Lisa Joy
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Filmography
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Connections, in both directions
Both Transcendence and Reminiscence are sleek, fantastical-faux credible science fiction yarns akin to Christopher Nolan’s Inception .
And, lastly, Reminiscence is at least a third part a classic mind-bending, semi-time traveling film along the lines of Total Recall, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and even Inception.
Well, in this case, it’s more like the “Inception” Ripoff Zone.
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.
For a project with the potential to combine the likes of Inception and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Reminiscence instead offers joyless forgettable nonsense.
Everything from the set-design to the dreadful dialogue to the bizarrely upbeat score serve to conjure entirely the wrong atmosphere, and the movie ends up coming across more like a Sam Spade spoof (think Steve Martin's '80s noir parody Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid ) than something akin to Blade Runner or Inception .
The world is flooded (for reference, see Kevin Costner’s Waterworld).
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 her feature film debut, Joy, who actually has some intriguing ideas about memory, goes overboard in every way, leaning too heavily on her memory replay contrivance, voice over narration and films which have come before like "Blade Runner," "Minority Report," "Waterworld," "Chinatown" and even “Who Shot Jessica Rabbit?”
Writer-director Lisa Joy ( Westworld ) seems to be aiming for an Inception -style metaphysical mind-bend, with the sci-fi jolt of Minority Report and a bleak splash of Waterworld .
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Directed by Michel Gondry
influenced Reminiscence (2021)
Plot Themes
And, lastly, Reminiscence is at least a third part a classic mind-bending, semi-time traveling film along the lines of Total Recall, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and even Inception.
For a project with the potential to combine the likes of Inception and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Reminiscence instead offers joyless forgettable nonsense.
Despite being an amalgamation of virtually every elevated science-fiction movie of the past four decades— Strange Days , Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , Minority Report , Until the End of the World , both Blade Runner s—the new film Reminiscence feels relatively lacking in self-importance.
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 .
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.
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.
First there was longtime Nolan cinematographer Wally Pfister’s Transcendence , a woebegone sci-fi thriller that fizzled in 2014.
In the case of Reminiscence, it's Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt in the 2016 disappointment Passengers - stars short on chemistry in a lost-in-space romance that looked great but went nowhere.