Hugh Jackman is a gumshoe of lost memories in the sci-fi noir Reminiscence
This ambitious genre hybrid evokes plenty of old movies, but it's most intriguing when forging its own path
Film Reviews Hugh Jackman
In the intriguing, convoluted dystopian noir Reminiscence, the future is not so bright. In fact, it’s so dreary—a damp tomorrow of climate change and post-traumatic stress—that everyone pays for the privilege of escaping into their buried memories of better times. On the outskirts of a perpetually flooded Miami, the lonely and damaged decamp for a dingy warehouse. Here, they slip on an electronic halo, settle into a bed of shallow water, and are lulled into a state of posthypnotic remembrance; they become like the Precogs of Minority Report, except that it’s not premonitions of what’s to come but vivid flashes of what already has that run through their heads and are projected holographically as they slumber, a little show for their hired conjurer of lost experiences. This is, of course, cinema’s latest metaphor for itself. What are the movies but a weaver of collective memory? It’s a connection made clear long before the film trots out an older version of the tech, sending these visions of the past onto a white wall like a flickering projector, in black-and-white no less.
Running the device is Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman), a one-time soldier who now specializes in literal nostalgia trips. Though he and his faithful girl Friday, fellow hardened veteran Watts (Thandiwe Newton), sometimes moonlight for the local DA’s office (The Tank, as they call their dream machine, started as an interrogation tool, and can naturally be used to extract information), Nick isn’t a detective by trade. But he certainly drinks like the ones in the movies, a glass of brown liquor his steadfast bedside companion. He pontificates like them, too: “The past can haunt a man,” goes one of his nuggets of narrated wisdom, delivered via a running commentary that accomplishes that classic voice-over trick of basting pages of exposition in hard-boiled flavor.
It isn’t long before Nick becomes an actual gumshoe, albeit of the amateur and personally driven variety. What he’s investigating is the disappearance of a new flame: Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), the seductive chanteuse that slinked into his office one day, supposedly seeking help locating her lost house keys but finding an admirer and then lover in the process. But after a few blissful months together, she vanished. Is the dame in trouble? Or is Nick a patsy falling for the schemes of a vintage femme fatale? A no-less pressing mystery: Why have rising water levels and international conflict caused the America of the not-so-distant future to look and sound like the one of 1950s movies, complete with gangsters in smoky nightclubs, where women like Mae sing the torch songs of generations past? The World War III of this film is essentially World War II, complete with internment camps for Asian Americans—an element mentioned but never expounded upon.
Have we stepped into the Dashiell Hammett-themed sister park of Westworld? Lisa Joy, who makes her feature debut as writer and director here, co-created that HBO sci-fi mindbender. Working with (and marrying) a Nolan seems to have partially shaped her preoccupations: Reminiscence boasts multiple hallmarks of that blockbuster sibling team’s output that go beyond the explicit Inception echoes, including an anxious fixation on water and drowning, a lost and endangered paramour, and an opening shot that pushes over the flooded streets of Miami with the same ominous sweep that Christopher brought to Gotham by way of Chicago. Joy doesn’t yet possess a comparable virtuosity of craft, though she hardly lacks for ambition—or for action-movie gumption, even if a John Woo shootout in a restaurant and a knock-down, drag-out fistfight in a dilapidated building seem less than strictly crucial to the story and more like a mandated condition of getting a semi-cerebral genre throwback bankrolled.
The pleasures are of a borrowed nature, the stuff of third-, fourth-, maybe fifth-generation noir homage, just gussied up in sci-fi formal wear: all archetypes spouting purple verbiage while navigating a twisty missing-person mystery that pulls together, in the classic private-dick tradition, seemingly unrelated cases. Reminiscence, which stacks plot turns like manilla folders in an overstuffed filing cabinet (the situation comes to involve a rich philanderer, a futuristic super drug, and a dirty cop played by Cliff Curtis), is enjoyably dense but a little plodding. What it critically lacks is an engine of truly sweaty, involving obsession, the sense that its hero is profoundly haunted to his bones by the mirage of a love that’s slipped through his fingers like cigarette smoke. Jackman, who provided that by the armful in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, seems only half-submerged here: He’s the sleepy center of a genre-bending Big Sleep. As a result, the emotions feel half-formed, maybe half-recalled.
