Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Hugh Jackman’s Nick Bannister and his buddy Thandiwe Newton’s Emily “Watts” Sanders make their living in near future, partially submerged Miami running a business that plugs folks into a computer to relive and record their memories, whether that’s just for nostalgia’s sake, or for, say, trying to remember where your keys are, such is the request of Rebecca Ferguson’s femme fatale Mae, whom Nick soon falls in love with.
A few months in, their relationship seems to be going well until the point that Mae simply vanishes, causing Nick some heartbreak before he resolves to find out what happened to her. Pulling on this thread reveals, as you will perhaps expect from this sort of thing, that Mae is not quite who she seems to be, and in discovering her past Nick will find himself dragged down to the seedy underworld of drug dealers, corrupt hyper capitalism backed land barons and their politicking, while exploring the strange new canals that used to be Miami’s streets.
I suppose the most revealing thing I can say about Reminiscence is that when I started watching it there was a substantial pile of messily dumped laundry on the bed next to me, and ninety minutes later there was a stack of neatly folded laundry, so to say that it kept my full attention would be a bit of a porky. Indeed, on a quick look around the Interwebs, Reminiscence has been rather poorly received. That feels a little harsh to me, but ultimately it’s not a film I can go to bat for too strongly, even though it’s got a lot of stuff in here that I’m normally open to liking.
I mean, I’m a sucker for noirish films, and Hugh Jackman is his dependably likeable self. The post climate change world is a cool setting, ahaha, and there’s some interesting world building going on. While I perhaps didn’t get much in the way of chemistry between Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson, I did at least believe that Jackman’s character felt there was, so there’s more than enough there to theoretically engage my interest through the various strands of the underworld and Nick Bannister’s obsession.
I suppose it’s ultimately trying to be about the redemptive power of love, and the destructive power of obsession, and quite where the line between them is, which I could just about argue that it manages to do, but at the same time it’s trying to be a film about climate change, and about inequality, and about government, and about capitalism, and humanity’s perseverance in the face of adversity, and about a half dozen other things that I’m forgetting, and there’s just too much competing for the sunlight here.
It’s perhaps not all that surprising that writer / director Lisa Joy has most recently been making the Westworld series, as there’s a solid argument that this could have been more suited to a miniseries. Y’know, so it could spend more time building a believable relationship between the leads, and fleshing out the role of land barons in this new world though means other than voice over, flashing back to the resource wars that are again mentioned in voice over, and well, what I’m saying is that near enough anything Jackman says in voiceover, and there’s a lot of it, could more or less be a complete episode of a TV series.
There’s some more quotidian criticism I could throw at it, like the sudden all-out gun battle that seems to have dropped in from a different film, or the nicely reasoned from world building perspective, but entirely counterproductive switch of the traditional roles of day and night, meaning this is a very brightly lit noir which is a complete tonal disaster, and there’s some less than stellar CG compositing, and some sets that look particularly, well, like sets, and so on and so forth, but I think you get the picture that I’m not recommending this.
I don’t hate Reminiscence, but I’d steer you away from it. Watch Strange Days instead.