REMINISCENCE - Official Reviews ( Potential Spoilers)

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None at the moment.

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‘Reminiscence’ Review: Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson in a Sci-Fi Noir Love Story That’s Déjà Vu All Over Again

Lisa Joy's film is a dystopian noir in which traveling through memory proves to be a routine novelty.


By Owen Gleiberman


REMINISCENCE, from left: Rebecca Ferguson, Hugh
©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett C


In “Reminiscence,” a sci-fi noir love story set in a climate-change dystopia that’s just short of the apocalypse enough to make Miami look like Venice with hotter nightclubs, Hugh Jackman plays Nick Bannister, a former soldier who runs a business in which people pay to float, unconscious, in a sensory-deprivation tank. Immersed in its calming water, with a virtual-reality headset on, they’re able to travel back into their fondest memories. It’s technology that makes the time-tripping possible, but the decaying landscape around them that makes it desirable. When the world starts to overheat and drown, the movie implies, our memories of better days may be all we have.

The sensation of déjà vu figures prominently in “Reminiscence.” We watch people’s memories unfold as if on a giant movie screen, eavesdropping on their most intimate moments. And so do Nick and his trusty number two, Watts (Thandiwe Newton), who are monitoring those memories, recording them on small square synthetic files.



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Beyond that, however, the entire movie, which was written and directed by Lisa Joy (the co-showrunner of “Westworld”), can often feel like a device for transporting the audience back to memories from the pop-culture past. Nick’s business occupies a dark, tall-ceilinged catacomb of an office space in which the sun glints around drawn blinds; it’s very “Blade Runner: The Streaming Series,” with maybe a stray hint of “The Godfather.” Outside, the flooded Miami landscape, with buildings and byways still visible, evokes a kind of “Waterworld Lite” crossed with a “Hunger Games” sequel. And when Nick, after falling into a romantic liaison with the beautiful and mysterious Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), attempts to learn what happened to her, he becomes immersed in a crime drama — drugs, dirty cops — that evokes everything from “Miami Vice” to the noirs of the ’40s.

No one could accuse “Reminiscence” of being an incompetent movie. It’s well-crafted, shot with expert gradations of filtered gloss, and every piece of its story falls into place just so. Yet here’s one case where that feeling of clockwork precision is actually part of what’s numbing about the movie. “Reminiscence” plays like a perfectly calibrated two-hour mirage of things we’ve seen before.

Back in the day, film noir, though we don’t necessarily think of it this way, was one of the most romantic of all movie genres. The phrase “femme fatale” conjures a lot of words apart from romance — words like cold, slinky, manipulative, treacherous — but the point is that the saps who fell for femme fatales fell for them completely; they let love lead them into the abyss. And the femme fatales fell, too. Rita Hayworth in “Gilda,” Lana Turner in “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” Barbara Stanwyck in “Double Indemnity” — these women may have flaunted their erotic power, but what made them so devious is that they used their own internal conflicted romantic feelings as a form of entrapment. It was love that lit the dark fuse of noir, at least back in its studio heyday.

But in “Reminiscence,” when we watch Nick fall in love with Mae, a drifter with a shady past, only to lose her as quickly as he found her, the romantic spark is so iconic and overfamiliar that it doesn’t carry that same breathless charge of fate. Nick and Mae just seem like they’re going through the motions of a cliché “hot” connection. She’s a cabaret singer, and Joy shoots her in a way that’s meant to be mythically glamorous: singing at the Coconut Club, in a red silk dress slit up to the thigh, standing before an old-fashioned microphone just like the one Isabella Rossellini commandeered in “Blue Velvet.”


Rebecca Ferguson is a magnetic actress who, at moments, suggests Isabelle Huppert without the reflexive disaffection. But I wish her character had more of a present-tense force. The connection between her and Jackman actually felt more dangerous in “The Greatest Showman.” When Nick goes back into Mae’s past, traveling to New Orleans (which looks just like Miami) and using other people’s memories to piece together his detective puzzle, what we learn feels concocted. There’s a drug called bacca involved. There’s a gangster named Saint Joe (played by the wily Daniel Wu, who the movie could have used more of). Mostly, though, Mae seems a by-the-book lethal manipulator, defined by a Proustian wisp of a song (“So it seems we’ve been here before…”), because that’s what the movie needs her to be.

Jackman never phones in a performance, but his hawkish eagerness here registers, at times, as trying too hard. He’s at his best in his scenes with Thandiwe Newton, who razzes him with ace timing; the two achieve a spiky office chemistry. If it weren’t for the deep-dive-into-memory premise, “Reminiscence” would be nothing more than a pile of well-worn noir tropes, featuring Cliff Curtis as a corrupt cop with a scarred scalp who masterminds an array of crimes that we never feel overly invested in. Yet it’s funny how the memory premise of this movie works. Back in the days of “Total Recall,” diving into this kind of virtual reality was a novelty, but now it’s so smoothly engineered that there’s no wow factor to it. It’s kind of like consuming television episodes. By the end of “Reminiscence,” you feel like you’re binge-watched people’s inner lives.

[jo]

The Hollywood Reporter --

MOVIE REVIEWS

Hugh Jackman in ‘Reminiscence’: Film Review

The star plays a private investigator specializing in the retrieval of lost memories who becomes dangerously obsessed with an elusive client played by Rebecca Ferguson.


BY DAVID ROONEY


AUGUST 18, 2021 9:00AM
Reminiscence

Thandiwe Newton and Hugh Jackman in 'Reminiscence' COURTESY OF WARNER BROS. PICTURES RELEASE



If you’re lucky and your memory serves you well, the lovely Rodgers and Hart standard “Where or When,” sung by Rebecca Ferguson’s mysterious chanteuse Mae in Reminiscence, will take you back to Ellen Burstyn at the piano in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, feeling her way through the song as she looks to her past to reshape her uncertain future. You should pray that exquisite distraction lingers, transporting you to a movie with a compelling plot, three-dimensional characters and emotional stakes that pull you in. Or you could stick with the stultifying bore of writer-director Lisa Joy’s first feature, a convoluted sci-fi noir mind-fuck from the Christopher Nolan school.



Joy happens to be Nolan’s sister-in-law, which might explain a lot, although she does have her own credentials as a successful television writer — on Pushing Daisies, Burn Notice and, most notably, Westworld, which she co-created with her husband, Jonathan Nolan. All that would suggest more persuasive storytelling skills than this lethargic trudge through the murky waters of memory, which is drowning in ponderous platitudes and enigmatic non sequiturs masquerading as dialogue. Its star cast notwithstanding, there’s good reason Warners is dumping the movie in the dog days of summer with minimal fanfare.


Reminiscence

THE BOTTOM LINE
Instantly forgettable.

Release date: Friday, Aug. 20
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Ferguson, Thandiwe Newton, Cliff Curtis, Marina de Tavira, Daniel Wu, Mojean Aria, Brett Cullen, Natalie Martinez, Angela Sarafyan, Nico Parker
Director-screenwriter: Lisa Joy

Rated PG-13, 1 hour 56 minutes



Hugh Jackman plays Nick Bannister, a private investigator who reconnects clients with lost memories through an immersion tank hooked up to computer gadgetry that produces hologram-like visual recordings. These are then archived in Nick’s vault on glass discs, because he’s an analog kind of guy.

“Time is no longer a one-way stream,” says Nick in a gurgle of voiceover that threatens never to end. “Memory is the boat that sails against its current. And I’m the oarsman.” There’s reams of this prosaic stuff: “The past is just a series of moments, each one perfect, complete, a bead on the necklace of time.” “Nothing is more addictive than the past.” “Memories are like perfume, better in small doses.” Narration is also better in small doses, but Joy is so intoxicated by it that she repeats the entire opening spiel in the concluding stretch.

Since business is slow, Nick also takes sideline employment extracting memory depositions for the office of the Miami DA (Natalie Martinez). But not just any old Miami. This one is in — you guessed it! — a Dystopian Future, in which rage against the wealthy ruling class is a bubbling cauldron. The border wars have given way to civil conflict as the waters have risen, with the barons claiming all the dry land and pushing the poor and disenfranchised further and further out onto the submerged coastline.


The most powerful of them is Walter Sylvan (Brett Cullen), a Trumpy slumlord with his fingers in all kinds of chicanery and corruption. He has a wife, Tamara (Marina de Tavira), with a foreign accent and a shaky hold on reality, plus a sniveling scion, Sebastian (Mojean Aria), who learned from Dad not to do his own dirty work. The depiction of this decadent dynasty has all the subtlety of an anal probe. Naturally there’s a melancholy mistress on the side, Elsa (Angela Sarafyan), and a young illegitimate son who becomes an inconvenient blight on Walter’s public profile.

Nick’s sole employee in his memory biz is Watts (Thandiwe Newton), a loyal ex-comrade from their days of drafted military service who has her own sorrows. She’s the most intriguing character in the movie, but, unfortunately, disappears for a hefty chunk of it. Though not before demonstrating her kickass sharpshooter and fight skills, stepping in to save Nick as he’s about to be drowned in a tank full of eels in a New Orleans bar by the men of drug kingpin Saint Joe (Daniel Wu), the area’s chief supplier of a highly addictive opiate called baca. During the shootout, a stray bullet hits the jukebox, and, faster than you can say, “Chew baca,” “Tainted Love” comes on.

That’s because despite all the plot contortions to uncover the nefarious business of Walter Sylvan — much of it carried out by crooked cop Cyrus Boothe (Cliff Curtis), who’s also in Saint Joe’s pocket — Joy aims to beguile us with romance. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is cited more than once as jaded Nick finds himself hypnotized by Mae, a femme fatale who takes a dip in his memory tank ostensibly to recover a lost set of keys.

Mae disappears soon after, but she’s not forgotten. As Nick has already noted, “Memories have a voracious appetite; if you’re not careful they’ll consume you.” Which is what happens when the woman who planted herself in his subconscious with a song from his childhood turns up in someone else’s visualized deposition, hooked on baca.

While Mae clearly spells trouble, Nick is unable to resist following her trail, ignoring the concerned warnings of Watts. As an ugly conspiracy comes to light involving Sylvan, Boothe and Mae, Nick begins to understand that he’s fallen in love and been duped at the same time. Or is the truth behind the shady dame even more tangled than he could have imagined?

Duh, of course it is! In a movie this overloaded with plot, the revelations are like a leaky faucet, just like that purple voiceover. In fact, there’s so much going on, much of it behind the literal curtain of memory, that Joy leaves little room for the characters to establish themselves in the here and now. That applies especially to Mae, who remains a distant cipher even after all the laborious explanation of her elaborate game. Nor does that help the heat-free chemistry between Ferguson and Jackman, who appeared together previously in The Greatest Showman.



Outside of his glowering Wolverine, given such haunting life, especially in Logan, Jackman tends to register most effectively when there’s a strain of mischievous humor in his roles, most recently in Bad Education. His Nick Bannister is a dour presence, far less interesting when he’s rewriting the tragic ending of a Greek myth while swooning over Mae than when he’s swapping banter with Watts.

The most affecting scene actually springs not from the soggy central love story but from Nick and Watts’ reconciliation as he places his future in her hands. Newton (who worked with Joy on Westworld) seems underused in what’s basically a sidekick role, but she deftly sketches in a history that makes you want to know more about the character.

There’s more deadening talk than action, the latter confined largely to Watts’ rescue of Nick from his brush with Saint Joe, and to Nick and Boothe in an extended fight/chase over rooftops that ends with the visual flourish of a grand piano sinking into the watery depths. But the violence has little impact because the story never acquires enough lucidity to pack much urgency.

Reminiscence has a sleek, moody look and a big brooding score by frequent Westworld composer Ramin Djawadi to propel the story in the absence of plot momentum. But as a bead on the necklace of time, it’s shoddy costume jewelry.

[jo]

Indiewire --

‘Reminiscence’ Review: Lisa Joy’s Soggy Near-Future Noir Is All Too Easy to Forget

"Westworld" co-creator Lisa Joy teams up with Hugh Jackman for a noir that frustrates in many of the same ways as her HBO series.

