Reminiscence review: Lisa Joy’s Westworld follow-up presents another dire future

Broadly speaking, there are two types of dystopian sci-fi movies: those that assume the protagonists have a way of fighting whatever has warped the world, and those that cynically decide not. Fight movies (like The Hunger Games or Elysium or Divergent or Ready Player One) generally create a big representative villain for a hero to fight to fix things. But while Don’t Bother It’s Too Late movies tend to be less poignant and exciting, they are often much more nuanced and textured, and more relatable to those of us who live in a world without a simple and obvious one. villain.

The mystery of future noir by Lisa Joy Reminiscence show why. That it takes place in a future where great evils have already occurred, and it makes no sense that no one can combat them. So instead, the characters fight their own smaller, personal battles, against despair as much as anything else. Reminiscence It doesn’t offer much hope for a better future, but at least it works on a level that feels real and familiar, no matter how fantastic the actual details get.

On Reminiscence, Human-induced climate change melted the polar caps, ocean levels rose, and a series of wars were fought to secure dwindling resources and precious dry land. The setting is a flooded future Miami, where giant walls keep the sea at bay in some neighborhoods, while other areas now resemble Venice, with canals instead of streets and boat traffic replacing cars. Daytime temperatures are also so prohibitive that Miami has gone completely nocturnal.

But it doesn’t make sense that someone is working to fix the problem. Floods, wars and heat are not just the calculated backdrop for ReminiscenceIn true history, they are the long-accepted backdrop for an entire culture of exhausted and powerless characters. Changes in the city appear in the background of virtually every shot, but aside from Hugh Jackman’s sad voice-over that blends in with the exposure, no one says much about this. It’s all they expect from shitty future They are over. It’s no wonder the film’s main theme is nostalgia and obsessively clinging to lost comforts.

Jackman plays Nick Bannister, a small shop owner who gives his customers total immersion flashbacks of their own pasts. With drugs, a dip tank and an electric brain induction rig, Nick and his former military partner Watts (WestworldThandiwe Newton) allows people to fully re-experience their own memories, perfecting every little detail and filling in with the feeling that you are there. A stage-shaped visualizer simultaneously displays those memories in elegant 3D glory to everyone in attendance. The visualizer initially seems out of place – if the technology is only designed so that clients can relive their past, why does it matter if other people in the room can see those memories too?

But Joy brings the same painstaking exploration of technology to Reminiscence that she brought to Westworld as a writer, producer and showrunner. The new technology seems flashy and cinematic, but it also has a society-changing impact: it is used as a deposition tool in court, to help unravel the truth of a situation, and as an interrogation tool for the police, to unearth memories. of criminals. And in those cases, the memories are more important to the institutional witnesses who see them play with vivid colors than to the drugged and immobilized subjects who offer them.

But that’s also a background. The true purpose of the viewer in Reminiscence is to let Nick fall completely into his past, while losing himself in the mysteries of his memories. One night, when he and Watts are looking at their usual list of clients, a woman named Mae (Rebecca Ferguson) walks in and asks for help remembering where she left the keys. She and Nick soon become lovers, until she suddenly disappears. Convinced that something terrible has happened to Mae, Nick begins obsessively reliving his own memories for clues. Gradually, he receives hints that she was not who she claimed to be, and finds himself involved in a criminal conspiracy, with Watts reluctantly behind him.

Watts is clearly at least somewhat in love with Nick, but she’s also ruthlessly down-to-earth and clear-eyed about her torn obsession with a two-faced woman who seems to have moved on. That three-way dynamic and the film’s focus on music, performance, technology-assisted memory revival, and growing social unrest are largely reminiscent of Kathryn Bigelow’s gloriously messy and criminally inaccessible 1995 sci-fi film. . Strange Days. Even the specific racial dynamics of the cast seem deliberate: Newton’s role in this film corresponds to Angela Bassett’s in Strange Days, and similarly they are conceived as hard-eyed, self-reliant warrior women who are fully aware that they are half in love with sentimental fools, and are more than a little angry about it. (As the audience can be, the specter of another competent and tough woman of color crawling behind a soaked, self-absorbed white guy who barely notices she’s in. Reminiscenceit is the worst echo of what was already a painful dynamic).

