KYMM'S 365 DAY MOVIE CHALLENGE #27: REMINISCENCE (2021, dir by Lisa Joy, USA)
Nothing is more addictive than the past.”
The trailer for this looked so good. We saw it a bunch of times, and the anticipation just kept building and building…and then we saw the movie. Sad trombone.
In the future, the waters rose, the rich bought up all the dry land, the poor drowned, there was a war, and because the days are so hot, people live at night. There are machines that can not just read your memories, but project them so that other people can see them, too, and Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman) runs such a business with his assistant, Watts (Thandiwe Newton). (That is not a typo, by the by, it is the original spelling of her name, and she has gone back to it. As you were.)
One day, a beautiful chanteuse, Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), walks into Nick’s place of business, because she lost her keys and needs Nick to search her memories to find them. She leaves behind an earring, so he must follow her to the dive where she croons in order to give it back, and so, of course, they fall in love. But is she really what she seems?
Of all the memory reliving joints in all the underwater towns in all the dystopian world, she had to slink in a cut-out dress into Nick’s (not Rick’s). Some things that happened for the first time seem to be happening again, forsooth.
I mean, it seems like a slam dunk, a good, old fashioned detective noir taking place in the future, with the tropes of both genres interwoven, quite stunning visuals, a cast featuring some strong performers, and the whole thing falls flatter than a pancake run over by a steam roller. It is, to put it mildly, a stone drag.
One problem is the female lead, and I cannot tell if the role is impossible to play as written or if Rebecca Ferguson cannot act her way out of a wet paper bag, but either way she is a black hole in the centre of the film. The femme fatale role is a difficult thing to pull off at the best of times, those times being the 1940s, it’s a real tightrope to wobble across in 2021.
When Nick hears Mae mediocrely warble “Where or When,” the most on the nose song that has ever nosed, he then tells her she has a great voice, and the audience is like…does he have some sort of hearing issue? Is this going to come back in the plot somehow that she really cannot sing, but is hypnotizing him, somehow? Nope, the movie just has decided that she can sing with no evidence to back it up. It is, in fact, wildly unfair to the actress to put her in that position.
Another thing is that we are so far ahead of Nick as he tries to solve the mystery of Mae, that when the penny drops and he figures something out, the audience rolls their eyes and responds, “We knew this HALF AN HOUR ago! Catch up!”We were groaning and praying for the end at least halfway through, I kept counting off things in the trailer that we hadn’t seen yet, “We haven’t seen the sinking piano yet,” and plot points that would have to occur before it ended, “They have to bring back that thing that was pointedly casually mentioned in passing.” It kept us entertained more than the movie itself.
The pluses that must be acknowledged are the world-building and gorgeous look of the film, Thandiwe Newton’s arresting performance as the loyal, hard-drinking Watts, and Hugh Jackman taking his shirt off with enough regularity to give the punters what they want. And that is the entirety. Fin.
There already is a dystopian future noir with a plot about memory, a strong look, and a bad central female performance, so just skip this and watch Blade Runner again instead.
Kymm Zuckert is an actor/writer/native Angelino. When Kymm was a child, her parents would take her to see anything, which means that sometimes she will see a film today and say, “I saw that when I was eight, I don’t remember any of that inappropriate sex stuff!” Check out her entire 365 day blog @ https://365filmsin365days.movie.blog