Last month’s much deserved swirl of bewildered horror and eye-rolling ridicule at the Frankensequel Space Jam: A New Legacy and its grotesque plundering of IP was also aimed at a worrying future. Things darkened even further with this month’s Free Guy, another film that doubled as “entertainment” and an exercise in brand extension. Both, following in the muddied footsteps of 2018’s Ready Player One, were littered with lapel-grabbingly obvious references to films also owned by the studio releasing each product, as if a click-to-rent button was ready to pop up each time another one lumbered onto the screen. The relatively recent siloing of Disney, Fox, Warners and Paramount and the almost total stratification of their wares available on uber-competitive in-house streaming services has led to an increased need to brand the studios as all-consuming one-stop crossover destinations. So yes, Bugs Bunny can and will bump into Rick Blaine whenever he damn wants.
Warner Bros has been the most bullish, using the entirety of its 2021 slate as a push to increase subscribers on HBO Max, where all of its many properties live. Now, this month’s sleek tech thriller Reminiscence does not exist in the same category as Space Jam: A New Legacy – not even in the same galaxy – but there is a similar “if you like this then also watch” vibe to it, impossible to ignore once you get a whiff. It’s written and directed by Lisa Joy, best known for her work on Westworld (available on HBO Max) and she recruits two of its stars to follow her, as well as the show’s co-creator, and her husband, Jonathan Nolan as producer, a man also known for collaborating with his brother Christopher (all films now available on HBO Max). The film exists very much within his serious sci-fi world, cribbing from Inception most notably and at times shamelessly, but also owing a huge debt to both the neon noir of Blade Runner (available on HBO Max) and the classic noir of the 40s, such as The Maltese Falcon (available on HBO Max), a genre that the studio practically owned during that decade.
It’s hard not to see it in algorithmic terms, for its personality is at times nothing more than an equation, one that pales next to the far superior films and shows it wants to sit next to, a drama about memory that’s far too easy to forget. In the near future, the world has become so rotten than most people are happy to live in the past, something that’s quite easy to do thanks to technology that allows for regular jaunts back to specific memories. Nick (Hugh Jackman) runs a service along with his longtime work partner, Watts (Thandiwe Newton), that gives people the opportunity to travel back, briefly, reliving happier, sunnier times. When Nick falls for the mysterious lounge singer Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), he finds himself savouring the present over the past but when she disappears, he uses this technology to figure out where she might be.
The reminders of Inception become so distracting that the film starts to border on pastiche. A device that allows for mind travel – check, an old song used for memory recall – check, the ghost of a beautiful but damaged woman haunting our hero – check, an oft-quoted line repeated by the hero about a journey – check, a tortured relationship between a rich man and his son – check. It’s overwhelming, even suffocating at times, which is a shame because there are elements here that work independently, without the need for the Nolan playbook to be so obsessively followed. For a while, Jackman’s grizzled noir schtick is fun enough (he’s an actor who can sell a lot) and the big, expensive slickness of the film surrounding him is inventively designed (it pops on the big screen, where, sadly, few will end up watching it). The world of the film is often confusingly built (there are references to the war and the border with little clarity on what this all means) but it’s aesthetically powerful, a version of Miami that’s believably waterlogged with people choosing to live nocturnally as the days are too hot.
But the film’s big romance is less sizzle and more fizzle. The pair’s chemistry, shown over just a few scenes, is as wet as the Miami streets, and while Ferguson gives good femme fatale, she can’t quite convince as a down-on-her-luck lounge singer with a secret addiction – the actor is far too refined to nail that sort of grit. The dialogue is often stilted, going through the motions rather than gliding, and what Joy seems to think is a labyrinthine plot is actually rather disappointingly straightforward. The reveals are thunderingly obvious replays, often relying on characters’ great stupidity not to spot them first time around, and as Joy reveals that her box of tricks is actually kind of empty, we start to clock-watch rather than care about what’s in front of us.
There are, of course, many poignant things to say about how some of us choose to relive the past until it slowly breaks us in the present, how moving on can seem more impossible than continually going back, despite our awareness of the self-masochism of such nostalgia. But there’s nothing revelatory or even heart-grabbingly resonant here. File under: if you loved Inception then you’d just about tolerate Reminiscence.
Reminiscence is out in cinemas and on HBO Max in the US and in UK cinemas on 20 August
