REMINISCENCE - Official Reviews ( Potential Spoilers)

[jo]

While a critic-contributor gives the film a 2/4 stars ( considered 50% at Metacritic) --

another contributor at RogerEbert.com writes an essay on love inspired by the movie.


www.rogerebert.com/features/dont-say-always-on-lisas-joys-reminiscence?fbclid=IwAR1WuRrRAssntI3V0PmbIxxox_eCA9fiPHsl608vElRQjepQqD2oQwDgQMs

[jo]

This is interesting --

Rotten Tomatoes (Critics) - 38 %

Rotten Tomatoes ( Audience Score) - 40%


Metacritic - 46 %


Metacritic is supposed to be the most rigid critics reviews evaluator and the most respected especially among film buffs - they are very selective on whose opinion they count. No movie of Hugh has ever had a higher Meta rating than its Rotten Tomatoes rating! Including Bad Education & Logan (highest rated in the 90's %) but only in the high 70 % on Meta
...except for REMINISCENCE!

The RT critics simply went with the crowd -- because the early big-boys reviews devastated the movie! Herd mentality!


Jo

[jo]

This is the best-rated review on Metacritic -- from PLAYLIST.

Reminiscence
‘Reminiscence’: Lisa Joy’s Nostalgic, Noir-Inspired Gem Is Packed With Intellectual & Emotional Thrills [Review]
Nick Allen August 18, 2021 12:00 pm News, Reviews



Nostalgia is a lie, but it’s true that they don’t make studio movies quite like they used to. It’s a common lament that non-IP influenced, original screenplays, and movies with smart-thinking, sexy lead adults aren’t as supported by the major studios as they once were. Enter “Reminiscence,” with its unabashed old soul and classic appetite for what makes a great Hollywood tale. It’s all about gorgeous movie stars intertwined, mysteries that throw characters into emotional labyrinths, and rich, practical production design that makes a Hollywood set a not-too-fantastical reflection of the real world. The film is a gem, really, with noir-inspired cynicism that’s almost too pure for the era of “Space Jam: A New Legacy,” but it’s nonetheless packed with intellectual and emotional thrills from debut writer/director Lisa Joy.



The significance of being a crafty pastiche about nostalgia’s fleeting high does not escape the incredibly sharp Joy, who embraces various noir and classic movie tropes with the expansive thinking of sci-fi. Rebecca Ferguson plays the femme fatale here, in a story that involves her character Mae getting close to a man who works in the business of memories, and who helps people briefly feel the contents of a memory, instead of just recalling it. Mae appears at his business one night, looking for help in finding her keys. His machine, called the Reminiscence, allows a worker to sift through these memories as if they’re watching a movie unfold in third-person. But while flipping through Mae’s previous thoughts, he catches a glimpse of her job as a lounge singer. She’s crooning the wistful ballad “Where or When,” which we learn has a deep place in his heart. He is in love. The two embark on a sunkissed Hollywood-grade romance in defiance of the crumbling world around them.

Suddenly, the lady vanishes. Finding out just where to becomes a months-long, unhealthy addiction for Hugh Jackman’s Nick, starting with no sign from the bar she used to work at. In his daytime gig of helping the district attorney’s office, he finds a lead by accessing the memories of a drug dealer associate, who works for a New Orleans head honcho named St. Joe. Watching this memory unfold on a projector screen, like a black-and-white newsreel of Nick’s nightmares, he learns about the true past of a woman he had cared for so deeply. The question of Mae becomes even more fascinatingly complicated and painful. Even more gutting than the loss is the idea that his perspective of Mae could have been another lie from nostalgia’s limited gaze.

Ferguson’s recent work in the “Mission: Impossible” franchise and “Doctor Sleep” has been ramping her up for a role like this, and she doesn’t miss the opportunity to take us right to the edge of uncertainty, embodying someone of unknown goals and unmistakable power, whether she’s in a room of dangerous criminals or behind a microphone (Ferguson does her own singing). She is the movie’s mystery box, and your inclinations about her stew throughout the movie with each carefully doled jump Joy makes back to the past.



Jackman, too, seems built for a role like this, the way he can carry a muted anguish on his hulking shoulders with the emotional accessibility of an everyman, and guide us every step of the way through an obsession that becomes our own. He’s equally believable here when getting his ass-kicked by henchmen for snooping in a drug den or quickly dispatching someone in a police station, in a moment for Joy to establish his military experience during “the border wars,” which comes in handy for a few convenient plot developments throughout. But the power in Jackman’s performance is more about his voice-acting, and how Joy uses his timbre hypnotically from the very beginning: the warmth and calm of its gentle bassy tone. We become just like Nick’s customers in the reminiscence machine, easing into his commands, getting lost in his ideas.

