The film “The Boys From Brazil” shows the genetic experiment performed by a highly decorated Nazi doctor, and the effort made by a Jewish investigator to stop him. The doctor cloned the genes of famous Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, and genetically implanted them into the egg of a woman in order to create another Hitler. With such an unlikely main action, ideas may seem unimportant, but one can nevertheless find a number of ideas in the film. One of the films major ideas is that evil will live forever.
This idea is shown in the careful planning of the doctor, the lengths the Nazis go to in order to fulfill their plan, and the results of the human experiment. The doctors experiment involved years of careful planning in order to create an environment similar to Hitlers. The doctor devoted his entire life to his research, which dated back to the time of the Nazi camps. His main goal was to clone the genes of Hitler and implant them in newborns. He performed many types of crude experiments on the prisoners to test how much pain one could endure and what would improve the human race.
Hitler believed that a perfect human race consisted of humans with blonde hair and blue eyes. Since the doctor believed in the ideas of Hitler, he genetically engineered prisoners to have these qualities, along with the people that worked at the doctors home. In order for the children to grow up looking, thinking, and acting like Hitler, the doctor’s planning necessitated precise planning. Along with the help of a nurse, he reviewed the charts of thousands of parents wishing to adopt a child in order to find family conditions that were similar to those of Hitler.
All of this precise planning was the first step in the doctors goal of creating another Hitler. The doctor cared too much about his experiment and the Nazi cause to have someone or something ruin it. For example, when he saw one of his closest Nazi aids at the party instead of on his planned mission, the doctor attacked him, claiming that he was a traitor to his cause. The doctor was so passionate about his experiment that he would kill one of his closest aides to see his experiment completed. Once the doctor found out that a Jewish investigator was interfering, he set out on a private mission to kill him.
Part of the doctors plan was to kill the fathers of the adopted babies at a certain time; yet one of the fathers was fellow Nazi. This did not stop the doctor from having him killed. The result of the doctors experiment proves that evil will never die. Of the many genetically altered children, we only see what happens to one of them. At the end of the movie, we see that the last child is beginning to overcome his evil genetic makeup when his blue eyes turn to brown. Yet, this may be a false impression, for he is fascinated by the blood and death in the pictures he took.
It is scary that we never learn of the outcome of the other Hitler children. We only know that they give off impressions of anger and inner hate. The results of the experiment suggest that some of the Hitler children will grow up to be similar to Hitler or have similar ideas of hate. If each of the Hitler children grows up with the ideas of the Nazis, then they will pass it their children and any other people with whom they come into contact. If these people then adopt the ideas of the Nazis, then they will pass them on, and so on, and so on, keeping alive the ideas of hate and evil.
The idea of evil is not new or surprising. It is the subject of popular songs, stories, other movies, and even a main theme of the Bible. The Nazis are definitely nothing new; they have left an everlasting mark in the history of our world. This movie raises many questions about our present day life: Is it possible to clone a madmans genes, is there a doctor somewhere waiting for the right time to create another Mussolini or Vladimir Lenin, will I awake tomorrow to find that a genetically engineered Hitler has revitalized the Nazis and is attempting to conquer the world?
These questions may seem far fetched, but in this era of technological advancements, it seems very possible. The doctors experiment engulfed his entire life; it was his purpose in life. He set forth to do everything he could to see that his experiment be a success, including killing a fellow Nazi. Although we can mock the likelihood of cloning of Hitlers genes, we cannot look past the fact that evil is everywhere, and it assumes various forms. “The Boys From Brazil” is an example of one of these forms- hate.