‘Reminiscence’ Review: A Haphazardly Executed Yet Creative Concept
While ‘Reminiscence’ contains memorable performances from Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson, its execution drowns an interesting premise.
The entire premise of Lisa Joy’s directorial debut, ‘Reminiscence’, is enough to entice any fans of mind-bending sci-fi films, but in film, execution trumps everything else. An artist can have the greatest idea in the world for a movie, TV show, or book, only for it to be a mediocre experience if the execution of that said idea wasn’t successful. Reminiscence, a sci-fi mind-bending noir detective thriller that has interesting ideas on themes of memory and the recollection of those memories, but can’t get past the drawing board in terms of execution.
The film tells the story of Nicolas Bannister (Hugh Jackman) who specializes in investigating past memories through a machine able to extract their subject’s recollections of past events. When a woman named Mae (Rebecca Ferguson) arrives at Nick’s place of work to remember where she lost her keys, he quickly becomes obsessed with her presence and they both fall in love. For a mere moment, like the flashes of memories experienced in holographic forms throughout the film, Jackman and Ferguson carry the film. The attraction and romance is enough to get engaged, but it is all-too-brief. After she mysteriously disappears, Nick seeks to find out what happened to her, by going on a journey through memory. The deeper he goes inside his memories, the more he not only unravels on Mae’s inexplicable personality but also on the people she was acquainted to, which include a drug dealer (Daniel Wu) and a crooked police officer (Cliff Curtis), who are are somehow involved in the drug trade, a kidnapping scheme, and are key to Mae’s disappearance… the list goes on and on, and the longer ‘Reminiscence’ plays out, the quicker it becomes convoluted.
The concept itself makes for a great film: investigating what happened to the woman Nick loved by using his own recollection of events that occurred in the past to find clues. It’s a great concept, albeit a tad familiar, as it might remind you of Christopher Nolan’s ‘Inception’, where information was extracted through dreams. Nick extracts information through memories to figure out the truth of Mae’s disappearance. However, the more memories the film decides to unravel, the quicker the disinterest starts to happen. Joy believes one reveal should be added on top of another, and another, and another until it becomes hard for the audience to discern what is real, and what might be fabrication of Nick’s imagination. This has an extremely detrimental effect on the film, as it becomes easy to lose trust in the narrative, and disconnect from the story. Without trust in the story, the audience cannot get invested in the characters, their relationships with one another, nor the stakes at hand.
Joy fills her script with endless detours that don’t serve the main plot, nor its characters. In fact, none of its characters are well defined or interesting enough to warrant our investment in them. Of course, Hugh Jackman is as great as he always is in roles that take full advantage of his leading talents (something we don’t see too often nowadays), and he shares terrific chemistry with an underused Rebecca Ferguson, but his character’s motivations are so paper-thin we barely have any interest in following his quest. He loves Mae. And that’s the only driving force that’ll push him to relive the memories he spent with her for the rest of his life until he finds out the truth. But since we spend very little time building that relationship between the two, and is instead built upon through memories, his motivation to seek the truth feels unearned and indecisive.
The same goes for the film’s action sequences, which, while competently shot, don’t hold any emotional weight whatsoever. Admittedly, they’re fun to watch on an IMAX screen (with the film’s immersive sound being the true highlight of the experience for me), but since there are no stakes, it only acts as a mere distraction from the plot at hand, in order to infuse some blockbuster level quality to a mid-sized sci-fi noir flick. In hindsight, the film reminded me a lot of Wally Pfister’s ‘Transcendence’, which also assembled a star-studded cast with an interesting sci-fi concept (more than) poorly executed, with sparse action sequences to entice blockbuster fans. The action sequences in “Reminiscence” are only there for action fans to get their fix, but don’t serve the story and add very little excitement to the mix. It’s a typical action sequence you’d find in many American blockbusters these days; decently shot, but it is all too familiar.
It has been seen before in films like “Chinatown”, “Inception”, Joel Schumacher’s “Flatliners”, “Strange Days” and “Blade Runner.” All of these movies are infinitely better than what ‘Reminiscence’ tried to do. While its performances, cinematography, and sound mixing keep the film going for a bit, though it's the story that should entice the viewer into watching the film in the first place. The idea was there for a great movie, yes, but execution is the most important thing. You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if it isn’t well executed, forget it.