Review: Reminiscence
SUMMARY :
Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman), a private investigator of the mind, navigates the darkly alluring world of the past by helping his clients access lost memories. Living on the fringes of the sunken Miami coast, his life is forever changed when he takes on a new client, Mae (Rebecca Ferguson). A simple matter of lost and found becomes a dangerous obsession. As Bannister fights to find the truth about Mae’s disappearance, he uncovers a violent conspiracy, and must ultimately answer the question: how far would you go to hold on to the ones you love?
REVIEW :
Fantastic cinema is full of films that, starting from interesting premises, spend all their footage determined to sabotage themselves through an excess of solemnity. And Reminiscence is a good example of this.
Choosing for her first feature a subject as thorny as the double edge of memories, Lisa Joy has accepted to measure herself against references of a great deal of importance, from La jetée to Forget about me, passing through Blade Runner. To top it all, its neonoir tone makes comparisons with both the Ridley Scott film and the work of Philip K. Dick inevitable. Thus, Reminiscence would have needed a point of lightness, madness or originality to face such names and succeed.
But what more would we want. While the story of that half-memory detective, half-mad doctor Hugh Jackman is full of good ideas and features a femme fatale as monumental as Rebecca Ferguson, her (unconscious?) Efforts to sabotage herself end up weighing too much.
Jackman’s voice-over, as annoying and unnecessary as Harrison Ford’s in his day, makes it very difficult for us to appreciate the film, almost as much as explanatory dialogues that reach plague dimensions. Thus, its strengths (that post-climate change Miami, turned into a kind of Bangkok that only wakes up at night) are buried by the verbiage and pompous tone, while its weaknesses (that plot that looks too much like a Chinatown with holograms) stand out too much.
This result is not much surprising coming from the co-author of Westworld, a series that also ended up drowning under its own pretensions. But even so, the disappointment hurts, and suggests that noir and science fiction have to urgently rethink their relationship if they want to proclaim themselves again as the ideal couple.
– Yugo Garcia (original review in Spanish)
FILM DETAILS:
Rating: PG-13 (Sexual Content|Drug Material Throughout|Some Strong Language|Strong Violence)
Genre: Sci-fi, Mystery & thriller
Original Language: English
Director: Lisa Joy
Producer: Michael De Luca, Lisa Joy, Jonathan Nolan, Aaron Ryder
Writer: Lisa Joy