David Ehrlich

36 mins ago

@davidehrlich


“Reminiscence”

A soggy near-future noir that fatally misunderstands the past, Lisa Joy’s “Reminiscence” is miles away from memorable, but that doesn’t mean it’s always so easy to forget. For one thing, it would be hard to completely shake any murder-mystery set in a half-submerged Miami so devastated by climate change that the streets of South Beach are flooded, the entire population has gone nocturnal because the daytime is too hot, and the rich live on a massive platform that’s walled off with its own private dam. If the lavish sets are furnished with too much CG, it’s still plenty neat to see trains skim across the surface of the ocean, or watch Hugh Jackman (as a rumpled private investigator of sorts) fight someone to the death in a sunken ballroom. But for all of its mildewed splendor, this Art Deco cross between “Waterworld” and “Blade Runner” lingers in the mind as a head-scratching example of what can go wrong when science-fiction ignores the immutable nature of certain facts.


In the hard-boiled spirit of the noir genre — the affectations of which this movie wears like an ill-fitting suit — “Reminiscence” is stitched together with some voiceover narration so briny with regret that it sounds like it was just poured out of a bottle that was fished off the ocean floor. “The past can haunt a man,” Nick Bannister (Jackman) grumbles as the camera drifts into shore, “but maybe it’s us who haunt the past.” Some viewers may not be aware that Joy co-created HBO’s “Westworld,” but her script pinballs between koan-like witticisms and wag-the-dog exposition with such profound entropy that it couldn’t have been written by anybody else.


In fairness to Nick, he might have a point. “Reminiscence” is haunted by a great many things — the ghost of Humphrey Bogart, the brutalistic spirit of Joy’s brother-in-law Christopher Nolan, whatever demonic studio notes flattened her script’s ending into a thematically incoherent mess — but the past isn’t one of them. It couldn’t be: Neither this film nor anyone in it even knows what it means to remember.



Once an interrogator during the vague “border wars” that were fought sometime between then and now, Nick supports himself by operating a nifty machine that turns the human mind into a projector for the memories that have been stored inside of it. Clients come to the abandoned bank where Nick and his platonic life partner Watts (Thandiwe Newton, doing as much as she can with far too little) have set up shop, climb into an electrified water chamber, and are lulled into a deep sleep; their subconsciouses follow the sound of Nick’s voice as whatever they’re “seeing” flickers to life inside a sepia-toned 3D hologram that’s draped behind the digital beads of time.

It’s a nifty idea, but one that suffers from the same mortal flaw that’s left “Westworld” chasing its own tail for the last two seasons: Joy refuses to accept that people are wired differently than machines. Our brains are not hard drives, and our memories are not encoded onto them like data. The past is a soft thing, even long after it seems to have petrified inside of us. And while storytellers always have free reign to rewrite the rules of how this world of ours might work, Joy’s dogged insistence that memory is as objective as DNA makes it all but impossible for “Reminiscence” to reach for the nostalgia that it namechecks throughout, or access the ache that propels Nick to search for the beautiful chanteuse who vanishes after a trip in Nick’s magical bathtub.


Played by the ever-watchable Rebecca Ferguson, here rekindling the chemistry that she and Jackman first stoked in “The Greatest Showman,” Mae is such an obvious femme fatale that Nick must never have seen a movie before; maybe all of the multiplexes were lost when the levees broke. Fresh from her gig singing Rodgers and Hart’s “Where or When” for sad-eyed strangers at the Coconut Club, Mae saunters into Nick’s life wearing the kind of slinky red dress that could make a man feel like he owes her a favor in return.

In this case, Mae has lost her keys, and hopes that Nick might be able to trigger the part of her mind that remembers where they went (that memories are shown in the third-person makes sense from an aesthetic point of view, but it’s also the sweaty kind of detail this movie only makes worse by offering a ham-fisted explanation that clashes with our lived experience). After a few special nights — or is it mornings? — together, Mae disappears along with some of the memory files kept in Nick’s vault. Might this have anything to do with the upcoming criminal trial of a local tycoon, a case for which Nick’s unique services have been enlisted by the district attorney? Even someone who’s never seen a noir before will be able to connect the dots.

“Reminiscence,” like “Westworld,” is made all the more frustrating because Joy has such an entrancingly filmic imagination. Even on the compressed timeline of a feature film, she displays a rare gift for rearranging today’s anxieties into desensitized tomorrows; the Florida she creates here is somehow even bleaker than the one we’re already familiar with (a quick jaunt to New Orleans furthers the illusion), and while “Reminiscence” struggles to justify certain aspects of its tech, the movie paints a vivid picture of a future where there’s so little to look forward to that everyone keeps searching for happiness over their shoulders. Christopher Nolan’s influence would be oppressive even if not for the family connection — just listen to a genius like Ramin Djawadi resigning himself to the fuzzy cheese guitars of the film’s ersatz Hans Zimmer score — but Joy creates a more present sense of hopelessness than “Tenet” ever did.


On the other hand, “Reminiscence” falters where the likes of “Dunkirk,” “Inception,” and “Memento” successfully used film language to destabilize their unyielding adherence to logic. Where those movies told stories that were inextricable from their structures, Joy’s not-so-twisty missing persons mystery wears its big gimmick like an itchy costume; neither Nick’s search for Mae nor the reasons behind her disappearance are meaningfully connected to the act of remembering.

“Reminiscence” offers glimpses of the inverted “Minority Report” riff that it might have become had Joy treated memory with the same plastic fallibility that our minds do — had she allowed for actual characters to form in the uncertain crevices where emotions gnarl into roots — but its premise doesn’t allow the past to be anything more than another addiction. Nick isn’t a person who’s desperate to recapture a moment that got away from him, he’s just a walking slogan for a service that doesn’t seem like it would hold any water. “Memory is the boat that sails against time’s current,” he intones, “and I’m the oarsman.” Whatever you say.


Whoever he is, it’s an absolute slog to watch Jackman row this way and that in search of something to justify this movie’s labored metaphors. “Reminiscence” eventually washes ashore with an incoherent ending that suggests it never had any real taste for the tragedy of its noir underpinnings, and while Joy’s vision makes for a handful of ravishing moments along the way, the film’s visuals are only interesting so far as they contradict Nick’s insistence that it’s impossible to remember something that never made an impression in the first place.

Grade: C-

[jo]

[jo]

San Francisco Chronicle --

MOVIES & TV
Review: Hugh Jackman goes down memory lane in so-so sci-fi flick ‘Reminiscence’
G. Allen Johnson August 18, 2021Updated: August 18, 2021, 9:01 am

Rebecca Ferguson (left) and Hugh Jackman star in “Reminiscence,” the first feature from writer-director Lisa Joy (“Westworld”).
Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures
Does Lisa Joy dream of electric sheep?

The supremely talented co-creator of “Westworld” is apparently a big fan of “Blade Runner.” She explores the role of artificial intelligence and humanity expertly in her HBO series, and now in “Reminiscence” — her intriguing but ultimately shallow feature film debut as writer-director — she gives us a post-apocalyptic Miami that, like Ridley Scott’s Los Angeles, is dark and wet.

There is even a mysterious woman, and a handsome detective who needlessly narrates the action, as Harrison Ford’s bounty hunter did in the maligned 1982 theatrical cut of “Blade Runner.”


Thandiwe Newton operates the memory-capturing technology in Lisa Joy’s “Reminiscence.”
Photo: Ben Rothstein / Warner Bros. Pictures
Well, Hugh Jackman’s Nick Bannister isn’t exactly a detective, but he does work with the police. He is an expert interrogator, a skill he learned during “the wars,” using technology where he can see people’s memories.

That’s bad news for the criminals; but good news for the good citizens in this nightmare Miami, where the streets are flooded as the oceans rise and people only go out at night, as extreme heat makes days unbearable. Who wouldn’t want to escape into prewar times and relive their happiest memories? Nick can hook you up.

Literally. The technology works by attaching electrodes to the subject’s brain and immersing him/her into a small cryogenic chamber. Nick and his trusty assistant Watts (“Westworld” alum Thandiwe Newton) can view the memories, which are projected in a 3-D hologram, and record and store them for their customers’ future use.


Saint Joe (East Bay actor Daniel Wu) is a New Orleans gangster who might hold the key to a mysterious woman in “Reminiscence.”
Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures
One day, a beautiful lounge singer, Mae (Rebecca Ferguson) enters Nick’s life, looking to relive a few memories, and suddenly Nick would like to make a few new ones. He falls in love, but she disappears after a brief fling.

A short time later, Nick and Watts are at police headquarters interrogating a gangster through the memory technology. In one memory from five years in the past, the gangster makes a deal with Saint Joe (East Bay actor Daniel Wu, “Into the Badlands”), a notorious New Orleans crime boss. The boss’ girlfriend? Mae.

Watts senses trouble. Was Mae playing Nick? Was she responsible for some memory files that have gone missing? For what purpose? Nick senses only his own obsession: He must find Mae at all costs.


Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman) prepares for a trip down memory lane in “Reminiscence.”
Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures
“Reminiscence” is never not interesting, but Joy leaves a lot of the intriguing issues unsatisfactorily explored. The technology of capturing memories carries immense moral and philosophical baggage. Is it a neural drug? Does it cause addiction? Even if life sucks now, is escaping into the past really a good thing? But in Joy’s hands, it’s a gimmick, a means of connecting the dots on the way to solving what is a rather predictable mystery.

And what about Nick’s voyeurism? He’s a little bit of a creep, although Jackman, good as always, makes him a guy to root for.

But the true tragedy of “Reminiscence” is that Nick desires the wrong woman. The best, sexiest, smartest, can-do female in the movie is already in-house: Newton’s Watts should have her own movie.

Too bad Nick is stuck in the past, because the present could be pretty good, even in Miami’s bleak, soggy nights.

L“Reminiscence”: Science fiction. Starring Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Ferguson, Thandiwe Newton, Daniel Wu. Directed by Lisa Joy. (PG-13. 116 minutes.) Starts Friday, Aug. 20, at Bay Area theaters and on HBO

[jo]

Empire --

In a war-ravaged, dystopian future, Nick (Hugh Jackman) has created a special machine that lets people escape reality and relive memories from happier times. A mysterious woman, Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), comes into Nick’s life, steals his heart, then disappears. He refuses to forget her and risks everything to find her.
By Olly Richards | Posted24 Minutes Ago
Release Date:
26 Aug 2021

As co-creator of the TV show Westworld, Lisa Joy is well-versed in crafting handsome, twisty, high-concept sci-fi. Reminiscence has a lot of the same qualities as that show, both good and bad. It has moments of creative brilliance, and just as many of frustratingly loose storytelling.

Reminiscence

Like Westworld, Reminiscence has a beautifully considered setting. The story takes place at some point in the future, in Miami. Climate change has put the city largely underwater and sent the daytime temperatures rocketing so high that people live their lives at night. It’s a very clever idea for a film noir. Everyone lives in the shadows and the city is artfully crumbling. The stage is set for sin. In this world lives Nick (Hugh Jackman). Nick runs a service that allows people to relive happy memories, from times before the world was awful. His customers are sedated, lie in a techy bath and Nick whispers gently to them while he watches a visual of their memories on a big, fancy projector. If you can remember it, Nick can access it. Assisting him is a warmly cantankerous old friend, Watts (Thandiwe Newton).

The world feels like it has many stories wanting to be discovered. There is so much potential, yet it doesn’t come together.



One night, in walks Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), a lounge singer, all Jessica Rabbit dress and no backstory. Nick falls for her; she disappears; Nick determines to find out what happened to her, with only a few memories as clues. It’s a hoary old noir plot — the grizzled man’s hunt for the dame with secrets — and the addition of the memory gimmick isn’t quite enough to make it feel fresh. It needs more twists on the road to the solution, or for the memory idea to be mined further (it effectively becomes a shortcut interrogation technique). A mystery is made better with a few red herrings to throw us off. Joy gives us just the clues to the solution, so it becomes too easy to piece most of it together before she’s ready to reveal all.

It might have worked better if it took itself a little less seriously. A lot of the dialogue is severely overboiled, but it’s never clear if Joy knows. The film opens with the lines, “The past can haunt a man, that’s what they say. The past is a series of moments, each of them perfect. A bead on the necklace of time.” Now, you can get away with that if it’s presented with a hint of a wink, a suggestion that you’re having fun with the genre, but Joy plays it earnestly. In that context, it just sounds like tin-eared writing.


