The Stepford Wives (2004 film)

Plot

• Tagline: The wives of Stepford have a secret.

In the 2004 film, the town's women were formerly successful and powerful figures in their industries - scientists, politicians, television moguls - and their husbands, feeling inferior and threatened, brought them to Stepford to have brain chips implanted to make them docile, subservient, and good at sex. In a departure from the original film, one of the couples who moved to Stepford is gay; a man wants his partner to become less flamboyant.

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The film is reported to have done very poorly in test screenings and to have required significant editing and additional filming before its general release. Some elements of the film hint at what the edits might have been: for most of the film, the wives are depicted as robots; sparking when they malfunction, spitting money from their mouths, and being able to place their hands on hot stoves, and the heroine is frightened by what appears to be a lifeless android version of herself. It's only at the film's climax that it is revealed the women, albeit in android bodies, still have their brains intact, controlled by microchips, and that this control can be reversed, giving them back their original personalities in their new bodies.

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