That titular process is nifty, though—and that goes beyond the way Nick’s device doubles as a tribute to the sad poetry of the moving picture and how it makes spectacle from desire and regret. In the most basic terms, The Tank is a flashback machine, providing information to characters and audience alike. Yet Joy, inspired by the endless possibilities of her fantasy tech, keeps creating clever wrinkles with it. Time jumps become rug pulls, as certain events are revealed to be past rather than present tense. One character delivers a passionate message to the future, confident in the knowledge that their words will be received through a projection of someone else’s memories. And in the film’s most bittersweet subplot, a widow exists in a limbo state of cherished past experience, an old clock shop constructed in her home, her brain running indefinitely through the same ancient scenario. In moments like these, Reminiscence reaches past its own memories of the detective stories of yore, to something sadder and truer and more distinctive.
31 Comments
Sounds interesting. Even though Westworld did nothing for me, I stopped after season one. I’ll always support original blockbusters.Hopefully it does well and launches the directing career of this Lisa character. She’s nothing if not ambitious.
A Dowd B- is about as good as a B or even B+ from many other critics, the concept (from what I’ve read) is right up my alley, and I like Jackman and Newton. Sounds like I’ve got another movie to add to my watchlist.
An AA B- is more like an A+++++ from other reviewers!
Wait, this also has Rebecca Ferguson and Cliff Curtis? Sold!
Missing is the fact this “original” flick pretty much ripped off the exceptional premise from George Saunders’ gut-wrenching short story “Offloading for Mrs. Schwarz” in Civilwarland and Bad Decline. If thou still read, read it.
This might be a good one. I always say, science fiction movies can have more than one blockbuster-style idea or mood.
Rebecca Ferguson seems like an utterly perfect femme fatale, I have to admit.
It wins me over by actually presenting Miami as the flooded dystopia it’s due to become!When I saw the trailer and read up the setup and mechanisms definitely do feel like a Nolan film, but at his worst Nolan can get wrapped up in his own twisty constructions that he loses sight of the human element in his films. Hopefully this avoids that pitfall.
Yeah, I really need to take my kids to Miami so they can see it before the world ends.
The Greatest Showman: Hugh Jackman falls for a singing Rebecca Ferguson.Reminiscence: Hugh Jackman falls for a singing Rebecca Ferguson.
Well it is a movie about memories.
Also who can resist Rebecca Ferguson, singing or otherwise?
I saw the trailer for this last time I went to the movies, and it looked like it nailed the noir feel in a way I’ve seen several films attempt but not succeed at many times before. As a big fan of this genre and sci-fi, that has me pretty optimistic.
Just watched it, really liked it (particularly because of the noir feel)… And I was a little shocked to see how middling the reviews are.Thoughts:-The sets, the “wetness”, the cinematography (is it still cinematography if it’s cgi’d? Regardless, it was still good); swapping day for night. It all felt classic noir while also feeling innovative and fresh;-same sentiments with the dialogue. I’ve heard some general criticisms that it was too talky. I thought it was pretty good. It was a nice balance been noir and realism. IMO, you don’t want noir characters to talk like real people. That’s half the fun. On the other hand, you don’t want it to sound like an SNL parody. This struck a nice balance.-I was really relieved that the sci-fi stuff never crawled up its own ass. I was worried we would end up in that Nolan territory where you’re never quite sure what’s real/imagined. It’s really just used as a flashback device with some nice touching twists at the end.-a nice sci-fi touch I really enjoyed: no fucking holograms. I know the dream is crystal clear 3D projections in thin air, but that’s pretty much iimpossible… And it feels like every big budget movie has them nowadays. I liked the concept of stringing clear beads/pixels to create a 3D stage. Still probably not realistic… But more imaginative and slightly more probable than another Tony Stark holowatch.-the ending? I’ve got mixed feelings. The plot, it was pretty good but it was pretty easy to know where it was going in general. That said this one is more about the journey than the destination… And it was a pretty great trip.
So how close is this movie to Strange Days?
Honestly I kind of like that they don’t explain the whole mid-century throwback vibe. I prefer it when this sort of speculative fiction hearkens back to bygone eras without coming up with a whole “oh everyone only had Raymond Chandler to read in the apocalypse bunkers” thing.
I was incredibly underwhelmed by Westworld after the first episode, but I’m a sucker for sci-fi so I’ll give this a shot – especially since this is a surprisingly positive review despite some misgivings. I’m a little worried about the time jump/playing with past and present stuff that’s mentioned though, as that was my biggest problem with Westworld, and something that just totally sank Season 2.
Finding it very disconcerting that there are two article titles on the main page both using the term “gumshoe.” “Dick” was right there, guys.
Noir. Darkness is all I see, and I hate movies that take place in the dark.