There’s plenty that’s good here. It’s exceptionally well cast. Few can play a heroic anger like Jackman, and Ferguson has such serious charisma that she gives Mae, more of a concept than a character, needed weight. The world feels like it has many stories wanting to be discovered. There is so much potential, yet it doesn’t come together. A little more attention on the plotting over the sci-fi bells and whistles and this could have been something to remember.

For all its lovely looks, flashes of inspiration and splendid cast, Reminiscence mostly serves to remind you of other films —Minority Report, Blade Runner — that did similar future-noir much, much better.

[jo]

First 17 reviews to Rotten Tomatoes --


www.rottentomatoes.com/m/reminiscence_2021/reviews

[jo]

Updated with 20 reviews for RT --

www.rottentomatoes.com/m/reminiscence_2021/reviews

[jo]

The AV Club review --

REVIEWS
Hugh Jackman is a gumshoe of lost memories in the sci-fi noir Reminiscence

This ambitious genre hybrid evokes plenty of old movies, but it's most intriguing when forging its own path

Thandiwe Newton and Hugh Jackman in Reminiscence
Photo: Warner Bros.
ByA.A. Dowd
58 minutes ago

In the intriguing, convoluted dystopian noir Reminiscence, the future is not so bright. In fact, it’s so dreary—a damp tomorrow of climate change and post-traumatic stress—that everyone pays for the privilege of escaping into their buried memories of better times. On the outskirts of a perpetually flooded Miami, the lonely and damaged decamp for a dingy warehouse. Here, they slip on an electronic halo, settle into a bed of shallow water, and are lulled into a state of posthypnotic remembrance; they become like the Precogs of Minority Report, except that it’s not premonitions of what’s to come but vivid flashes of what already has that run through their heads and are projected holographically as they slumber, a little show for their hired conjurer of lost experiences. This is, of course, cinema’s latest metaphor for itself. What are the movies but a weaver of collective memory? It’s a connection made clear long before the film trots out an older version of the tech, sending these visions of the past onto a white wall like a flickering projector, in black-and-white no less.

Running the device is Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman), a one-time soldier who now specializes in literal nostalgia trips. Though he and his faithful girl Friday, fellow hardened veteran Watts (Thandiwe Newton), sometime moonlight for the local DA’s office (The Tank, as they call their dream machine, started as an interrogation tool, and can naturally be used to extract information), Nick isn’t a detective by trade. But he certainly drinks like the ones in the movies, a glass of brown liquor his steadfast bedside companion. He pontificates like them, too: “The past can haunt a man,” goes one of his nuggets of narrated wisdom, delivered via a running commentary that accomplishes that classic voice-over trick of basting pages of exposition in hard-boiled flavor.


REVIEWS
Reminiscence
B-

DIRECTOR
Lisa Joy

RUNTIME
116 minutes

RATING
PG-13

LANGUAGE
English

CAST
Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Ferguson, Thandiwe Newton, Cliff Curtis, Marina de Tavira

AVAILABILITY
Theaters everywhere and HBO Max August 20

It isn’t long before Nick becomes an actual gumshoe, albeit of the amateur and personally driven variety. What he’s investigating is the disappearance of a new flame: Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), the seductive chanteuse that slinked into his office one day, supposedly seeking help locating her lost house keys but finding an admirer and then lover in the process. But after a few blissful months together, she vanished. Is the dame in trouble? Or is Nick a patsy falling for the schemes of a vintage femme fatale? A no-less pressing mystery: Why have rising water levels and international conflict caused the America of the not-so-distant future to look and sound like the one of 1950s movies, complete with gangsters in smoky nightclubs, where women like Mae sing the torch songs of generations past? The World War III of this film sounds an awful lot like World War II, complete with internment camps for Asian Americans—an element mentioned but never expounded upon.

Have we stepped into the Dashiell Hammett-themed sister park of Westworld? Lisa Joy, who makes her feature debut as writer and director here, co-created that HBO sci-fi mindbender. Working with (and marrying) a Nolan seems to have partially shaped her preoccupations: Reminiscence boasts multiple hallmarks of that blockbuster sibling team’s output that go beyond the explicit Inception echoes, including an anxious fixation on water and drowning, a lost and endangered paramour, and an opening shot that pushes over the flooded streets of Miami with the same ominous sweep that Christopher brought to Gotham by way of Chicago. Joy doesn’t yet possess a comparable virtuosity of craft, though she hardly lacks for ambition—or for action-movie gumption, even if a John Woo shootout in a restaurant and a knock-down, drag-out fistfight in a dilapidated building seem less than strictly crucial to the story and more like a mandated condition of getting a semi-cerebral genre throwback bankrolled.



The pleasures are of a borrowed nature, the stuff of third-, fourth-, maybe fifth-generation noir homage, just gussied up in sci-fi formal wear: all archetypes spouting purple verbiage while navigating a twisty missing-person mystery that pulls together, in the classic private-dick tradition, seemingly unrelated cases. Reminiscence, which stacks plot turns like manilla folders in an overstuffed filing cabinet (the situation comes to involve a rich philanderer, a futuristic super drug, and a dirty cop played by Cliff Curtis), is enjoyably dense but a little plodding. What it critically lacks is an engine of truly sweaty, involving obsession, the sense that its hero is profoundly haunted to his bones by the mirage of a love that’s slipped through his fingers like cigarette smoke. Jackman, who provided that by the armful in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, seems only half-submerged here: He’s the sleepy center of a genre-bending Big Sleep. As a result, the emotions feel half-formed, maybe half-recalled.


That titular process is nifty, though—and that goes beyond the way Nick’s device doubles as a tribute to the sad poetry of the moving picture and how it makes spectacle from desire and regret. In the most basic terms, The Tank is a flashback machine, providing information to characters and audience alike. Yet Joy, inspired by the endless possibilities of her fantasy tech, keeps creating clever wrinkles with it. Time jumps become rug pulls, as certain events are revealed to be past rather than present tense. One character delivers a passionate message to the future, confident in the knowledge that their words will be received through a projection of someone else’s memories. And in the film’s most bittersweet subplot, a widow exists in a limbo state of cherished past experience, an old clock shop constructed in her home, her brain running indefinitely through the same ancient scenario. In moments like these, Reminiscence reaches past its own memories of the detective stories of yore, to something sadder and truer and more distinctive.

[jo]

Update on Rotten Tomatoes -- 27 reviews in; Average Rating : 48 %

www.rottentomatoes.com/m/reminiscence_2021/reviews


***********************************************************************************


Users vote on IMDB ( 267 votes) : Average rating : 7.5 of 10

Votes of "6-10 of 10" account for an average of 83 % of total votes ; Predominantly favored by the male demos.

www.imdb.com/title/tt3272066/ratings/?ref_=tt_ov_rt

This might be an indication of a healthier box office reception.

[jo]

From Deadline --

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‘Reminiscence’ Review: Hugh Jackman Confronts His Memories In Stylish Mishmash Of Genres & Themes

By Pete Hammond

Pete Hammond
Awards Columnist/Chief Film Critic


'Reminiscence' Review: Hugh Jackman In LIsa

Making her feature writing-directing debut with Reminiscence, Lisa Joy proves she comes from the Nolan school of filmmaking, challenging audiences with complex themes that play with our heads and points of time. It shouldn’t be a surprise since her husband and creative partner on the hit TV series Westworld is Jonah Nolan, and her brother-in-law is Christopher Nolan. Give her props for igniting her own passion for the film noir genre and finding a way to wrap it all up in a romantic sci-fi concept that examines the meaning and worth of our memories.


Joy takes us on a journey into that memory bank via the gimmick of a new-age PI, or mind-bending detective (of sorts) named Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman), who operates a business in a very wet and dark Miami. He and his associate Watts (Thandiwe Newton), who once served admirably in the Gulf War with him, take people back in time via a Reminiscence machine, a pod-like bathtub in which you are submerged with weird headgear designed to help unlock specific memories that may offer clients new truths about themselves. Those “memories” are then played out in 3D-style holograms as if you are watching your past as a play. It’s an interesting device that Joy merges with a number of familiar cinematic genres including the doomed romance, suspense thriller, sci-fi head-scratcher, and most particularly 1940s and ’50s film noir of the sort in which Robert Mitchum might have starred.


In fact just like those private-eye antiheroes of all those black-and-white noirish dramas, Nick gets to narrate his own story and thoughts as he pretty quickly dives into an obsession with a mysterious new customer, Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), who comes in for a spin in the Reminiscence machine only to soon completely vanish. But why and how? Nick starts to lose his own mind, jumping into his device to find the answers of who Mae is, what his forgotten past has triggered, and how he can salvage a memory that ended sadly and perhaps reverse course in the process. Watts, a no-nonsense type personality with drinking problems and regrets of her own, wants none of this as she pleads with Nick to snap out of it. “Who gives a sh*t about this girl?” she asks him.

It is a good question because Joy’s entire deep dive into the past and all its mysteries floating to the surface depends on our investment in Mae and Nick’s relationship to her. Ferguson certainly plays her up as a Veronica Lake-y femme fatale (or think Kathleen Turner in Body Heat) crooning a sultry classic standard, “Where Or When,” that she sings in a nightclub Nick revisits, and it is a consistent theme throughout, not just musically but also storywise. “It seems we’ve stood and talked like this before/We looked at each other in the same way then/But who knows where or when?” the lyrics say.


Who knows indeed, but that is what Nick is determined to find out. There are all sorts of clues and a feeling that maybe Mae isn’t at all that she appears to be, or what Joy wants us to think she is, as we get to know her with Nick through his increasingly numerous dips in that tub and flashbacks. As a straight romance lost in time, this concept might have really worked ala Somewhere In Time, but Joy is, by necessity for what passes muster in major studio releases these days, forced to throw in some villains with evil ambition plus a couple of action sequences that could be out of any number of movies. There are also Blade Runner influences here, along with the fascination of time travel as defined in the mind. Can we reinvestigate our past, and for what purpose? How important are the memories that we leave behind?


Jackman is a comforting presence here where a big star is definitely needed to put this stuff across and keep us engaged. A little more humor might have helped, but he is earnest and emotionally engaged enough to make Nick’s plight believable in the circumstances. Newton actually has the most scenes to steal and thankfully she knows exactly how to steal them. Ferguson gets her moments toward the end, but by and large must play Mae for the enigma that she is. Cliff Curtis as a shady friend and cop named Cyrus Booth gets some nice scenes, and augments Daniel Wu’s underused Saint Joe in the bad guy department, both taking the plot into more familiar movie tropes.

The real stars here are cinematographer Paul Cameron, production designer Howard Cummings (who makes the most of shooting Miami in New Orleans, which is also used), and a terrific score from composer Ramin Djawadi. The latter three, along with Newton, all have collaborated with Joy on Westworld and they don’t let her down. Only the rather convoluted and over-expository script does that. But I have to say the movie is almost atmospheric enough to forgive some overwrought plotting. There are twists and turns toward the end that, for whatever reason, sadly really don’t have the impact Joy clearly intended. For all the effort Reminiscence is just not all that memorable. Still I applaud Joy for giving a try. It is not easy to pull off original, adult-oriented IP these days. For whatever flaws it certainly has, it also shows, as her work in television, that she has the chops to make something, well, unforgettable, but “who knows where or when?”

]

[jo]

What about reviews outside of the USA ( based on the IMDB voting, it seems the non-USA votes are much more favorable than the USA votes.

A film critic in Puerto Rico tweets his review summary --

[jo]

From Chicago Sun Times --

FILED UNDER:
MOVIES AND TV

ENTERTAINMENT AND CULTURE

COLUMNISTS
‘Reminiscence’: Too bad Hugh Jackman’s sci-fi noir about a memory machine is so forgettable
All the convoluted subplots are more than the average brain can handle.

By Richard Roeper Aug 18, 2021, 2:25pm CDT



Military vet Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman) makes a living accessing people’s memories in “Reminiscence.” Warner Bros.

