The jury is still out about immortality. Books like Tuck Everlasting or The Picture of Dorian Grey say that however you swing it, eternal youth can often be a raw deal. Or at the very least, you always have to give something to get something. As George R.R. Martin would put it, "only death pays for life" when you're playing with blood magic.

Consciousness transfer—the idea that a person can extend his or her life by siphoning memories and knowledge into another vessel—is less ominous in pop culture. The best example here is Lieutenant Dax from the Star Trek franchise. In Deep Space 9, this character is fleshed out in Jadzia Dax, a 28-year-old woman who has a Trill simbiont, a slug-like being that requires a humanoid host, inside of her. The worm is surgically embedded into hosts' bodies so that its consciousness can live on, joining with the consciousness of the host. But in the Star Trek universe, hosts volunteer for this position. In DS9, Jadzia describes how she trained to become a host and was mentored by the Trill's former host, an old man named Curzon Dax. Once the Trill was inside of her, she had one mind, but all of her memories and feelings lived together with the memories and feelings of the 300-year-old simbiont.

Barring the discovery of a consciousness-transferring simbiont, though, can real-world humans ever achieve this kind of everlasting life? Self/less is yet another movie about consciousness transfer and immortality that tries to imagine this future, but it falls well short of the excellent books and TV shows cited above.

Take the red pill?

Last week, Ars got a sneak peak of Self/less, written by Alex and David Pastor and directed by Tarsem Singh. Although we never expect summer movies to get too heavy-handed on the science, if you come to it expecting to learn anything about consciousness transfer or to feel any emotions about one man's journey through the process, you'll be disappointed. On the other hand, if you come to this movie wanting to see Ryan Reynolds bash some guys in the face and also use a flame thrower in an enclosed space without giving everyone else in the room hypoxia, then you've absolutely come to the right place. Proceed accordingly.

Self/less follows a very wealthy dying man named Damian (Sir Ben Kingsley) who contacts a secretive company, Phoenix Biogenics, to have his consciousness transferred to a younger, more lithe body which Phoenix promises was definitely, most certainly, without-a-doubt grown in a vat. Damian leaves his original corporeal form through the help of what looks like two conjoined MRI machines, with the fresh, unsullied body waiting to accept his consciousness on the other side. Once Damian wakes up in the new body (played by Ryan Reynolds), he goes about his new life with Dionysian abandon.

One day he forgets to take the red, supposedly immunosuppressant pills the Phoenix doctors ordered, and some strange memories invade his own. Damian goes in search of the flashbacks and locates the wife and daughter he saw in his visions almost comically quickly. He realizes that the body he's in might not be as fresh and pure as he was led to believe, and of course, an army of Phoenix Biogenics henchmen are now after him as well as the wife and daughter of his past life. This trio simply knows too much.

Damien finds out that his body's name was Mark, and Mark gave that body to Phoenix Biogenics because his daughter Anna was desperately ill and the family couldn't afford to give her the treatment she needed to make her better. (But Anna's sickness is entirely in the past throughout the movie—apparently whatever the treatment was cured her 100 percent.)

Conveniently, Damian also learns that Mark's body has the kind of military training that makes him really good at shooting a variety of guns as well as bashing in the faces of angry henchmen. This seems like an oversight on Phoenix Biogenics' part if the contingency plan for "when consciousness transfer doesn't take" is to kill the host and also his family and friends.

Mark/Damian (Mamien?) convinces Mark's wife, Madeline, to follow him to safety with Anna. Eventually, though, Mark/Damian have to make a choice: keep taking the pills and body-squat as Damian (he is supposed to be a heartless rich guy after all, and Mark did sign the papers giving his life away) or stop taking the pills and let Damian slip into oblivion and give Madeline and Anna their husband and father back?

Gramercy Pictures

Gramercy Pcitures

Gramercy Pictures

Gramercy Pictures

Still, the movie never really establishes that Damian might care about his life more than he cares about Mark's life. By the end of the movie, there is no real choice for Damian to make unless his drive is simply the fear of death. We see that Damian is mostly just a lonely dude, with no family other than a daughter he cares about but barely speaks to. He doesn't even get to continue the work he dedicated his first life to after his consciousness is transferred to Mark's body; he has to hide out in Phoenix Biogenics-approved luxury suites until... well, like much of the movie, the timeline is vague.

On top of that, we see no indicators that Damian is actually Damian in Mark's body. After the transfer, he retains no twitches, no ways of standing or speaking, nothing to literally show that Mark is not Mark, besides one scene where he calls Mark's wife "Madeline" instead of "Maddy." He doesn't even have Damian's New York accent. So when the critical point comes where Damian must make his choice, the viewer only sees Mark there. Damian has been Mark all along.

OK, OK, we're not here for the science. We're not even sure if we're here for the storyline. But we sure as heck are here to see Ryan Reynolds break the faces of some henchmen.

The trouble with consciousness

What many summer movie-goers might not realize is that Self/less is loosely based on a real-life project called the 2045 Initiative, which is being spearheaded by Dmitry Itskov, a Russian multi-millionaire. The 2045 Initiative aims to make a person's consciousness "substance-independent" in just 20 years. The project has a list of milestones to get humanity to that point—the first step, which must take place sometime between now and 2020, involves developing android avatars that can be controlled using a brain-machine interface.

Two years ago, Ars attended the Global Future 2045 conference hosted by Itskov and found that among supporters of consciousness transfer, ideas are plentiful and practical implementation is scarce. This may be why Self/less struggles so much with articulating what consciousness transfer looks like. Science is still not sure itself. Do you retain an accent if your brain's habits are attached to new vocal cords? Are emotional responses affected by the body's "hardware?"

Nevertheless, research has been advancing in these areas. In 2013, Itskov's conference included a talk by a man who had just received a prosthetic arm that he was able to control through the nerves in his upper arm. This year, a brain implant allowed a paralyzed man to control a robotic arm to help him drink a beer. The difference is that the man's brain controlled the intention to perform the movements of the hand, rather than the nerves at the limb's end. That's a big leap forward.

Still, transferring consciousness will be a lot more difficult. After the screening of Self/less, Ars moderated a discussion with Dr. Niren Murthy, a Bioengineering professor at UC Berkeley. Dr. Murthy noted that there's still some controversy in the science surrounding memory, let alone the concept of "consciousness." Not that these issues can't be overcome, but 2045 as a target date to transfer everything we are and feel might be overly ambitious.

In fact, maybe Self/less was overly ambitious. It's an action movie, not much more, and people who are truly interested in extending life indefinitely won't find any of the really difficult questions about consciousness transfer answered or even presented. For that, I'd recommend you pick up some Deep Space 9.

Listing image by Self/less