Reminiscence Review: Interesting Setting Fail to Hide Familiar Tropes
The amount of mileage you will get out of Lisa Joy’s Reminiscence is pretty much directly related to how much you like the tropes of film noir. While the film itself (and Warner’s marketing) pitted this as a hard science fiction film mimicking Inception, it borrows much heavier from Warner’s own catalogue of gritty hard-boiled detective films with voice-over narration, gumshoe-like acquisition of clues, a shady cast of gritty gangsters, and an effective femme fatale, all wrapped in a mystery that has both personal and societal stakes of the highest order. All of this is baked into a dystopian future that feels fresh though much more seemingly grounded in current science. The two areas don’t always mesh perfectly, but when they do it spins a tale that will stick in your memory.
Hugh Jackman stars as our substitute detective, a veteran of war who now makes money probing the minds of customers to have them relive their favorite moments in time and memory. Rebecca Ferguson plays the dame that walks in after closing hours, a dame that our hero falls for immediately. They start a whirlwind romance, but right when things get serious, she vanishes, and Jackman is tormented with a single question – why did she leave? The rest of the movie is spent exploring this message, which involves land barons, illegal synthetic drugs and their dealers, crooked cops, and class dynamics.
The movie doesn’t tread any new ground, and truth be told it doesn’t need to. Reminiscence plucks the same tropes and cliches in the genre at such a consistent rate that you’re just waiting for the next major cliché to crash upon the shores. They don’t do much that is fresh, but their execution is (for the most part) very capable, and in some cases it is fantastic. The movie heads exactly where you hope it heads, pulls just enough red herrings and misdirects to keep you engaged, and finds a way to stumble upon a satisfying-enough ending.
Luckily, we are treated to this by a very visually impressive world. Unlike most post-apocalyptic or dystopian fare that shows the world as a barren wasteland of desert and dryness, the world of Reminiscence is a world that is slowly drowning to the rising tide. Miami of the future is traversed by cars in water up to your ankles on the driest of areas, gondolas on the areas that are the most sunken. All the largest buildings have new doors built on the 30th floor (the other floors are all covered in water). People travel from area to area on elevated trains and walk the elevated highways to get from district to district. It eschews Venice with 21st Century architecture.
The memory bank – which acts as both the journal, the clue source, and a narrative device to spatially compress time – is just as thoroughly thought out to be realistic enough. The images being projected on strings of fiberglass are another cool visual to denote a hologram, the specific drugs and details in relaxing the mind to project the images feels very hard-science fiction, and the concept of how people can visualize themselves in the third person – almost like a dream – feels very appropriate if a little too plot convenient. Cutting between the hologram of the memory and the subject’s own perspective within the same memory keep things fresh while also is used to assist with a few fun narrative twists.
The performances are also very solid. Hugh Jackman is… well, he’s Hugh Jackman. He’s very good at what he does, and he does about as good a job as you’d expect. Rebecca Ferguson is great as May, who must be sexy, vulnerable, confident, damaged, fearful, and redemptive. She also does all her own singing, which is truly impressive. Jackman and Ferguson show their acting chops in their scenes together, creating quite a lot of chemistry. I personally really enjoyed Daniel Wu as a New Orleans gangster who has his own slang that feels like Cityspeak. No one else in the entire movie took the time to even approach something like it, so I give him props for that. Thandiwe Newton also gets a shout-out – she’s consistently solid and at least has something to work with in this movie as Jackman’s partner Watts. There’s another version of this movie told from her point of view that could be engaging (you know, if you change the last act to focus on her) that I would find interesting. Cliff Curtis is over-the-top in his role – you’ll either think he’s great or horrible, but he definitely earns what he gets in the end of the flick.
As much as I’ve praised the movie, and as much as I enjoyed it, I have to advise of this caveat – the movie feels like comfort food for those who miss the hard-boiled detective films of old. There’s enough interesting in the setting to get you engrossed, and the rest of the detective story that follows should keep you engaged, but it is fairly predictable and fails to hide any of its cards or twists. Still, it gets a decent grade for the (very expensive) effort.
Final Rating: High Fine.