It’s “The Maltese Falcon” meets “Inception” somewhere in the “Vanilla Sky” on the way to “Chinatown” in the inventive and ambitious but wildly convoluted and ultimately disappointing sci-fi noir “Reminiscence,” which careens this way and that, and this way and that, before running off the rails.

‘Reminiscence’: 2 out of 4

Warner Bros. presents a film written and directed by Lisa Joy. Rated PG-13 (for strong violence, drug material throughout, sexual content and some strong language). Running time: 116 minutes. Opens Friday at local theaters and on HBO Max.

The talented writer-director Lisa Joy is a prime creative force behind HBO’s “Westworld” and she clearly knows this territory, and there are moments of breathtaking beauty and fascinating weirdness in Joy’s feature directorial debut, but the screenplay veers down so many different pathways and never quite comes together, all the way to a coda that should pack an emotional punch but feels tacked-on and underwhelming.

Jackman’s Nick Bannister provides the gravel-voiced narration for a story set in near-future Miami (and later New Orleans,) some years after an unspecified global war left the citizenry literally knee deep in water, as most of the streets are now canals and it’s also so unbearably hot that virtually everyone sleeps all day and nothing ever happens until after sunset. (Only the wealthiest land barons live on an isolated, dry patch of real estate in the city.)

While serving in the military, Nick pioneered an interrogation technique by which he would attach a device to the subject’s cranium, immerse them in some sort of water-based solution and turn up the dials on a device that would allow Nick to access their memories. (For such a high-tech contraption, it kinda looks like something Phil Dunphy from “Modern Family” might have invented.) These days, Nick and his partner Watts (Thandiwe Newton), a former sharpshooter who served with Nick and has a serious drinking problem, have turned the device into a thriving business for miserable Miamians who make regular visits so they can access their favorite memories, as the machine makes them feel as if they’re inside the moment for the very first time. Pretty neat trick.


One night after closing, a ravishing redhead named Mae (Rebecca Ferguson, who co-starred with Jackman in “The Greatest Showman”) comes knocking and says she lost her keys and is hoping for a quick session so she can figure out where she left them. “Call a locksmith,” says Watts, who sizes up this dame and sees her for the femme fatale she surely is — but from the moment Nick sets eyes on Mae, he’s a goner. Suddenly our gruff and damaged loner is making his own memories, falling in love with this mysterious nightclub crooner who all too conveniently walked into his life, almost as if she had an agenda of her own.


The special effects in “Reminiscence” are pretty spectacular, whether we’re swooping over the waterlogged city or watching Nick’s clients enter their memories via a circular staging area. (Nick and Watts can actually see what their customers are experiencing.) Things remain interesting when Nick is summoned by the D.A. to use his machine to access the memories of possible suspects. (The authorities have to get a court order for that.) But then the coincidences start piling up, and we’re plunged into convoluted subplots involving a land baron and his apparently insane wife and his sniveling son, AND the land baron’s mistress, with whom he also has a son, and there’s this crime kingpin who peddles a highly addictive new drug, and a nasty enforcer who was nearly burned to death for skimming from his boss and is now on a mission to kill Nick, for reasons far too complicated to explain. Whew!


Former sharpshooter Watts (Thandiwe Newton) works with Nick on the mind-reading technology. Warner Bros.
By this point, Mae has disappeared, and our poor sap Nick is obsessed with finding out what happened to her, even as Watts keeps telling him to let it go, because Mae was nothing but trouble and most likely a scam artist and come on Nick, can’t you see Watts is obviously in love with you? She’s way cooler than that sketchy Mae anyway. Every time “Reminiscence” brings in a new character or introduces another wrinkle, the plot becomes that much more tangled, to the point where we’re ready for Nick to just shut down that damn machine and live in the moment. Even when it’s blazing hot and the taxis are now water taxis, there’s a lot going on in dystopian Miami.

[jo]

Den of Geek examines both the joys and missteps of the movie.

REVIEWS
Reminiscence Review: Hugh Jackman’s New Sci-fi Movie from Westworld Creator

Hugh Jackman searches for his missing love in Westworld co-creator Lisa Joy’s feature directorial debut.

By Don Kaye
|
August 18, 2021
|
Reminiscence opens on a striking image of a half-submerged Miami, with buildings rising out of the deepest part of the water like tombstones in a flooded graveyard, while the less inundated areas are filled with people splashing through knee-high water on foot or cruising blithely down streets in boats like they’re vacationing in Venice.

It’s a haunting visual metaphor for the movie’s thematic preoccupation with memory, and how human beings desperately cling to the memories that comfort them even as time works its slow, steady entropy on our lives and places. Both those recollections and those buildings will eventually vanish one day, leaving behind nothing but the waves.

Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman) plies his trade in those memories. In this not-too-distant future, where climate change and a war of indeterminate origin have wrecked a large portion of the planet for most of us, a technology has been developed in which people’s memories can be accessed from their brains and recorded. Those memories can be used for things like criminal investigations, but most clients come to Bannister’s lab — housed in an abandoned bank — to relive precious moments from their lives.

Into Bannister’s place one day comes Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), a beautiful, enigmatic lounge singer whose picture would no doubt be in any dictionary next to the words “femme fatale.” She’s ostensibly there to retrace her memories of the past day and find out where she left her house keys, but it isn’t too long before Bannister is intoxicated by her and the two begin a torrid affair — which abruptly ends with Mae’s disappearance.




Despite the disapproval of his faithful sole employee Emily “Watts” Sanders (Thandiwe Newton) — who is perhaps a little in love herself with her boss — Nick begins a dangerous journey to find Mae, probing both his own memories of their time together and a shadowy network of drug dealers, corrupt cops, and amoral oligarchs.

Reminiscence is the feature directorial debut of Lisa Joy, co-creator and executive producer of HBO’s Westworld (with her husband, Jonathan Nolan) and the upcoming video game adaptation Fallout. Like Westworld, not to mention a number of the films directed by her brother-in-law Christopher Nolan, Reminiscence combines several genres — in this case, dystopian science fiction with film noir — but never quite successfully meshes the two.



Joy certainly has a great eye for visuals: she and director of photography Paul Cameron (also from Westworld), along with production designer Howard Cummings, have crafted an alternately beautiful, eerie, and harrowing vision of a very plausible near future in which the coastline is rapidly disappearing and pushing one’s way through water is an everyday aspect of life (the sinking cityscapes are reminiscent — no pun intended — of those in Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, but are explored in more detail here).


Wealthy real estate barons (who live in a walled-off enclave, of course) seem to be mostly in charge, with the rest of the population getting by on a subsistence level, and the gradual accumulation of details about life — like the fact that no one goes out during the day because it’s too damn hot — paint a picture of a society that is clearly going through a slow-motion collapse.

All that interesting information, however, is not used particularly well by Joy’s original screenplay, which focuses primarily on the noirish quest by Jackman’s Bannister to find his lost love. The actor’s gravelly voice-over, which kicks off the film with a heap of aphorisms and exposition and reappears intermittently throughout, hints that Joy is still struggling with the clunky writing that has done a lot of damage to Westworld (and, strangely, seems to be a thing that the Nolan boys wrestle with as well).

So even though the film is always visually interesting, it moves rather slowly and at times comes across as inert, with the familiar beats of the story lacking any kind of real momentum. The shifts between “reality” and the characters’ accessed memories can be jarring and confusing as well, and the plot — which carries echoes of noir touchstones like Chinatown and Out of the Past — seems ultimately inconsequential, with a number of minor characters gaining importance so late in the game that the viewer doesn’t get a chance to connect or empathize with them (or even be clear on who they are).




The cast is uniformly fine, with Jackman doing his usual effective mix of vulnerability, determination, and raw anger, letting his natural charisma fill in the rest. Even though Ferguson is suitably sultry as the mysterious Mae, one never really feels the spark that’s supposed to crackle between them. Perhaps the best performance comes from the always excellent Newton, who brings a matter-of-fact practicality to the role of Watts while also imbuing her with genuine emotional depth.


With such a good cast (which also includes a nice villainous turn from Cliff Curtis), great visuals, and the intriguing possibilities of the world she’s built, it’s a shame that Joy’s script never really adds up to much more than what Bannister calls in his voiceover “a series of moments.” Credit to Joy as well for ending the movie on a low-key note instead of with the usual fire and explosions, but for a movie about memory and its powerful hold on us, Reminiscence never finds a way to lodge itself in one’s mind.

[jo]

Scott Mendelson of Forbes rates it 7 of 10!

BREAKING|Aug 18, 2021,12:10pm EDT|2,379 views

‘Reminiscence’ Review: Hugh Jackman Anchors Warner Bros’ Original Sci-Fi Success
Scott Mendelson

'Reminiscence' WARNER BROS.


Opening Thursday night in theaters and debuting Friday morning on HBO Max, Reminiscence is the latest in Warner Bros.’ heroic attempt to both remain a regular/old-school movie studio and to continually offer the kind of old-school “movie-movies” that were once the bread and butter of a vibrant theatrical film industry. It is an original sci-fi film, rooted in a strong “What if?” hook and anchored by glamorous movie stars acting out pulpy film noir detective storytelling. That it is a big-budget original fantasy written and directed by Lisa Joy (a... gasp... female filmmaker) is icing on the “what we say we want” cake, which makes its likely commercial doom all the more frustrating. The film is about the ability to revisit moments of your own past, to replay your own memories. Reminiscence made me want to revisit a time when a film like this might have been a hit.

Set in a future where climate change has led to worldwide war and global flooding, Reminiscence concerns a veteran (Hugh Jackman) who has become a kind of “private eye of the mind,” using technology developed to interrogate prisoners to delve into peoples’ memories. For a fee, you can revisit a memory, be it for nostalgic pleasure or for figuring out where you left your car keys. The business isn’t exactly booming, which is why Nick Bannister and Watts (Thandiwe Newton) moonlight for the Miami Dade prosecutors office. As Nick would say (and the kids from Ready Player One would second), it’s easy to get fixated on the past when there’s nothing to look forward to in the future. Anyway, in walks a mysterious lounge singer (Rebecca Ferguson) looking for her lost car keys, quickie job that leads to a romantic entanglement and (after she mysteriously vanishes) obsessive investigation.

The “What happened to Mae?” plot takes Nick to various corners of his city, while interacting with various criminal elements of high and low status. There is a distinct pleasure in seeing how this original fantasy both lays out the rules and caveats of its non-IP mythology and how its old-school mystery unravels in a logical and precise fashion. The film runs a tight 116 minutes, and it offers a variety of action beats (a terrific shoot-out in act one, a waterlogged chase in act two, etc.) amid its engrossing dialogue beats. While Jackman still *looks* relatively young, he moves and fights like a 52-year-old man who was never good at the fisticuffs (it’s implied that he was good at defusing violent conflicts back in his war days). And, yeah, in non-yellow highlighter fashion, it has much to say about the lure of nostalgia even in a world gone to hell.



None of this will reinvent the wheel. The “you can travel into your own memories” hook is a gimmick with which to enhance a pretty conventional hardboiled detective story. Likewise, the film’s post-climate change setting offers glorious visuals of a flooded American city (folks use paddle boats to travel where streets once stood above water) but are mostly seasoning for what otherwise would have been a much cheaper flick. Still, commercial considerations aside, the film’s over/under $70 million budget is absolutely on the screen. This is a big movie that looks truly big (kudos to Paul Cameron) in that way (multiple distinct locations, copious speaking parts, a big-screen sensibility) which we took for granted before the streaming era. Both locale and the sci-fi gimmick play crucial and satisfying roles in the narrative’s eventual outcome. If you can and are willing to venture out to a theater, I’d suggest you do so.

Reminiscence features real movie stars (Ferguson and Jackman are both ridiculously good-looking and actually get to have an adult romantic relationship) and character actors (among them Cliff Curtis and Daniel Wu) in a visually scrumptious biggie aimed at adults (it’s only PG-13 by virtue of not drowning in carnage or hard profanity). We get good actors playing scenes and having interesting conversations about interesting subject matter. The film’s memory hole fantasy is used to enrich an otherwise standard noir tale and its stock characters. There is a confidence and competence on display, both behind and in front of the camera, that makes Reminiscence a genuinely engrossing old-school movie. Would the folks who will likely ignore this one in theaters or on HBO Max would have otherwise shown up if it were a padded-out-to-six-episodes HBO miniseries? “This miniseries could have been a movie.” is the new “This meeting could have been an email.”