“Reminiscence” is a whole collection of different experiences with nostalgia, with every character coated in its ideas about how a person holds onto the past. Thandiwe Newton is excellent as Nick’s business partner, a high-functioning alcoholic who has her own history that she has been looking away from. Later into the story, Joy makes great use of the brawn and intensity that comes from Cliff Curtis, who plays a dirty cop deeply enmeshed in the script’s brewing corruption and drug dealing business.



Brandishing the world-building skills she honed as a writer, producer, and director on HBO’s “Westworld,” Joy does an incredible job of painting a decayed present here, an unforgiving landscape that explains why people would cling to the past. This version of Miami has accepted its fate of being flooded, and the feeling of Nick constantly getting their shoes and pants soaked, just to get across the street, is a visceral nod to the constant rainfall of dystopic Los Angeles in “Blade Runner.” Or, it’s a reverse “Chinatown,” in which it’s no longer the terror of a drought destroying its people, but of too much water. Joy uses global warming as a fact of the future, and its grandeur becomes bittersweet—it’s amazing to see Warner Bros. invest in this detail with massive practical sets, but painful in that it’s so honest to the current state of the environment. Noir is a viscerally cynical game, and it’s at times exhilarating to see how much Joy and wide-scale production is able to honor that.

Water takes on many different significances in the script, whether it’s in the Reminiscence machine, or the class divide it creates in Miami, and it becomes one of many elements, like that of having an addiction to help avoid the present, that shares space in Joy’s heady script. The film is so interconnected with its characters and its different themes, that in a few moments it seems to be overwhelmed, just like Jackman’s hard-boiled anecdotes about nostalgia can be as much of an overly serious mouthful as the movie’s title. In terms of story, the overall conspiracy at hand doesn’t work as well as it wants to, relying on supporting characters who are beyond the script’s emotional grasp, but it still leads to long-lasting imagery about clocks, time, and the patterns anyone can be trapped in. And while the emotional finale for Nick and Mae’s journey is presented with gutting, poetic visuals only possible from Joy’s inventive sci-fi rules, its tone takes too sharp a turn in order to create a few more beats, which threaten to undermine what should hit hardest.



In building this mystery, and in proving herself as a major entertainer, Joy always has something up her sleeve, including her savvy ways to suddenly spike the plot with a slickly edited fight scene that builds the mystery instead of just taking a break from it. It’s a real treat when Jackman and another character square off in a bravura fight sequence later into the film. The life-or-death scuffle keeps going and going, up and down dilapidated buildings and into flooded classrooms, throwing in an homage to “Oldboy”’s oft-quoted hammer sequence, and climaxes with a gorgeous slow-motion shot involving a grand piano sinking into a submerged concert hall. The water levels may rise, the drug of nostalgia will continue to rule our brains. So long as directors like Lisa Joy can orchestrate the grandiose images that fill “Reminiscence,” we’ll at least have some stunning Hollywood storytelling to look forward to. [B+]

“Reminiscence” arrives in theaters and on HBO Max on August 20.

[jo]

The review is in Italian but there is an option for an translation to English at the upper right.

I will see if I can reprint the translation.

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Home » Film » Film reviews » Fragments from the past – Reminiscence, the sci-fi review with Hugh Jackman
Fragments from the past – Reminiscence, the sci-fi review with Hugh Jackman
The review of Fragments from the past - Reminiscence, sci-fi film starring Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson.
Sofia BiaginiBy Sofia BiaginiJune 12, 2023

Hugh Jackman in the movie Fragments from the Past - Reminiscence
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The film: Fragments from the past – Reminiscence, 2021. Directed by: Lisa Joy. Cast: Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Ferguson, Thandie Newton, Daniel Wu, Angela Sarafyan. Genre: Science fiction. Running time: 116 minutes. Where we saw it: on Netflix.

In a dystopian future, Nick has invented a special machine that allows people to escape reality and relive memories of happy times. But when a mysterious woman makes him fall in love and then disappear, the man will do anything to find her.



Written and directed by Westworld co-creator Lisa Joy, here in her feature film debut, Fragments from the Past Reminiscence is a sci-fi noir centered on a device – called, in fact, reminiscence – through which people can escape from the dramatic present of war and global warming to relive their memories. A process entrusted to Nick (Hugh Jackman), whose life will be turned upside down by the meeting with a client, Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), with whom he will establish a relationship before his sudden disappearance.


