Reminiscence review – Hugh Jackman’s Inception rip-off isn’t worth remembering
Last month’s much deserved swirl of bewildered horror and eye-rolling ridicule at the Frankensequel Space Jam: A New Legacy and its grotesque plundering of IP was also aimed at a worrying future. Things darkened even further with this month’s Free Guy, another film that doubled as “entertainment” and an exercise in brand extension. Both, following in the muddied footsteps of 2018’s Ready Player One, were littered with lapel-grabbingly obvious references to films also owned by the studio releasing each product, as if a click-to-rent button was ready to pop up each time another one lumbered onto the screen. The relatively recent siloing of Disney, Fox, Warners and Paramount and the almost total stratification of their wares available on uber-competitive in-house streaming services has led to an increased need to brand the studios as all-consuming one-stop crossover destinations. So yes, Bugs Bunny can and will bump into Rick Blaine whenever he damn wants.
Warner Bros has been the most bullish, using the entirety of its 2021 slate as a push to increase subscribers on HBO Max, where all of its many properties live. Now, this month’s sleek tech thriller Reminiscence does not exist in the same category as Space Jam: A New Legacy – not even in the same galaxy – but there is a similar “if you like this then also watch” vibe to it, impossible to ignore once you get a whiff. It’s written and directed by Lisa Joy, best known for her work on Westworld (available on HBO Max) and she recruits two of its stars to follow her, as well as the show’s co-creator, and her husband, Jonathan Nolan as producer, a man also known for collaborating with his brother Christopher (all films now available on HBO Max). The film exists very much within his serious scifi world, cribbing from Inception most notably and at times shamelessly, but also owing a huge debt to both the neon noir of Blade Runner (available on HBO Max) and the classic noir of the 40s, such as The Maltese Falcon (available on HBO Max), a genre that the studio practically owned during that decade.
It’s hard not to see it in algorithmic terms, for its personality is at times nothing more than an equation, one that pales next to the far superior films and shows it wants to sit next to, a drama about memory that’s far too easy to forget. In the near future, the world has become so rotten than most people are happy to live in the past, something that’s quite easy to do thanks to tech