[jo]

A positive review from Manohla Dargis from the NYTimes --

‘Reminiscence’ Review: Out of the Past, Into the Future (and Back)
In her feature debut, the co-creator of HBO’s “Westworld” toys with time, space, clichés and conventions in a narrative hall of mirrors.

Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson in “Reminiscence,” a new film by Lisa Joy.

By Manohla Dargis

Aug. 19, 2021, 1:22 p.m. ET
ReminiscenceDirected by Lisa JoyMystery, Romance, Sci-Fi, ThrillerPG-131h 56m



Highfalutin, lightly enjoyable mush, “Reminiscence” is one of those speculative fictions that are at once undernourished and overcooked. It makes no sense (despite all the explaining), but it draws you in with genre beats, pretty people and the professional polish of its machined parts. It’s shiny and pricey and looks good on the big screen; it is also the newest addition to what now plays like the Nolan Family Extended Universe.

The writer-director of “Reminiscence” is Lisa Joy who, with her husband, Jonathan Nolan, created the HBO series “Westworld.” Jonathan Nolan has helped write some of his brother Christopher’s films, notably “Memento” and “Interstellar,” and served as a producer on “Reminiscence.” Although these entertainments have their obvious differences, including in quality, the family DNA is evident in their embrace of narrative elasticity and interest in the labyrinths of the mind (also: gunplay and hot women). With degrees of success, they play with time and space, storytelling conventions and human consciousness. “It’s all a construct,” a character says in “Westworld.” “None of it is real.”

That character is played by Thandiwe Newton, one of the stars of “Reminiscence,” a kinked tale in which the divide between reality and its facsimiles is blurred. Here, Newton plays Watts, a crusty, no-nonsense veteran with a booze problem and an obvious thing for her boss, an old war buddy, Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman in squinty tough-guy mode). Set in a fairly benign-looking dystopia — Miami is partly underwater but jumping — they run a business where customers can recover favorite and forgotten memories. After clients strip and lie semi-immersed in a tub, Nick plugs them into a machine that renders their memories into lifelike or, rather, movielike 3-D projections.




Trouble arrives in the form of a slinky redhead, Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), who can’t find her keys. Struck dumb, seriously dumb by her mere and unremarkable presence, Nick falls fast and hard, and soon tumbles into the kind of complicated trouble that inevitably bedevils noir heroes with granite jaws and bleeding hearts. A great deal ensues, some of it nonsensical, some of it diverting. For a short while, the movie drifts along agreeably as Nick and Mae’s gauzy romance heats up, and then Joy shifts gears, flexing her action-genre muscles with violence and rampaging villains. And, much as in “Westworld,” the movie uses memory to explore its characters’ humanity or lack thereof.



Like Nick’s clients, “Reminiscence” oscillates between the past and the present, which fits a thriller nestled at the intersection of film noir and science fiction. Yet while Joy has handsomely kitted out her future world with ominous cascades of water and other apocalyptic flourishes — the rich live on dry land while the poor struggle to keep from drowning, literally and figuratively — the past exerts a stronger pull on her. She treads a lot of familiar genre ground, which is expected (and fine!), but she also stuffs “Reminiscence” with so many cinematic allusions that the movie itself soon feels like a very thin copy. Pastiche comes with the neo-noir territory but can also inundate it.


When Nick walks down a mean street, the dark city gleaming, the image sets the scene. For some viewers, it will likely unleash a chain of associations: Raymond Chandler, Humphrey Bogart, Harrison Ford. Certainly the vision of another lonely man of honor piques your interest as you wait for Joy to clarify her intentions, revealing whether she’s having fun, rethinking golden Hollywood oldies or both. One problem with citing favorites is that the imitations often wither when set against their dazzling influences, which is what happens when Mae sings a Rodgers-and-Hart standard in a strapless, side-slit gown clearly modeled on the one that Rita Hayworth immortalized in “Gilda.”

Ferguson is an attractive if regrettably wan presence in “Reminiscence,” though it’s hard to imagine who, other than a cartoon femme fatale à la Jessica Rabbit, could even approach the devastating charms of Hayworth’s Gilda. It’s equally difficult to think of many actors who could handle Joy’s cliché-ridden, melodramatically engorged dialogue, which consistently trips up her actors. Joy has a feel for spectacle and can handle bodies and bullets flying through space. When she’s not narrowing her focus on big heads, she fills the frame with strong, clear images — a bed on a roof, a city in water — that have a solidity that helps anchor the movie, which is generally better seen than heard.

Reminiscence
Rated PG-13 for action-movie violence, including gunplay and immolation. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters and on HBO Max.

[jo]

The tweeter also writes for THe AVClub ( their official review of Reminiscence is written by AADowd -- see above)

He is a writer/editor for AVClub which submitted an official review - a POSITIVE one - to Rotten Tomatoes.[/quote]
wrote a very thoughtful insight on Hugh Jackman's evolving acting persona, including a long examination of his Reminiscence portrayal and how it relates to his Wolverine and other roles.

Aug 20, 2021 6:58:54 GMT -5 jo said:

MOVIES
REMINISCENCE SHOWS WHY HUGH JACKMAN CAN’T GO BACK TO WOLVERINE AGAIN
AUGUST 19, 2021 JESSE 0 COMMENTS


Ryan Reynolds is at it again: A new round of press for his new movie Free Guy has meant another parallel round of Reynolds goofing on his former co-star of X-Men Origins: Wolverine—not least because Jackman does quick vocal cameo in the mostly video-game-set comedy. As it happens, Jackman also has a new movie out this month, so his press rounds for Reminiscence have included him discussing how much Reynolds wants to do a Deadpool/Wolverine team-up, and how Jackman doesn’t think that’s in the cards.

Reynolds and Jackman did, of course, team up briefly during that Wolverine prequel that introduced the wisecracking mercenary Wade Wilson, played by Reynolds (as well as the mutated and muted version that re-appears at that film’s misbegotten climax). Since then, Reynolds has resurrected Deadpool as an extremely popular and self-referential R-rated superhero, while Jackman has gone on to make two Wolverine movies that were actually good-to-great. Seems like everything worked out for both of them, but in the spirit of nothing being left alone, it makes sense enough that Reynolds would like a reunion that hitches Deadpool’s insouciant wisecrackery to Wolverine’s gruff irritability. It would probably be a fun and funny variation on the X-Men series that fans would enjoy.

It would also place the sensibilities of two major stars directly at odds. And not necessarily in the usual, familiar buddy-comedy way.

Jackman understand the value of franchise allegiance better than most. His career was jumpstarted by his casting as Wolverine over 20 years ago in the first X-Men movie, and he went on to play the part as the lead in six more films, plus two cameos. But most of his non-Wolverine roles are more like his part in Reminiscence, where he plays a noirish sorta-hero who isn’t sure if he’s a de facto cop or a manipulated patsy. Last year, he gave one of his finest performances as a Long Island educator whose people-pleasing slickness hides a career of embezzlement (as well as his closeted homosexuality) in Bad Education. He’s also played charismatic but doomed politician Gary Hart in The Front Runner and the obsessed parent of a kidnapped child in Prisoners. Not every Jackman character is this tortured—one of his biggest hits, The Greatest Showman, is a family-friendly musical that translates his Broadway chops to the big screen—but he seems to save most of his crowd-pleasing for when he plays in front of an actual crowd. In most of his movies, of late, any showmanship masks a hurt, a void, or both.

That’s the side of him that Reminiscence favors. He plays Nick Bannister, proprietor of a rundown facility where he guides people through a tour of their most cherished memories. In a flooded and ravaged Miami of the future, customers come to Nick, who outfits them with a high-tech crown, partially submerges them in a tank, sedates them, and talks them toward the memory they want to relive—a combination truth serum and hypnotic dream state. Nick understands his clients because he himself is stuck in the past; it’s revealed early on that some of what we’re seeing is his memory of when he met May (Rebecca Ferguson), a stunning mystery woman who walked into his life with a simple request for him to help find her misplaced car keys.



Reminiscence builds its own memory-chamber thingie out of the many, many other movies it recalls: Start with the recent time-jumping, memory-warping oeuvre of Christopher Nolan, whose sister-in-law Lisa Joy wrote and directed this film, produced by Nolan’s brother Jonathan, and continue through a litany of Philip K. Dick checkpoints like Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report, with stops at Vanilla Sky and a host of more overtly noirish movies featuring dames, drink, convoluted amateur investigations, and slightly clumsy ruminations. By comparison to her many touchstones, Joy’s obsessions feel a bit secondhand, like she’s more transfixed by the cinema of elegiac memories than the actual experiences that inform them. The ample time that Jackman and Ferguson do share on screen feels illusory, with none of the real-life notes struck by something like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Yet their elusiveness, the feeling that their archetypal, noir-ready, overnarrated courtship starts to fade before the movie’s exposition is even over, also lends Reminiscence some weight, as does Jackman’s accumulated weariness. No longer cartoonishly jacked, coifed, or clawed, he’s still outfitted in ways that recall Wolverine: In one scene he sports that essential Wolverine On Film accessory, a white tank top; when he plugs himself into the watery tank, it recalls the endless flashbacks to Logan’s own foggy past. Even weirder, other elements of the movie recall The Greatest Showman, of all things, wherein he plays another man bewitched by the beauty and singing voice of a character played by Rebecca Ferguson. (There’s even a scene using sheets hung to dry on rooftops, like an early, romantic musical number in Showman.)

It’s hard to say how intentional any of this really is; this movie doesn’t feel like the work of someone who considers a shlocky revisionist 2017 musical about P.T. Barnum iconic. But the details are there anyway, Jackman’s film career (which also includes a genuine Christopher Nolan movie, The Prestige, with a particularly dark turn for his character) floating through the firmament of this beautiful, underpopulated world. When the movie breaks out into bizarre action scenes, it feels dreamlike, rather than obligatory.

The way Jackman rattles around this effects-laden landscape, looking dissatisfied and lost, serves as a reminder of how gratifyingly uninterested Jackman has seemed in franchise-building in recent years. Logan, his last superhero movie, actually attempted to put a period at the end of a 20-year sentence, and did so with surprising emotion and credibility. (It’s one of the few superhero movies that’s legitimately difficult to watch in parts for reasons other than bad CG.) The Jackman of Reminiscence seems acutely aware of how dangerous nostalgia can be, even if his character may be ready to acquiesce to it.

It might not be fair to compare the brightly colored antics of Free Guy to the brooding ambition of Reminiscence. But they’re both movies that assimilate spare parts into virtual worlds—and Free Guy is as eager to please as Reynolds, just as Reminiscence is as self-consciously serious as Jackman. This also means that outside of their virtual realms, Reminiscence has a credible tactility, with actual sets and memorable imagery, while Free Guy feels as simulated outside the computer as it does inside. The Reynolds film bends its most interesting sci-fi ideas, about the creation of a full-on artificial life form evolving from the questionable environment of a derivative videogame, into a story of cheerful self-actualization. There’s nothing wrong with that, exactly, but it underlines a basic lack of compatibility between Reynolds and Jackman, even if they enjoy joshing around the margins of each others’ projects. After spending two decades playing a man who barely ages, Jackman taps into middle-aged regrets that don’t have much of a place in a Disney-stamped blockbuster-to-be. Meanwhile, in Free Guy, Reynolds labors to look, sound, and act like a daisy-fresh naif, sort of a peculiar shtick to be accessing in your mid-forties. Of course, both men have other modes: Look at Adventureland or Mississippi Grind, where Reynolds plays a man whose slickness has started to calcify and crack; or look at the deadpan humor Jackman brings to his brooding X-Men role. They might well be a great buddy team in the making, in some X-Men spinoff or another realm entirely. But his performance in Reminiscence, even when it succumbs to hard-boiled affectation, makes it difficult to picture him joshing around back in comic-book world, ready to turn nostalgia back into a bloodless playground.

