen here. The screenplay is all over the map by the time the film had ended I really wasn't sure what the point was or if there was even a point. The film tries to throw in horror elements mixed with a family drama but neither are given any original thoughts and nothing plays out completely so in the end we've watched a film about nothing. Even after the child is child and the parents get the chance to clone him, there isn't a scene where they think about what could happen by doing this. We get the dad saying no, the mom saying yes and then the screenplay jumps to the child being born.The parents are dumb as a bag of rocks, which is another irritating thing about the screenplay. Not only do they not consider the side effects but they don't seem to even know when things start to take a change for the worst in their new son. When his attitude begins to change, instead of being concerned they simply don't want to know if something is really wrong or not. The film tries to take a more dramatic turn every once in a while by having the parents fight over what they've done but these scenes go nowhere and instead of having a thought provoking conversation the screenplay pretty much jumps over any bright ideas and goes into the next scene, which makes even less sense.The horror elements never go full ahead either, which is probably due to the PG-13 era and the fact we're living in times where it seems you can't make an R-rated film. Perhaps this is a reason why nothing ever comes full circle but I'm really not sure because I still can't tell what this film was supposed to be about. For the first two-thirds we're led to believe that the old son has come back to haunt the new son but then in the final act we're given a new mystery that is just downright stupid and once again, it never pays off in the end. When the movie finally ends you're no better off then when the movie started.Another problem are the actors, a couple of whom should probably stay out of dramatic pictures. Greg Kinnear can be good in comedy but his dramatic work here is so bad it becomes rather laughable. The scene where he tries to cry over the death of his son had me rolling on the floor, which I'm sure wasn't what the director wanted. Rebecca Romijn-Stamos doesn't fair any better with the dramatic role. Just look at any scene where she is crying because it appears there's a quick cut whenever she is supposed to cry. Perhaps they did this because the tears never came? I'm not sure but that's what I thought while watching the film. It saddens me to say this because he's one of my favorite actors but Robert DeNiro doesn't add anything to the film either and it appears he was simply cashing a check.