Reminiscence (2021)

I've had enough "red flags" for "Reminiscence" to skip it, but I didn't do it. 46 on Metascore, 37 on RT and a puny 6.0 on IMDb didn't convince me. I thought that it couldn't be that bad with such a promising trailer. A SciFi packed with time travel, as it looked like, it already scored some winning points from start. But, finally yes, it is that bad...

First, we don't have any time travel. In a future that seems a prequel for "Waterworld" (we can add an extra red flag) = in a semi-flooded Miami sem, an advanced tech (pretty much the only advanced tech actually) allows re-living memories while some stasis is induced to the body. Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman) is a private contractor that offers this kind of service, offering his experience accumulated during the latest war, when the memory machine was used for interogations. One day, Mae - "la femme fatale" - enters his shop as a client needing to figure out where she lost her keys, and from that point we also enter into a deeply entangled neo-noir romance, with even more deep plot holes. It's a waste of time to write more about it...

The most frustrating part is that the story in "Reminiscence" has potential. But it's ruined by the directing and the writing. It might look like something between "Inception" and "Blade Runner" but it doesn't get close to any of these two. Probably a more appropriate comparison would be with "Strange Days", an older, less known movie, but much much better than what we have here. The actors are struggling, but you can't do much with cliche lines or ridiculous parts of talking with yourself to tell the viewer what can be seen already on the screen. Besides this, the whole plot is bound weirdly as a whole - my feeling was of some series episodes that are shortened and just edited together to rush out a two hour movie without much polishing. Add to that also a sound mixing that normally doesn't stand out, or if it does it's in a positive way. Rarely it happened to watch a movie that catched my ear for how bad the tracks are mixed together, even if it happened in one or two scenes. The only part that's ok-ish are the visuals... and the trailer. Too bad for what it promised.

Rating: 1.75 out of 5 (with a reminiscence of 0.25 for what could've been)