As we will see in our review of Fragment from the past – Reminiscence, the film directed by Lisa Joy – now available on Netflix – provides several interesting ideas that too often loses to chase sci-fi elements already seen too many times and dialogues full of rhetoric. Despite this, the aesthetic charm of the film and the presence of actors of the caliber of Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson still make it a pleasant viewing.

The plot of Fragments from the past – Reminiscence: the power of nostalgia
Rebecca Ferguson in Fragments from the Past - Reminiscence


2030, Miami. The city is almost totally submerged by water due to global warming and typical daytime activities are now carried out when the sun goes down due to high outside temperatures. In this post-apocalyptic scenario – in which a war also rages – Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman) does a very special job, that of the memory specialist. Through a special device that uses a psycho-sensory process – reminiscence – and with the assistance of his colleague Wats (Thandie Newton), the man helps clients escape from the dramatic reality allowing them to relive events and emotions of the past. A routine that is however broken by the arrival of Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), a woman who wants to undergo reminiscence to find the keys to the house she has lost. A fatal meeting for Nick: between the two, in fact, the passion explodes but, after a disruptive love story that lasted a few months, Mae mysteriously disappears. Nick will then have to dig into the woman's past to find out where she is in the present.

The obsession with the past
Rebecca Ferguson and Hugh Jackman in Fragments from the Past - Reminiscence


Fragments from the past – Reminiscence follows that trend in search of the nostalgia effect so present in films and TV series of recent years. It does so, of course, by adapting this process to what the modern world is, and thus using a technology – reminiscence – that looks very much like our virtual reality. In the film directed by Lisa Joy, however, the past becomes a real obsession for people, a response to a world in which it is now impossible to even imagine the future. Thus, Nick's clients take refuge in this welcoming universe that man (re)builds for them, made only of beautiful memories that, thanks to the machine, will never be lost in the ocean of memory. But what are the consequences of remaining so anchored in the past? As explained to us from the beginning, exploiting reminiscence too frequently means running the risk of "getting burned", or reliving those same memories forever even when awake. Wanting to see it as and borrowing a phrase from Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: "It is useless to take refuge in dreams and forget to live".

A soulless noir
Hugh Jackman in a scene from Fragments from the Past - Reminiscence


Although this continuous persistence in memories gives the film an absolutely personal and enjoyable bittersweet charm, as far as the narrative structure is concerned, Lisa Joy's film limits itself a bit to being a reflection – or we can even use the term "memory" in this case – of something already seen. The narrated one is in fact a classic (even too much) noir story that refers, without hiding it in the slightest, to films like Roman Polanski's Chinatown or Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (but also the same series co-created by the director, Westworld) and borrows all those sci-fi elements that we usually find in films of the genre. In this way, although there are sporadically interesting ideas that unfortunately are not always well developed, the final result is that of a soulless film noir with little personality.

The cast of Fragments from the Past – Reminiscence
Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson in a scene from Fragments from the Past - Reminiscence

Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson reunite here after sharing the set of The Greatest Showman. Although the dialogues are often a bit too rhetorical – except for some rather current ideas on the environment – the chemistry between the two protagonists works, especially thanks to the experience of both actors in the dramatic genre. Hugh Jackman is, as always, absolutely believable – despite sometimes being overshadowed by the somewhat convoluted and not always understandable passages of his own investigations. Rebecca Ferguson is absolutely has the magnetism of the femme fatale, too bad that her character is, most of the time, relegated to the past.

The review in brief
6.5
ANONYMOUS

The film directed by Lisa Joy provides several interesting ideas that too often loses to chase sci-fi elements already seen too many times and dialogues full of rhetoric. Despite this, the aesthetic charm of the film and the presence of actors of the caliber of Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson still make it a pleasant viewing.

[jo]

[jo]

Some late interest in REMINISCENCE, as it has become available on streaming.

This review --

CINEMA AND TV SERIES

Fragments from the Past-Reminiscence by Lisa Joy | The Review
June 17, 2023 - by Salvatore Iaconis - Comment
Fragments of the past-Reminiscence
Fragments from the Past-Reminiscence is the sci-fi thriller film by Lisa Joy starring Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson available on Netflix

Fragments from the Past-Reminiscence is a science fiction thriller film directed and written by Lisa Joy (based on a subject included in The Black List), produced by Jonathan Nolan (the brother of the well-known director Christopher Nolan, i.e. the author of films such as Insomnia, Memento, Inception, Interstellar, The Prestige, the Dark Knight Trilogy and Tenet ) and released by Warner Bros in August 2021.

