This is perhaps why it’s been dumped in late August and feels a bit like a disposable piece of “content” only contractually given a theatrical release. If certainly heavy-handed in its political allusions, one still gets the feeling its creatives ultimately just wanted to do their little ’90s throwback hard-boiled sci-fi noir. While prestige television (the film is directed by Westworld co-creator Lisa Joy) and A24 movies have seemingly accommodated us to seeing all genre now as capital-A allegory––the kind of work to inspire “it’s about” tweets or Letterboxd reviews–– Reminiscence sticks to its narrow aims, never overwhelmed by a need to pander too hard to the New Yorker’s TV-recap culture.
#Reminisce reviews movie#
The shifts between “reality” and the characters’ accessed memories can be jarring and confusing as well, and the plot - which carries echoes of noir touchstones like Chinatown and Out of the Past - seems ultimately inconsequential, with a number of minor characters gaining importance so late in the game that the viewer doesn’t get a chance to connect or empathize with them (or even be clear on who they are).Despite being an amalgamation of virtually every elevated science-fiction movie of the past four decades- Strange Days, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Minority Report, Until the End of the World, both Blade Runners-the new film Reminiscence feels relatively lacking in self-importance. So even though the film is always visually interesting, it moves rather slowly and at times comes across as inert, with the familiar beats of the story lacking any kind of real momentum. The actor’s gravelly voice-over, which kicks off the film with a heap of aphorisms and exposition and reappears intermittently throughout, hints that Joy is still struggling with the clunky writing that has done a lot of damage to Westworld (and, strangely, seems to be a thing that the Nolan boys wrestle with as well).
Wealthy real estate barons (who live in a walled-off enclave, of course) seem to be mostly in charge, with the rest of the population getting by on a subsistence level, and the gradual accumulation of details about life - like the fact that no one goes out during the day because it’s too damn hot - paint a picture of a society that is clearly going through a slow-motion collapse.Īll that interesting information, however, is not used particularly well by Joy’s original screenplay, which focuses primarily on the noirish quest by Jackman’s Bannister to find his lost love. Joy certainly has a great eye for visuals: she and director of photography Paul Cameron (also from Westworld), along with production designer Howard Cummings, have crafted an alternately beautiful, eerie, and harrowing vision of a very plausible near future in which the coastline is rapidly disappearing and pushing one’s way through water is an everyday aspect of life (the sinking cityscapes are reminiscent - no pun intended - of those in Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, but are explored in more detail here). Will Westworld Season 4 Be Set Far in the Future? By David Crow Into Bannister’s place one day comes Mae ( Rebecca Ferguson), a beautiful, enigmatic lounge singer whose picture would no doubt be in any dictionary next to the words “femme fatale.” She’s ostensibly there to retrace her memories of the past day and find out where she left her house keys, but it isn’t too long before Bannister is intoxicated by her and the two begin a torrid affair - which abruptly ends with Mae’s disappearance. Those memories can be used for things like criminal investigations, but most clients come to Bannister’s lab - housed in an abandoned bank - to relive precious moments from their lives. In this not-too-distant future, where climate change and a war of indeterminate origin have wrecked a large portion of the planet for most of us, a technology has been developed in which people’s memories can be accessed from their brains and recorded. Nick Bannister ( Hugh Jackman) plies his trade in those memories.
Both those recollections and those buildings will eventually vanish one day, leaving behind nothing but the waves. It’s a haunting visual metaphor for the movie’s thematic preoccupation with memory, and how human beings desperately cling to the memories that comfort them even as time works its slow, steady entropy on our lives and places. Reminiscence opens on a striking image of a half-submerged Miami, with buildings rising out of the deepest part of the water like tombstones in a flooded graveyard, while the less inundated areas are filled with people splashing through knee-high water on foot or cruising blithely down streets in boats like they’re vacationing in Venice.
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