[jo]

www.cnet.com/news/reminiscence-review-hugh-jackman-falls-for-femme-fatale-in-engaging-thriller/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter#ftag=CAD590a51e

Reminiscence review: Hugh Jackman falls for femme fatale in engaging thriller
Inception meets Chinatown in this entertaining near-future noir in theaters and streaming on HBO Max.


Richard Trenholm
Aug. 20, 2021 10:02 a.m. PT



They don't make 'em like this anymore. Not only is Reminiscence a meticulous re-creation of old-school noir thrillers, it's the kind of midsize original story that's been edged out of multiplexes by sequels and franchises in recent years. It's fitting, then, that Reminiscence is also a story about memories, reminding you of times gone by while serving up an entertaining slice of star-powered sci-fi.


Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Ferguson and Thandiwe Newton star in Reminiscence, in theaters now. Like other Warner Bros. films such as The Suicide Squad and Dune, it became available on streaming service HBO Max on the same day as its theatrical release and will stick around for a month.



In the near future, waves crash against skyscrapers as the city of Miami lies drowned. War and ecological devastation have remade the world, but this isn't a post-apocalyptic dystopia: things continue mostly the same, particularly with the rich continuing to exploit the poor. Splashing through waterlogged streets, Jackman plays a dogged gumshoe who trades in helping people relive happier memories, only to be blindsided by Rebecca Ferguson walking through his door in an unforgettable red dress.

Writer and director Lisa Joy has a lot of fun recreating the classic film noir template: a femme fatale tempts a troubled guy in a rumpled suit to pick at a mystery he knows he shouldn't, uncovering corruption among low-lifes and high society alike. But Joy is also the co-creator of HBO hit Westworld, and Reminiscence shares that near-future setting in which new technology provides humanity with escape -- only to find that love and hate, mayhem and murder can't be escaped so easily.


As you'd expect from the people behind Westworld, there's a rug-pulling twist or two in the meticulously constructed whodunnit plot, which gets more and more complicated in classic film noir style. Again, this serves up memories of everything from Farewell My Lovely to Chinatown. At the heart of the mystery is Rebecca Ferguson as a seductive femme fatale, by turns fragile and conniving, backlit with golden light.

Jackman plays back people's treasured memories through a machine called the Tank, which itself recalls the dream-invading tech in Inception. There are definite wobbles in the explanation of how the memory-mining gadget works -- for example, recollections are seen not from the point of view of the person remembering, but as if the subject was filmed by a camera crew capturing things the subject couldn't have seen at the time. The tank is a nifty device for uncovering clues, although it does reduce Jackman to a passive observer for stretches of the film. That said, this part of the story touches on a theme of voyeurism that reflects back at us as viewers. And in the figure of the femme fatale, there's an intriguing theme of seeing what you want to see.


In between memories, Jackman splashes across ruined buildings demanding answers and throwing punches, while his gravelly voice-over riffs on "the past" and how it "haunts us." Backing him up is Westworld star Thandiwe Newton in a slightly thankless sidekick role. The supporting cast is a largely anonymous line-up of stock secondary characters (grumpy DA, bent cop, sleazy land baron) but Daniel Wu stands out as a lissom crime kingpin with a nice line in shiny jackets.

A couple of stylishly bruising fight scenes perk things up, while the intricate film noir plotting is given a visually stylish twist by sun-dappled cinematography. People live at night, suggesting humanity is out of balance with nature, and so the remorseless sun sends piercing shafts of light cutting across glowingly lit scenes. Paul Cameron's cinematography is complemented by a growling score from Game of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi, although the music occasionally meanders into melancholy where a dash of urgency would have fired up the slower parts of the story.


Reminiscence is an assured big-screen debut from Lisa Joy, playfully recreating classic movie tropes with a modern twist. They may not make 'em like this these days, but they really should.

[jo]

Reminiscence Review: Hugh Jackman Masterfully Headlines A Bittersweet Sci-Fi Noir
MIKE REYES
AUG. 18. 2021 4:00 PM

Action, romance, and corruption mix together in a blend that allows Reminiscence to wow as an original movie that indulges in the comforts of a very familiar sort of story.


Nostalgia has always been a powerful lure for those who seek it. In the world of writer/director Lisa Joy’s Reminiscence, that power is amped to the extreme, as a future sees human society looking to forget their troubles through their past triumphs. Blending her professed love of film noir and cutting edge sci-fi, Joy has delivered the goods in a movie that’s unlike anything you’ve seen in some time. And with Hugh Jackman masterfully headlining a notable cast of actors, this story lands like a bittersweet dream.

In fact, it’s Jackman’s protagonist of Nicholas Bannister that really ties together the worlds in which Reminiscence plays around. A veteran of a future war and living in a Miami ravaged by climate change, Bannister helps people relive their best days through advanced technology that can help people re-inhabit their memories. Embodying a perfect noir protagonist, Hugh Jackman goes from being a man in control to someone totally obsessed. And naturally, it’s because of a mysterious woman who drifts into his life, knocking the protagonist out of his usual orbit of control.

As he falls for Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), a client whose disappearance triggers one hell of a rabbit hole for him to fall into, Nick finds himself slowly entangled in a mystery of which he never asked to be a part. But the resulting investigation, and its results, lead Reminiscence’s curious lead to unravel a plot that feels right at home with the classic pulp detective stories it seeks to scho. Danger threatens him and his partner, Watts (Thandiwe Newton), and in true noir fashion the closer Nicholas gets to the truth, the higher the stakes happen to be. And when it comes to the audience, those raising stakes couldn’t be more effective.

Reminiscence boasts Hugh Jackman as its lead, but the entire cast shines from start to finish.
Functionally, Hugh Jackman is Reminiscence’s lead, as Nicholas Bannister is the gateway to this expansive future that turns a blind eye towards its pervasive unfortunate circumstances. With the haves and the have nots more sharply defined, and the water level rising ever higher, Lisa Joy shows us a society that’s more of a logical extension of the one we currently live in rather than a far flung dystopia. Which makes the performances of Jackman and his castmates all the more significant.

Flanked by Rebecca Ferguson’s alluring mystery woman and Thandiwe Newton’s dependable lieutenant, Hugh Jackman’s investigation into Reminiscence’s central mystery holds the sway that any good tale should. This entire “case” is important to Nick, and the fact that he’s not even a detective makes it more exciting to follow. Watching him relive the romance of the past while struggling to maintain control in the present is the push and pull that makes for fantastic noir cinema. While he may be the centerpiece of the story, both Ferguson and Newton’s are equally essential to cementing the world of Reminiscence.



Fans of Lisa Joy’s seamless blend of sci-fi and noir sensibilities are going to love taking this particular ride.
If you’re a Westworld fan, then you should already buy yourself a ticket to Reminiscence. That’s not to say that Lisa Joy is merely recycling her tools and approach from the hit HBO series to simply cash in on a hot trend. Rather, the world of her feature directorial debut is severely adjacent to the world she’s helped craft on the small screen. But her previous world building has also helped shape Reminiscence into a mystery ride worth taking.

Lisa Joy’s fandom of this sort of storytelling is prominent in Reminiscence, as she’s crafted a neo-noir that takes the style of classics in that particular genre and upgrades them for an advanced future. What’s more, rather than embodying the pitch black bleakness these sorts of movies have been known for, Joy allows for hope to grow in this seemingly hopeless world. Never compromising the integrity of the story for the sake of brightening the story, Reminiscence allows happiness to take hold, but still firmly plants its feet in the world of genre where there will always be a price to pay for such pursuits.

A mysterious love story of the future, Reminiscence takes a past genre and turns it into a modern beauty.
Reminiscence is a mysterious love story of the future, which sees a man pursuing his romantic interests wherever they may take him. As Hugh Jackman winds through that web of mystery, the dynamics of that relationship only get more complicated, and the results will affect the world that he lives in – for better or worse. What may seem like a throwaway detail, or a moment of exposition that exists merely to give Reminiscence’s future Miami some color, could in fact be something that becomes much more important down the line.



That’s the true beauty of Lisa Joy’s film, as it’s in a world so meticulously crafted that the viewer is allowed to follow along with Nick’s own shocked revelations in what feels like real time. Everything has a purpose, and there’s no such thing as a coincidence in the narrative of Reminiscence. Investing valuable time and energy into both the visual and thematic thrills that await moviegoers, this is a movie that will live in the memories of viewers who give it the opportunity to do so. Action, romance, and corruption mix together in a blend that allows Reminiscence to wow as an original movie that indulges in the comforts of a very familiar sort of story. Though it may be debuting simultaneously on the big screen and streaming, it’s well worth taking the time to go to the movies and enjoy in the traditional theatrical setting.

RATING: 4 star rating out of five


[/quote]

[jo]

popculturemaniacs.com/reminiscence-review/

Reminiscence Review
August 25, 2021
Kieran Freemantle


Sci-fi and noir thrillers are two genres that many filmmakers have merged together. Directors like Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, and Christopher Nolan have made great films in the neo-noir genre and Westworld co-creator Lisa Joy attempts to join them with her feature film debut.

In the future, Miami has been flooded by rising sea levels. Dikes and dams have been erected to try to keep the floodwaters out, but they are only holding off the inevitable. The city suffers from a wealth divide that’s bubbling up. Because the present is so bleak people escape to the past through memory machines.

Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman) runs a business in Downtown Miami where people can relive their memories. One night a lounge singer, Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), visits Nick and the pair form a romance. When Mae disappears Nick sets to find the Englishwoman.

Reminiscence seems like it’s going to be one of the biggest flops of the year. In its first weekend, Reminiscence only made $5 million worldwide and only has a 38% on Rotten Tomatoes. This was a shame because in a cinematic landscape of franchises and CGI-heavy action films Reminiscence was refreshing. It was a film that was a mature mystery and attempting some deeper themes.



Reminiscence’s themes were both psychological and social. This was a film that centred around the power of memory. People escape in their memories, the District Attorney’s office uses the memory machine to interrogate suspects, and Nick has to use his own memories and other people to try and find Mae. Joy was using her mystery and setting to explore the function of the mind, similar to what Inception and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind attempted. Joy is married to Christopher Nolan’s brother which has led to Reminiscence being unfairly compared to her brother-in-law’s work.

The use of memories and nostalgia acts as a commentary on today’s culture. A lot of today’s pop culture-based is on existing franchises or replicating styles from previous decades. Politics also uses nostalgia with some voters and politicians longing for a glorious past. Reminiscence was similarly themed to Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One because reality was so awful that people escaped to another world. In Ready Player One, the alternative world was a nostalgia fuelled virtual reality.

Joy taps into big issues facing the world: climate change and the wealth divide. We can’t escape news about climate change and the impending crisis it will cause. Joy plays on those fears and shows a world where main cities are flooded but humanity is so stubborn that they do try and hold back the water. This was a world where the rich build higher and higher flood defences and the poorest members of society have been forced onto the water. Miami was a powder keg that was about to go off.

Joy did create a fascinating world which made for a great backdrop for Nick’s mystery. As stated, there was a class divide with lots of political and corporate intrigue. Due to the heat of the day Miami had become nocturnal. The world felt more believable than some other cinematic sci-fi worlds and I would have liked to have seen more of it.

Reminiscence was a trope-heavy film. Like many film noir stories, there was an emphasis on the lighting where smoke and dust-filled rooms and many scenes highlighted the darkness. This was a film that justified why it was mostly set at night. There was a gothic look to some locations: Nick’s operation was based in an abandoned bank and there was a scene that took in a flooded theatre. Another scene had a man wearing a suit and a fedora and Thandiwe Newton got to be a hard-drinking badass wearing a trenchcoat.

Like many noir-style stories, the events in Reminiscence were caused by a dame. A woman comes to the protagonist for help, the woman disappears and the protagonist becomes obsessed as they try to find her. It was a standard plot and that leads to Reminiscence’s biggest promise: feeling derivative. The plot wasn’t much different to other sci-fi thriller films like Mute and What Happened to Monday where the driving incident was a disappearance. Mae’s disappearance and Nick’s search for her could have fitted in a contemporary setting.