Should I watch this or just rewatch Strange Days?
The reviews I have seen of this in Norway has totally savaged it.
Blade Runner: Too Much Talking Edition.Man, I really wanted to like this film, but there’s just so so much talking going on that it kind of bored me to death. The story itself is decent, but not talking in some certain scenes would have serve the plot and atmosphere much better.This is a good case of when showing and not telling can really makes a difference.C+
C+ is still too generous.
Yeah. I loved the world-building, but this film somehow managed to both be overlong AND not explore any of the hinted-at backstory in detail, or give us much about any of the characters. I’m always fine with the latter especially in a mystery where the plotting is enough of a hook, but I feel like this needed 30 minutes chopped off given their approach.
This is the first positive review I’ve seen from a decent critic. The film is getting a real hammering, but I’ll give it a go.
Holy cow was this a slog. I couldn’t care about ANY of the characters (not even Thandiwe!), there were more tropes than plot or characters, the cgi looked like shit, and it was not successful as a noir or a sci-fi film. What a waste of a good sunken Miami.
Review compelled me to watch and glad I did. Bit of a mark for Lisa’s work so happy about it. Good concept, well sustained and well acted. A B+ for me, I think.That said… the first VoiceOver… could have been deleted entirely and the film would have risen a slice of grade for me. Honestly felt like the studio said “explain what’s going on” when it was showing this, quite clearly.
*1/2
In the near-future, a dystopian Miami (that actually looks a lot of fun at times, a 21st century Venice if you will) has sunk under rising seas with its population driven to habitable areas now also ankle deep in seawater. Real estate owners er… soaked the populace as the waters rose and now live, insulated by their wealth, on higher ground with private security.Nick Bannister (and you thought the film’s title was the least inspiring name in the production) has repurposed his military interrogation machine into a memory retrieval system allowing clients to revisit joyful moments in their past, escaping the incipient violence fomenting all around them. When redheaded bombshell, Mae, walks in, he’s smitten – but when she disappears and turns up in memories retrieved during a police investigation, Nick sets out to find her.There’s a good film here – but it’s not this one. The director needed to tell the writer that if the characters have to do this much exposition and you also need (spare us please) a grinding voiceover narration, then the script isn’t ready to shoot. The writer needed to tell the director that the “by numbers” approach – love scene, chase scene, action scene, shootout scene, fight scene… – saps the pace to the glacial just when tension needed to build. But Lisa Joy was both writer and director, so it didn’t happen.Characters come and go, Hugh Jackman gets to take his shirt off at least half a dozen times, Rebecca Ferguson vamps and sings in a part that makes little sense and Thandiwe Newton completely fails to look plain in a painfully underwritten role as a boozy sidekick. Even Jackman’s legendary charm is washed away by some of the most execrable lines he must ever have spoken on film, and he moves rather like the ageing Roger Moore did in later Bonds – arthritically. I hope he was paid well.Ironically, Reminiscence is utterly forgettable.As an aside, the levels of violence in this movie make me question its 12 certificate. The censors seem willing to accept prolonged sequences of pain inflicted and death after death, but heaven forfend a bit of sex. They have it the wrong way round.
I liked it better when it was Angela Bassett putting up with Ralph Feinnes obsessing over Juliette Lewis while he dealt in skeezy replays of people’s memories.
This was…Terrible
Wow! B-? C- at best from me. While it looks great, and there’s no issues with the acting (well, one issue, but we’ll get to that later), directing or cinematography, the plot is just a boring mosaic of better sci-fi. Right off the bat, my suspension of disbelief was knocked off its high horse when Jackman’s character (Sam Spade, memory detective?) is smitten by Rebecca Ferguson, when he works right next to Thandie Newton. How is that possible? Not only is she a million times sexier, but she’s a badass soldier to boot, which, him being a veteran, would make way more sense than some high-class floozy.From there it’s a neo-noir without any legs. I really don’t care about any of the characters, but keep coming back to how vapid Rebecca Ferguson is. She’s just bad. She’s Jessica Rabbit without the cartoon fun, but with the same intellect (hearing her talk about Dune being overly sexist because Herbert wrote it in the 60’s, without ever reading it (preferring to have her male costars mansplain it) is beyond contempt). I never really paid her much attention; just tits and an accent, but now every time I see or hear her talk, I have to ask, who is casting her? At the end of the day, it just left me thinking, why do I car about some junkie whore? If I’m Jackman’s character, I’d just shack up with Newton and laugh at the idiots who come in to hump the memory leg.