When Warner Brothers made its decision to put all of its 2021 releases onto HBO Max and in theaters simultaneously, there was a good deal of backlash from creative types. It was clearly a business decision, and for reasons that I am sure are both artistic and financial, a number of creatives complained loudly. The loudest was arguably Christopher Nolan. Now, Nolan always makes his movies to be seen on big screens, so he has a history of such statements, but his public insistence on releasing Tenet to theaters during a pandemic will never sit right with me even though I am sure I will see his next one on the big screen once the pandemic is finally over. Now, Nolan doesn’t have anything new coming out this year, so why might he be making a fuss aside from the obvious that he has enough clout to be heard by the most people?
It may have had something to do with the fact his sister-in-law, Westworld co-creator Lisa Joy, had her directorial debut come out this year in the form of the sci-fi noir Reminiscence.
Set in Miami at some point in the future after the waters rose and the wars broke out–that may be as much of an explanation for how far in the future this movie is set–the film follows Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman). Life in Miami is rather terrible for anyone who isn’t a land baron–the wealthy who managed to secure the only dry land in the city to live on–so many people prefer to live in the past. Nick has a business where, thanks to some drugs, a fancy metallic cocoon, and some other high tech apparatus, a user can relive memories of the past as if they were still happening. Nick isn’t the only person to offer such services, and his building has clearly seen better days, but he seems to be good at his job. He has a loyal assistant in the form of Watts Sanders (Thandiwe Newton), and he’s willing to let his veteran friends get their memories relived for free. Then, one day, in walks Mae (Rebecca Ferguson) in a slinky red dress looking for help finding some lost keys, and Nick falls for her almost instantly. The two begin a relationship, but then Mae disappears without an explanation one day. Nick would like nothing more than to find her, and seeing as how he can somehow cause a person’s memories to be projected as some sort of 3D hologram, he may be just the sort of person who can find her. The real question is should he find her.
What follows is, in many ways, an old fashioned noir sort of film in a sci-fi setting. I like noir. I like sci-fi. Did I like this? Eh, not quite. I can easily pick up the genre trappings, such as the way the movie is set mostly in the city’s seedy underbelly, Nick’s substance abuse problems since his memory machines are themselves dangerously addictive if used too much or in the wrong way, and right down to Mae’s general wardrobe and the fact she is some sort of lounge singer by profession. I mean, is there anything more noir than the movie’s femme fatale being a singer of some sort? The thing is, noir is a difficult genre to pull off, and while the elements are here and the mystery behind Mae is not a bad one, it just doesn’t quite add up.
Take a shoot-out in the middle of the movie. It starts off promising, but as it goes, it just somehow loses its effectiveness. That could also describe the movie as a whole. The setting is intriguing, the concept potentially cool, and the underlying theme of the problematic aspects of living in the past or pining for someone who, let’s face it, the protagonist didn’t really know as well as he thought he did, are all intriguing on the surface, but it just doesn’t all add up together as well as it could. I feel a more experienced director might have been able to pull it off, but Joy isn’t quite there.
Now, I am sure the movie is bound to be compared to her brother-in-law’s Inception. The comparisons are a bit obvious: memory manipulation by some advanced technological means are involved in both. But while Nolan’s movie has a somewhat open-ended conclusion around what is basically a heist movie, this one goes more for a somewhat convoluted mystery, one that is solved in the end without any sort of ambiguity. I’d call the ending tragic in a sense, but I don’t know that the movie itself ever gave its characters the gravitas to make them more than ciphers. Nick Bannister is a thousand other down-on-his-luck private investigators looking for the woman who caught his eye that came before him, and even Jackman’s considerable charisma can only do so much. If anything, the movie feels more like it is just something heavily borrowed from a dozen or so different and better movies. Joy does show some potential here as a director, so I wouldn’t necessarily say no to seeing something else she directed, but this one here is at best a decent first effort.
Grade: C+
0 Comments