Nick provided a voiceover for the film with Jackman speaking in a hard-boiled manner. But it came off as exploratory as he talks about the world he lived in. It was done for the benefit of the audience. Joy was trying to ape the tropes of the noir genre that she did things that didn’t benefit her film.

Joy was a competent director and she did craft great imagery and scenes. The flooded Miami was striking as many tall buildings were surrounded by water and travelled across via different modes of transport. When Nick had to chase a lead in the city’s slums it showed Joy’s potential as an action director. An emotionally powerful scene was when Nick spoke to a hologram during his search for Mae.


It was a shame that Reminiscence underperformed at the box office. It deserved more of an audience and hopefully, it will find it on home release. Ambition can at least be admired.




3.8 (presumably of 5 stars)

Summary

A solid film for fans of the sci-fi noir genre.

[jo]

A well-thought out review - focusing on a film essentials while citing those that could have improved the story-telling


www.polygon.com/reviews/22634846/reminiscence-review-lisa-joy

Lisa Joy’s sci-fi movie Reminiscence lays out a terrible future by staring back at the past
A Westworld showrunner branches out into a new form of beautiful dystopia

By Tasha Robinson@TashaRobinson Aug 20, 2021, 7:14pm EDT


Roughly speaking, there are two kinds of dystopian science fiction movies: The ones that assume there’s a way for protagonists to fight back against whatever’s warped the world, and the ones that cynically decide there isn’t. The fight-back films (like The Hunger Games or Elysium or Divergent or Ready Player One) generally create one big representative villain for a hero to battle in order to set things right. But while the don’t-bother-it’s-too-late films tend to be less rousing and thrilling, they’re often much more nuanced and textured, and more relatable to those of us who live in a world without one simple, obvious villain.

Westworld creator Lisa Joy’s noir-future mystery Reminiscence shows why. It takes place in a future where the big evils have already taken place, and there’s no sense that anyone can fight them. So instead, the characters fight their own smaller, more personal battles — against despair as much as anything else. Reminiscence doesn’t hold out a whole lot of hope for a better future, but it at least operates at a level that feels real and familiar, no matter how fantastical the actual details get.


In Reminiscence, human-induced climate change melted the polar icecaps, the ocean levels rose, and a series of wars were fought to secure waning resources and precious dry land. The setting is a flooded future Miami, where giant walls hold the sea mostly at bay in some neighborhoods, while other areas now resemble Venice, with canals in place of streets, and boat traffic replacing cars. The daytime temperatures are also so prohibitive that Miami has become fully nocturnal



But there’s no sense that anyone’s working to fix the problem. The floods and wars and heat aren’t just the calculated backdrop for Reminiscence’s actual story, they’re the long-accepted backdrop for an entire culture of drained and impotent characters. The changes wrought on the city show up in the background of practically every shot, but apart from Hugh Jackman’s dreary voiceover slathering on exposition, no one much comments on any of this. It’s all just what they expect from the crapsack future they’ve ended up in. No wonder the movie’s primary theme is nostalgia, and obsessively hanging onto lost comforts.

Jackman stars as Nick Bannister, proprietor of a small shop that offers its clients full-immersion flashbacks to their own pasts. With drugs, an immersion tank, and an electrical brain-induction rig, Nick and his old military partner Watts (Westworld’s Thandiwe Newton) let people fully re-experience their own memories, perfect down to every tiny detail, and complete with you-are-there sensation. A stage-like visualizer simultaneously shows those memories in stylish 3D glory to anyone present. The visualizer initially seems beside the point — if the tech is just designed so clients can relive their pasts, why does it matter if other people in the room can see those memories too?

But Joy brings the same thought-through exploration of technology to Reminiscence that she brought to Westworld. The new tech looks flashy and cinematic, but it also has a society-shifting impact: It’s used as a deposition tool in the courts, to help unravel the truth of a situation, and as an interrogation tool for the police, to dig memories out of criminals. And in those cases, the memories are more important to the institutional witnesses watching them play out in living color than to the drugged and immobilized subjects offering them up.

But that’s all background as well. The real purpose of the visualizer in Reminiscence is to let Nick fully fall into his past, as he gets lost in the mysteries of his memories. One night when he and Watts are seeing their usual roster of clients, a woman named Mae (Rebecca Ferguson) slips in and asks for help remembering where she put her keys. She and Nick soon become lovers, until she suddenly disappears. Convinced something terrible has happened to Mae, Nick obsessively begins reliving his own memories, looking for clues. Gradually, he gets hints that she wasn’t who she said she was, and he’s pulled into a criminal conspiracy, with Watts reluctantly trailing along after him.


Watts is clearly at least somewhat in love with Nick, but she’s also ruthlessly practical, and clear-eyed about his gormless obsession with a two-faced woman who appears to have moved on. That three-way dynamic, and the film’s focus on music, performance, the tech-assisted reliving of memories, and a rising social unrest all heavily recall Kathryn Bigelow’s gloriously messy, criminally unavailable 1995 science fiction movie Strange Days. Even the specific racial dynamic of the casting seems deliberate — Newton’s role in this film corresponds to Angela Bassett’s in Strange Days, and they’re similarly conceived as hard-eyed, self-contained warrior-women who are fully aware they’re half in love with sentimental chumps, and are more than a little angry about it. (As audiences may be — the specter of yet another competent, badass woman of color trailing around after a drippy, self-absorbed white dude who barely notices her is Reminiscence’s worst echo of what was already a painful dynamic.)

But while Reminiscence often seems like a nostalgic echo of Bigelow’s film, it leans even harder into the traditional noir-movie dynamic than Strange Days, as Nick tries to run down Mae’s past. In some ways, she’s a traditional femme fatale, a beautiful mystery who comes into the life of the hero-patsy, upends it, then heads back to her troubles, tempting him to follow her and fix them. But there’s more to her than the clichés, as well. Ferguson keeps her alluring and opaque, unreadable enough to help sell the mystery. Jackman, meanwhile, turns Nick into a wide-open book, nakedly yearning for the one good thing he had in his squalid recent life, and unable to believe it might have been a lie.

Individual viewers are certainly going to bring their own emotional biases to interpreting Nick, and that’s going to heavily shape whether they see him as a romantic hero, gamely pursuing true love at all cost, or an annoying stalker who constantly endangers himself and others by refusing to let go of his irrational obsessions. He’s certainly a little of both, but it’s a funny irony that a film so hung up on relived memories is going to play out so differently to different audience members, based on their own memories of past relationships. Jackman is a charismatic performer as always, but the script makes him repetitive, clueless, simplistic, and borderline abusive, and it’s easy to find him and his quest off-putting. Then again, the movies almost always reward this kind of dogged pursuit of a seemingly unwilling woman, so viewers’ memories of past rom-coms or noir movies may come into play in setting their expectations too.

As a noir mystery, Reminiscence is certainly solid, with a series of complications and surprising reveals, and a genre-friendly helping of double-crossings and double-dealings, of slimy mobsters and rich monsters. It mostly fails through its character dynamics, especially for anyone who isn’t swooning over Nick’s monomania. Nick’s soppy voiceover not only steers the audience toward maudlin self-pity, it overexplains things better left subtle and up to interpretation, and it prevents viewers from just quietly soaking in the movie’s elaborate dystopian spectacle. It’s an irritating, intrusive drag, constantly trying to steer the audience and tell them what to think or how to feel. Joy’s symbolism can be equally heavy-handed: a bit of business with a recurring lost queen from a deck of cards is a ridiculously gratuitous bit of stagecraft in a story about a missing woman.



It does feel throughout Reminiscence as though Joy doesn’t trust the audience to follow the story unless everything is explained, and re-explained, and re-communicated symbolically, and allowed to play out in flashback. The story simply isn’t that complicated, and the hand-holding slows down the action in what’s already a meandering, melancholy story.

And much like she did with Westworld, Joy gets painfully clever with Reminiscence’s timelines, using her invented tech to play around with the audience’s perceptions. But while there’s a lot of chicanery and contrivance in a plot that sometimes feels more focused on its mechanisms than its characters, the world’s flashback machines do wind up seeming like a natural tool for making a story like this work. They give Nick a window into other people’s perspectives on Mae, and as the truth unfolds, Joy gets to show viewers exactly how things happened by effortlessly waltzing them back into the past.

That’s another bit of subtle irony, in a movie that so expressly takes place in a terrible, and sometimes seemingly inevitable future. But then, Reminiscence is rarely about looking forward. It’s a weary, intent warning about where we might be headed, not just in a big-picture science fiction mode, but on an individual level, toward a world where the only comforts exist in our memories of what we once had. It’s depressing, in more ways than one, given its cynical take on what makes life worthwhile, and what we have to do to preserve it. But it’s also refreshing to see science fiction this aware of how actively we’re careening toward a terrible future, and how our response to it is likely to be specific, personal, and just as selfish as the behavior that gets us there in the first place.

Reminiscence debuts in theaters on August 20, and is currently streaming exclusively on HBO Max through September 19.

[jo]

This article was actually submitted to Rotten Tomatoes as the official review of ATLANTIC MONTHLY --

Aug 22, 2021 7:27:42 GMT -5 jo said:

The Atlantic summarizes the quality of Hugh Jackman's career choices ( presumably as a related article to promotion for REMINISCENCE) --

CULTURE
Why Is Hugh Jackman Still Underappreciated?
We know he can sing, rage, and plumb surprisingly dark depths. In Reminiscence, he also displays a continued embrace of his age.

By David Sims


Hugh Jackman has spent a surprising amount of his career floating in water tanks. In Reminiscence, the new sci-fi noir thriller on HBO Max from writer and director Lisa Joy, the actor plays Nick Bannister, a former soldier turned private investigator of the mind, probing people’s memories while they’re submerged in a big, futuristic bath. The twist is that Bannister is addicted to revisiting his own past, taking frequent dunks to plumb the details of a romance he had with a missing woman named Mae (played by Rebecca Ferguson). It’s a clever tale, anchored by Jackman doing reliable work as an antihero haunted by his sins.



Jackman has performed this role multiple times, right down to the aquatic fixation. In his Hollywood breakout, X-Men, he played the metal-clawed Wolverine, an amnesiac who was constantly flashing back to his genesis in a military fish tank. Maybe his best-ever work was in The Prestige, as a hammy magician whose signature escape trick involves … well, you know. Every A-list actor has motifs and themes running through their career, but Jackman’s has been unusually specific.

Yet those recurring baths also chart the journey of Jackman’s varied career: The many prongs of his stardom encompass comic-book heroism, sincere song and dance, and grim dramatics. For years, Jackman did not have the clout to launch a project as weird as Reminiscence, which serves as a solid reminder that he has been one of Hollywood’s most underrated stars of the past two decades. Because he emerged with a genre-defining superhero role just as those types of films were taking over the industry, Jackman was for long periods locked in the public eye. That success has let him collaborate with more daring filmmakers, pursue passion projects, and help make original movies like Reminiscence.


Though Jackman’s first major starring role was in X-Men, he was originally plucked from the world of musical theater, where his boisterously chipper turn as Curly in a West End production of Oklahoma! had won him plaudits. So his film follow-ups to X-Men were on the gentler side: the overlooked romantic comedies Someone Like You, where he played a charming cad, and Kate & Leopold, which cast him as an English gentleman. In an earlier era, that was the typical strategy for a new male actor in demand: get him in a generic rom-com quickly, along with a generic action thriller (in this case, the nonsensical hacker flick Swordfish).



But even though the X-Men movies kept succeeding, Jackman took a while to find his footing as a star in his own right. He won a Tony in 2004 for his work in The Boy From Oz, but Hollywood couldn’t find a proper musical project for him until years later. He hosted the Oscars to critical acclaim in 2009, an indication of his popularity with viewers worldwide, but his only non-Wolverine box-office hit at that point had been Van Helsing, a critically reviled monster-hunter movie. While the other A-listers of his generation—George Clooney, Will Smith, Matt Damon—always found a mix of blockbusters and more serious projects, Jackman initially struggled to do the same, yet somehow retained his celebrity sheen.

