Reminiscence “follows Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman), a private investigator of the mind, who navigates the darkly alluring world of the past by helping his clients access lost memories. Living on the fringes of the sunken Miami coast, his life is forever changed when he takes on a new client, Mae (Rebecca Ferguson). A simple matter of lost and found becomes a dangerous obsession. As Bannister fights to find the truth about Mae’s disappearance, he uncovers a violent conspiracy, and must ultimately answer the question: how far would you go to hold on to the ones you love?”
I watched this on HBO Max. It’s 36% on Rotten Tomatoes, and that seems about right. It’s pretty bad. Details later!
Later: I mean, without spoiling anything, this is the movie you would write if you watched the original Blade Runner and came out of it thinking, “hey, that was great! And what made it great… was the voiceover!”
Also, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen Strange Days, but I think a lot of the plot is lifted from that movie. Which, for reasons unknown to me, is not available for streaming anywhere.
Now that I’ve seen Reminiscence, written and directed by Lisa Joy, I have a more solid understanding of who to blame for Westworld turning so awful.
This was truly terrible. Hackneyed and ham-handed noir with a laughably executed VR concept caught on the bottom of its well worn shoe. Garden variety cherchez-la-femme that isn’t served at all by its sci-fi trappings. The set design and world building of its flooded dystopia are equally bad. Like, made-for-TV bad, shot cheaply and then touched up with a little post-production around the edges of the frame. I think the only cool moment this movie can wring from its post-flood-ocalypse is a fight scene in which someone gets stuck on a sinking piano.
And what a horrible miscasting of Rebecca Ferguson as a strung-out femme fatale. At least Lisa Joy obviously enjoyed Ferguson’s sexy dress from Mission Impossible:
This kind of thigh appreciation with a split dress happens about three different times in Reminiscence, but it comes across as awkward and stagey more than sexy. And I’m no dress expert, but the costumes in Reminiscence can’t hold a candle to Ferguson’s yellow dress in Mission Impossible. That thing nearly stole the whole movie.
It was pretty amazing how proud this movie was of its awful dialogue. Lines repeated OVER AND OVER AND OVER. Not even just his hypnotism shtick, but the whole “tell me a story” thing. Yes, that was such brilliant dialogue, I need to hear it three times!
And yeah. I’m interested to see a movie where people are dealing with a post-climate change world, but this was ham-handed. It’s apparently too hot to go out during the day, but they’re still out during the day all the time anyway. The flood wall does, in fact, look worse than the one in Expanse.
I’m gonna try to re-watch Strange Days (I’m going to have to get the DVD from the library! I don’t have a player for my VHS copy any more…) And hope that the upcoming “Peripheral” series does post-apocalypse better.
Is that a real thing or did you make it up? Either way it’s good, i just wanna know if it’s my lack of knowledge, or your inspiration, that’s the source…
Funny, at this thread so aptly bumped: my wife’s downstairs watching it now. We started dinner with it, and I wasn’t even done dinner and I’m like “Ya, i can’t watch this”. And she looks at me. “Who the hell has a dream they’re a camera watching themselves having a dream?” And why’s there water all over the place? And how are those flooded, powered, skyscrapers still standing? And…nope, i’m out.
Oh, that’s not mine! It’s an actual subgenre of noir. The dame comes into the hardboiled detective’s office, he’s smitten with her, then she goes missing and he spends the rest of the movie cherchez’ing for her. And sometimes she’s also a femme fatale, so you get two French phrases in one movie!
Did you play Cyberpunk? The plotline with Evelyn was standard cherchez-la-femme stuff.
That whole “day is the new night” concept didn’t amount to much, did it? About as effective as the patch of street they covered with an inch of standing water. See, it’s world devastation! Plus Hugh Jackman’s shoes get wet in the deal!
Ya, my movie genre vocabulary stops at genre. I’m pretty basic that way. Dramas. Romance. Sci-fi. Comedy. Big-all purpose bins, that’s how you categorize stuff! Except screws, probably need some smaller bins for that.
Is cherchez-le-merde a thing? You know, where they search for shit? I, uh, assume merde is masculine…la merde? le merde? And…I’ll just see my way out, over here…
This inspired me to request the DVD at my local library as well. I remember thinking in the mid 90’s that Angela Bassett should be the next action superstar, and hopefully Strange Days would lead the way. Never materialized, alas.
Yeah, I watched this last night and kept wondering if the movie would have been any different without the Sci-Fi trappings? I guess the delving into memories would have had to be different but they could have used a different narrative device to deliver that stuff.
I knew it was going to be bad when I heard at the beginning the line, “moments are like a bead on the necklace of time.” What is the necklace of time? A treasure in a D&D campaign? And that line was so good it had to be repeated at the end!
Oh well, HBO Max saved me some money. Well, not really. No way would I have paid to see this.
I went into this with greatly lowered expectations, but was still disappointed. I’m willing to forgive a lot of the basic issues with the setting and general noir plot beats, but it just didn’t do anything interesting with the central mystery, and wasted any potential from the memory stuff.
FYI for those anticipating a Strange Days rewatch - I did it about 10 years ago and was really turned off by how profoundly ugly it is. Horrible people doing horrible things. The central conceit is interesting, but IIRC the politics are intensely stupid and Juliette Lewis tries to be taken seriously. Angela Basset is an obvious upside, so YMMV.
I remember that cherchez-la-femme was a Poirot thing in one of Agatha Christie books. Maybe she coined the phrase, but could also be some crime noir books from the thirties (Chandler or Hammett or so).
On topic, I guess I will go to see it in the cinema, because nothing is coming out at the moment. Even bad SciFi is better than no SciFi. Waiting for DUNC to come out, then BOND.