The film's lead duo consists of Hugh Jackman (who played Wolverine in the X-Men film series, The Fountain, The Son, 2012's Les Misérables, Humandroid and Pan-Journey to Neverland) and Rebecca Ferguson (Mission: Impossible-Rogue Natation, Mission: Impossible-Fallout, Dune, The Greatest Showman, Doctor Sleep and the upcoming Dune-Part 2 ), the rest of the cast includes Cliff Curtis, Thandiwe Newton, Brett Cullen, Daniel Wu, Angela Sarafyan (who previously collaborated with the duo Joy-Nolan on the TV series Westworld), Marina de Tavira and Natalia Martinez. The film is available from June 11 on Netflix.

Fragments from the Past-Reminiscence, an investigative thriller in post-apocalyptic Miami of 2030
The film is set in the year 2030, the city of Miami has been partly submerged due to the rise of sea waters, caused by global warming. In addition, daytime temperatures are too high, so citizens prefer to go out and work only in the hours of darkness. Nicolas and Emily run an unusual business. Thanks to a machine (previously used by the police for interrogations), the two allow their clients to escape into the past and relive the best moments of their lives. Although Nick's days seem to have become monotonous, the arrival of a new client (named Mae) will change his existence. After falling in love and living happy moments, his partner disappears from his life. In a city close to a revolt because of the "barons" (the magnates who bought the few lands emerged), our protagonist understands that the only opportunity to find it is to dig into his memories. Unfortunately, Nick does not know that Mae is embroiled in a secret plot connected by one of the richest lords of the city of the metropolis.

A love story between mythology and science fiction and noir genres
Fragments from the past-Reminiscence is a film that plays with the topoi of two genres: science fiction and thriller. The sequences of the post-apocalyptic city of Miami (illuminated by neon lights at night) reminds us of the Los Angeles of the film Blade Runner by Ridley Scott, the moodiness between social classes refers to the film Snowpiercer by Bong Joon-ho, the contrast between memory and reality reminds us of the dichotomy between real and dream in Inception. The noir scenes cite Roman Polański's cult Chinatown.

Joy's film is also linked to classical literature, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice (handed down to us by Virgil in the Georgics and by Ovid in the Metamorphoses) lives again thanks to the characters played by Jackman and Ferguson. The well-known Greek poet had mourned the death of the nymph (as well as Nick for the disappearance of Mae), later he began a "catabase" to Hades to find his beloved (instead for Nick it is the descent into the world of organized crime). In addition to this mythological fable, Fragments from the past-Reminiscence plays with the viewer with time (the past and the present) to propose "a reinterpretation of the myth of Plato's Cave between the illusion of happiness and sad reality".

Orpheus and Eurydice relive thanks to Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson
Hugh Jackman confirms himself as an excellent interpreter, a character tormented between the life of the present and the memories of a happy past. An ex-military turned detective, he later chose to work on his own managing the activity of recalling memories. Alcohol and memories of his happiness with Mae are the only things to hold on to in a world destined to end. Ferguson plays an ambiguous woman, a femme fatale of the noir genre, a sensual singer in a Miami nightclub. The woman is divided between good and evil, but also betweenliving the ultimate pleasures of a life without any perspective and acting according to a moral. The antagonists of the film are three, the boss Saint Joe (who runs the drug deal between Florida and Louisiana), the corrupt cop Cyrus Boothe and a member of high society. Unfortunately we find ourselves in characters with little personality and close to the clichés of the noir genre.

Little interest in deepening the political and social issue shown in the film
Despite these excellent premises, the story of Mae and Nick suffers from some problems with direction and screenplay. Since the story narrated is "intimate to the emotions of the characters", the world-building of Reminiscence offers very little. We do not know specifically what allowed the birth of the prodigious machine that digs into the mind, just as we do not know anything about the rest of the USA. Compared to other dystopian films such as V for Vendetta or The Hunger Games (2012), here the themes of bad government and the clash between the stronger and weaker social classes are not deepened, they play the background function of the story of the two new Orpheus and Eurydice. There are no precise directorial choices to give a strong personality to the film (although it is the first film by Lisa Joy), the same goes for the soundtrack of Ramin Djawadi (composer of the soundtracks of TV series such as Westworld and Game of Thrones and films such as Iron Man, Pacific Rim and Dracula Untold).

A film that lacks the courage to dare
Fragments of the Past-Reminiscence is a good sci-fi thriller that presents themes already addressed by dystopian science fiction. We have a first part of the film with a slow narration, and then speed up development and end between scenes between past and present. The film product offers a beautiful evening of entertainment and reflection, but the director and producer should have dared more to offer personality to the film.

[jo]