Read: The shadow that’s haunting Will Smith

Christopher Nolan’s 2006 film, The Prestige, which is probably Jackman’s finest performance, seemed to finally unlock him. Jackman played Robert Angier, a talented magician prone to corner-cutting who values showmanship over craft—a clever subversion of his jazzy Broadway persona. Whereas his work as Wolverine had emphasized one-dimensional berserker rage, here Jackman was a recognizably flawed charmer who eventually strikes a devil’s bargain to achieve real fame. At the time, Nolan said that, although he was initially drawn to Jackman because of his experience as a stage performer, “he also has the great depth as an actor that hasn’t really been explored.”


The Prestige was not a massive hit. But it succeeded in teasing out Jackman’s broader potential. He worked with more challenging directors, playing the time-shifted, lovelorn protagonist of Darren Aronofsky’s brilliantly baffling The Fountain, and the gritty cowboy love interest in Baz Luhrmann’s epic Australia. In 2012, he finally landed a significant musical worthy of his talent in Les Misérables, which earned him an Oscar nomination.

Even when his projects don’t entirely land, I appreciate Jackman’s eye for tough material no matter the genre. One of his best performances of the past decade was in Denis Villeneuve’s operatically dank thriller Prisoners, but he gave his all even in projects that didn’t work, such as Joe Wright’s ridiculous Peter Pan prequel or Jason Reitman’s muddled Gary Hart biopic, The Front Runner. Jackman headlined his passion project, The Greatest Showman, an original musical about P. T. Barnum, which became a surprise word-of-mouth hit. He even shaped his later Wolverine roles into unexpectedly complex projects, working with Kate & Leopold director James Mangold on an acclaimed swan song for the character with the appreciably bloody Logan.

The key shift between the first half of his career and the latter half was that Jackman finally gained some control over his star power, and exercised it to act in movies that were obviously risky—many because of their grisly content or because they represented old-fashioned genres such as the musical. In 2020, he gave a dazzlingly vulnerable performance in Bad Education, the true story of a Long Island school superintendent who embezzled money from his district. The film emphasized Jackman’s age, casting him as a man trying to prop up his waning charm by investing in face-lifts and expensive clothes.


Viewed alongside his work as old man Wolverine in Logan, and as the troubled protagonist of Reminiscence who can’t forget his past, it’s clear that Jackman is happy to accept his age—something some of his peers, such as the eternally energetic Tom Cruise, have not. But more crucially, all of his upcoming projects are original stories from exciting filmmakers (Michael Mann, Florian Zeller, Hany Abu-Assad) that don’t have a whiff of franchise potential to them. Jackman may have emerged in Hollywood as a superhero, but he’s sticking around by embracing roles that are anything but heroic.



David Sims is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers culture.

[jo]

Interesting perspectives with the critic from Zimbabwe digging deeper into the characters and the world in which they revolve.

www.tzperspective.com/index.php/2021/08/29/reminiscence-review-hugh-jackmans-noir-sci-fi-flick-has-big-ideas/

Reminiscence Review: Hugh Jackman’s noir sci-fi flick has big ideas

Clint Posted onAugust 29, 2021

But is not always great at executing them..


Hugh Jackman for most is still defined by his role as wolverine in the X-Men films, but chances are if you’ve looked at the Australian actor’s filmography you’ll realize there’s a lot more to his acting range than brooding tortured superheroes (see, Swordfish and Les Miserables for reference). Reminiscence continues in that tradition, giving a stellar performance from Jackman and his supporting cast in a sci-fi future-based flick that has a lot of intriguing concepts, even if it doesn’t always live up to them. Allow us to explain in the review below.

Directed by Lisa Joy , Reminiscence stars Jackman as Nick Bannister , a former military operative who lives in an extremely flooded Miami ravaged by climate change and specializes in the business of allowing people to relive their memories in dream sequences with his partner and fellow veteran Emily “Watts” Sanders played by the Thandiwe Newton. In a future that seems hopeless without much to look forward to, Nick’s business is incredibly lucrative as most people prefer to revisit the past and live in it as much as possible. The nature of Nick’s device however, makes him often get involved with law enforcement and interrogation cases as well, and through this he gets tangled in a mess involving drugs, the extreme caste system in said apocalyptic future and a woman he can’t help but fall for. The premise itself is incredibly engaging, and Joy’s experience having worked on shows like Westworld is on full display, showing how humans and human emotion would react to a world where technology and our collective mistakes as a race come to meet us face to face or worse yet warp our perception of reality. It makes an intriguing setting to set up the noir crime drama that the film is, delving into concepts seen in movies like inception and blade runner.

There’s definitely a temptation to compare Reminiscence to Inception as well, as both involve machines that involve people’s dreams and tamper with the dreams people have. However, while Inception leans hard into people essentially inserting thoughts into your head through their subconscious, Reminiscence instead focuses on the technology not having that ability, but instead highlights just how much people can be stuck in their pasts, unable to move on. It’s almost a metacommentary on human behavior in our current generation as well, where we’re constantly stuck in reminiscing about decades past, with the media around us following suit and rebooting shows, movies, even remixing music from our youth just so we accept something because it reminds us of something we loved in our past. The climate change setting with coastal cities being flooded is also interesting enough both for how it feels more plausible, but also simply because it gives a lot of the characters unique backstory almost all bound by struggle. While Nick and Watts seem to suffer from the guilt that comes with being a soldier during a time where they were seemingly used to oppress people, characters like Daniel Wu’s Saint Joe are defined by how they’ve struggled to become kingpins in a time determined by simply surviving whichever way they could.


Despite it being a movie with impressive visuals and a premise that’s based on special effects, character work is the larger core of Reminiscence, and while none of these characters are specifically ground-breaking, they’re e all relatable and engaging simply because of the performances of the cast on display. Jackman pulls another stellar performance, playing Nick as not a big , intimidating alpha as tends to be expected but rather a man defined more by loss, desperation and an unrelenting drive to find the woman he fell in love with, Mae, played by the ever-enchanting Rebecca Ferguson. What’s most interesting however is that as captivating as Nick can be in his most emotional moments, he’s arguably the least interesting character in the headlining cast.


Thandiwe Newton’s Watts is by far the most interesting understated character in the film, being shown to be the dangerous, capable and tactical half of their pairing. She is the highlight of one of the film’s standout action scenes but not just because she’s a complete pro in it , but more of her outlook towards violence, death, and her outlook towards enemies in a fight. Arguably more captivating however is Mae, who Rebecca Ferguson plays in a manner that makes her less of person but more of an embodiment of a fantasy, something that’s fitting considering Nick essentially chases after her the way one pursues a long-lost dream, with no hope of attaining or achieving it but a seemingly endless supply of energy to go after it, even if it destroys everything else in their life. Even Daniel Wu’s Saint Joe steals the scenes he’s in almost effortlessly and it all adds to the feel of this movie and this world feeling lived in, so much so that you can’t help but buy the narrations of Jackman as he states how hopeless this world is.



The movie also takes a slightly indirect approach to its storytelling, definitely tapping on a similar style to the one Lisa Joy used in Westworld, with character details and important beats being revealed as the story goes, as well as explaining the world around it the same way. It works for those used to Joy’s previous work, but it does slightly make one have to always remember just how much they need to listen to every bit of dialogue in the movie.


Not the biggest complaint when essentially what you have is a crime noir film just set in the future, but it does make one always feel like they have a few details they’re keeping on their short-term memory to make sure they catch every reference and character referenced. In that same vein, for a movie that leads with quite a bit of mystery and unravels as it continues, there’s no exact big reveal at the end, or rather the one that’s there isn’t as big as the movie probably would like it to be. It makes sense in the context of Jackman’s Nick needing catharsis, but it’s less of a big shock as it is an acceptable avenue that probably can make more audiences feel good about the end product. There is also the element of the caste system in the movie and the common man suffering that feels like it’s forced to conclude in a feel-good manner, especially considering it wasn’t directly connected to the direct struggles of Nick until in the final act.

However, the overall journey that the film takes you on is worth the trip. If anything it’s world leaves you wanting to explore it more, and maybe in some way it could be. For now, however, Reminiscence and it’s world give a thought-provoking and interesting concepts that we hope are somehow explored more in future.

[jo]

Translated from French - a review from France.

Maybe it is just me - but somehow I have always thought that the storytelling and characters in Reminiscence would find favor with French filmgoers and critics. After all, they did contribute quite a number of dramatic literary classics (foremost of which would arguably be Les Miserables with its many characters from different backgrounds amidst a world of turmoil)...and a nation that adored the deeply emotional songs of waiflike Edith Piaf will likely find Reminiscence a good film with a purpose!

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REMINISCENCE - DIVING INTO THE MURKY WATERS OF REMEMBRANCE



After starring as co-creator of the Westworld series, Lisa Joy directed her first film with Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson. "Reminiscence" has just appeared in our cinemas after many postponements and date advancements. So, what is the worth of this first production by Lisa Joy that plunges us into both the world of science fiction and the world of thrillers?


SYNOPSIS:

At the turn of the era of global warming, the world sank into war and drowned as the waters rose. Nick Bannister, a former soldier, has converted to exploiting reminiscence, a technology to relive his memories. Between exploring the memories of nostalgic clients and memorial interrogations for the prosecutor's office, Nick Bannister meets Mae, a singer who will plunge him into an investigation mixing past and present.





Science fiction is a genre that is always complicated to exploit. It is not enough to create a technology to succeed in making science fiction, it is also necessary to justify its creation and use. And here the contract is fulfilled since the technology, although sometimes based on scripted mechanics, works well and is pleasantly brought to the image. From its creation for a need for military interrogations to its commercial generalization for the general public, the technology of reminiscence follows the classic path of great inventions. In the film' filigree, we find the common theme of addiction that all the characters share. Whether it's drugs, love, alcohol or nostalgia, addiction doesn't allow the characters to live, it simply plunges them into a mental prison from which you only escape by agreeing to give up something.

But to speak for "Reminiscence" only of science fiction is a mistake. If indeed, the film is based in a science fiction universe mixing the life of a world destroyed by its climatic apocalypse with journeys through the past of memories, the fact remains that it is an intense thriller with astonishing entanglements. The tone of the film pays a real tribute to black thrillers as much in its aesthetic giving pride of place to the 50s and 60s as in its hero former soldier with the false air of private detective (of memory) played by a Hugh Jackman very fit. Similarly, we will find in the role of Rebecca Ferguson, that of the femme fatale, shady bar singer and mixed with the underworld, a great classic of the genre that never fails to drag the detective into a high-risk investigation. This urination between thriller and science fiction gives the film a very special tone between past and future, which is necessarily interesting in a story exploring the nostalgia of the characters.




The first inspiration of Lisa Joy is not to be found far, because if we can actually see references to Blade Runner, Inception, and Minority Report, it is especially Westworld that we will think of when seeing the feature film. Joy will work even more on this aesthetic of the falsely real and the crossovers between different life paths. Once again, it will be for the characters to immerse themselves in a fake world to live a dreamed and selfish pleasure at the expense of a dying and hopeless reality. And it is also one of the great themes of the film that the desire for freedom of the characters who constantly seeks to escape the addiction that keeps them in a constantly repeated pattern of life.

Beyond the thematic and aesthetic parallels, Lisa Joy will rely on the pillars of her series to build her film. Thus we will also find in the cast of "Reminiscence" the actresses Thandiwe Newton and Angela Sarafyan who had already given breathtaking performances in the robotic western of HBO. Similarly, we will also find Ramin Djawadi to the music of the film which delivers us a captivating original tape whose main theme will mark the aquatic and deep atmosphere of the universe. These loans will be more than welcome and will give a particular style that we recognize immediately and that seems to be a trademark of the director in her future projects. It is regrettable, however, that the plots of the scenario sometimes find their resolutions in predictable revelations without this being an obstacle to the interest that one has in its history.



In conclusion, "Reminiscence" is a good science fiction thriller that takes us into its universe brilliantly. His plots manage to surprise and lose the viewer in their interweaving before offering them a bitter sweet release in an ending that did not fail to let go of some tears of emotion to some spectators. A great success for Lisa Joy's first film that we will keep an eye on in the future and we look forward to following the next projects.

Theatrical release: August 25, 2021 / 1h 56min / Science fiction, Romance, Thriller
From Lisa Joy
By Lisa Joy
With Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Ferguson, Thandiwe Newton