But while Reminiscence often seems like a nostalgic echo of Bigelow’s film, it leans even more towards traditional film noir dynamics than Strange Days, while Nick tries to run over Mae’s past. In some ways, she is a traditional femme fatale, a beautiful mystery that comes into the life of the scapegoat hero, changes him, and then returns to his problems, tempting him to follow her and fix them. But there is also more to it than cliches. Ferguson keeps it attractive and opaque, unreadable enough to help sell the mystery. Meanwhile, Jackman turns Nick into a wide-open book, openly yearning for the one good thing he had in his sordid recent life, and unable to believe that it could have been a lie.

Individual viewers will certainly bring their own emotional biases to play Nick, and that is going to go a long way in whether they see him as a romantic hero, valiantly pursuing true love at all costs, or an annoying stalker who constantly puts himself in danger. himself and others by refusing. to let go of your irrational obsessions. It’s certainly a bit of both, but it’s a funny irony that a movie so obsessed with relived memories plays out so differently for different audience members, based on their own memories of past relationships. Jackman is a charismatic actor as ever, but the script makes him repetitive, clueless, simplistic, and almost abusive, and it’s easy to find him and his quest off-putting. On the other hand, movies almost always reward this kind of stubborn pursuit of a seemingly reluctant woman, so viewers’ memories of past romantic comedies or black movies can also come into play in setting their expectations.

Like a black mystery Reminiscence it’s certainly solid, with a number of surprising complications and reveals, and a friendly help with the betrayals and double-dealing genre of slimy gangsters and wealthy monsters. He mostly fails through his character dynamics, especially for anyone who doesn’t swoon over Nick’s monomania. Nick’s honeyed voice-over not only draws audiences into maudlin self-pity, but it overexplains things best left subtle and in the performance, and prevents viewers from silently immersing themselves in the film’s elaborate dystopian spectacle. It’s an irritating and intrusive annoyance, constantly trying to lead the audience and tell them what to think or how to feel. Joy’s symbolism can be just as awkward – a little business with a recurring lost queen from a deck of cards is some ridiculously gratuitous theatrical art in a story about a missing woman.

It feels in everything Reminiscence as if Joy didn’t trust the audience to follow the story unless everything was explained, re-explained, and symbolically re-communicated and allowed to unfold in a flashback. The story just isn’t that complicated, and holding hands slows down the action in what is already a meandering and brooding tale.

And just like she did with Westworld, Joy becomes painfully smart with Reminiscencetimelines, using their invented technology to play with audience perceptions. But while there are many traps and tricks in a plot that sometimes feels more mechanistic than character-centric, the world’s flashback machines end up looking like a natural tool to make a story like this work. They give Nick a window into other people’s perspectives on Mae, and as the truth is revealed, Joy is able to show viewers exactly how things happened by effortlessly returning to the past.

That’s another subtle irony, in a movie that so expressly takes place in a terrible and sometimes seemingly inevitable future. But then, Reminiscence it is seldom a matter of looking ahead. It’s a tired and purposeful warning as to where we are headed, not just in a big picture sci-fi mode, but on an individual level, into a world where the only comforts exist in our memories of what we once had. It’s depressing, in more ways than one, given his cynical view of what makes life worth living and what we have to do to preserve it. But it’s also refreshing to see science fiction so aware of how actively we are headed for a terrible future, and how our response is likely to be specific, personal, and just as selfish as the behavior that gets us there in the first place. place.

Reminiscence It debuts in theaters on August 20 and currently airs exclusively on HBO Max until September 19.

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