Movie Review : Reminiscence (2021)
Whatever genre you might be into, a new film featuring iconic actors dropping on streaming services without anyone hearing about it before it always a red flag. A film that is getting buried is almost never good. I love detective movies more than anything and I’m somewhat sympathetic to hypermasculine Australian heartthrob Hugh Jackman, but something about his latest movie Reminiscence sounded terribly wrong to my limbic system.
I did not know anything about it. It featured top talent, but instinctively knew it would fucking suck and my instinct was right.
Reminiscence tells the story of Nick Bannister (Jackman), a private detective living in a post-apocalyptic Miami that got partially flooded because of climate changes. He operates a machine equivalent to the polygraph with a woman named Watts (the underrated Thandie Newton). Their technology allow to travel into people’s memories and see objective of what-the-fuck-really-happened, which is quite useful for police. That is until Bannister falls in love with a client who has a troublesome past.
You can’t do the cool stuff if you don’t master the simple stuff first
Reminiscence is a film that is very preoccupied with being beautiful and deep. Written, directed and produced by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, the co-creators of Westworld (a series that was beautiful and deep until it wasn’t), it is furiously enamoured with itself. It opens with a monologue delivered by Hugh Jackman about the past, memory and time, which is supposed to establish that he is a thinking man. An intellectual caught in a violent lifestyle. It would be fine if it wasn’t the only thing you ever learn about his character.
The movie eventually tells us he’s some kind of civil war veteran, but it has no incidence whatsoever on the movie until Bannister needs to get bailed out. His motivations for falling in love with femme fatale stereotype Mae (Rebecca Ferguson) are also quite unclear. They have one sequence together in the beginning where Bannister follows her home to have sex. After a montage of sweet moments, Bannister wakes up months later in his memory tank trying to piece up together the reasons why Mae dumped his ass.
Motherfucker you JUST MET HER. Don’t be a weirdo.
Mae is also a terrible character. Thirty minutes into Reminiscence, I started live-tweeting my viewing and comparing her character to a real-life Jessica Rabbit and Lord almighty, I was not that far off. She’s a huge problem that drags the movie down. Mae has no substance. She’s more an idea than a person and that idea matters to Nick Bannister more than anything else and this includes the audience. Being hot and singing a song you like does not warrant obsessive behaviour. It’s not even a reason to fall in love.
Although it has ambitions to explore profound themes like time and memory, Reminiscence fails to deliver basic engaging storytelling. It relies on tired neo-noir tropes like the haunted detective and the mysterious femme fatale in order to carry its narrative forward. Bannister and Mae behave like genre stereotypes are expected to. They have no personality of their own outside of their thoughtful monologues, but these aren’t worth shit if they aren’t being told by people who act thoughtfully and they definitely aren’t *.
They’re being told by a creep and a woman with no soul.
The Ghost of Christopher Nolan
Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy are respectively Christopher Nolan’s brother and sister-in-law. It’s easy to claim it has a lineage to him, but it’s also all over Reminiscence. Not only the memory machine is reminiscent (pun not intended) of the sleep investigations in Nolan’s masterpiece Inception, but the entire worldbuilding effort somewhat resembles the paradigms Nolan likes to explore. The gorgeously desolate. The broken, inhabited landscapes under a sunny weather.
The only problem is that despite a honest production budget for such an ambitious film (over 50 millions), the actual production decisions are sometimes laugh out loud funny. For example, the character use tiny fishing boats to move through the mean streets of post-apocalyptic Miami. There is no reflection of social hierarchies through boats or something, they all use the exact same one and most times, the characters stay out of the water anyway.
The level of flooding in the Sunken Coast district is also unclear. Sometimes it looks like Venice and others, water levels look barely ankle deep. Reminiscence only feels post-apocalyptic because of how rundown and desolate everything is. Otherwise the great flood looks like it has created a quite pleasant new landscape. Same for the supposedly toxic heat that forces people to live at night. Most of the scenes are in daytime and characters aren’t even sweaty.
*
Reminiscence is a high-minded movie that thought its high-minded premise was strong enough to eschew the basics of engaging storytelling and it clearly wasn’t. Of course, time and memory are great ideas to discuss, but they need to be discussed by people we care about and Reminiscence doesn’t offer that. Poor characters and muddy conflict are boring things to complain about, but it’s even more boring when a movie doesn’t bother getting these right.
* I didn’t even get into Thandie Newton’s character here. Holy shit, she’s bad. I have literally no idea what she’s doing in this movie except looking at screens and bragging about her alcohol problem.
