For a genre so often cited as a major stylistic influence on any number of modern filmmakers, it’s a wonder why the sci-fi neo-noir isn’t a larger fixture in the genre’s release rotation. It feels like we get maybe two or three every 10 or so years – in the ’90s and into the post-9/11 era, we had Strange Days, Dark City, and Minority Report, which served as an unofficial capstone to that era, and we had a rash of them in the early ‘10s, perhaps kicked off by Inception, but closely followed by films like In Time, The Adjustment Bureau and Looper. There are outliers, of course, like Blade Runner 2049, which seems to have been a cycle unto itself, but it’s always exciting when we get a new one and Lisa Joy’s new film Reminiscence is a good example of how wonderfully pleasing the genre can be even when it’s not really doing too much aside from slapping a fresh coat of paint on old-school pulp stories. Joy, co-creator of HBO’s Westworld, has a good understanding of what it takes to revive a concept and make it relevant to an audience, and she applies those lessons learned smartly here. One must have a compelling plot, an intriguing setting, and a frequently shirtless Hugh Jackman. Well, at least two out of those three are real requirements, but you get the point.
Reminiscence forgoes the traditional trappings of dystopian stylization to bring us a vision of a water-logged future Miami, plagued by corruption and economic hardship. Nick, Jackman’s character, a veteran of a devastating war at the border that basically destroyed the international order as we know it, puts the skills he learned in the service to good use in private practice by operating and guiding guided tours of one’s own memories. The machine is called the Reminiscence, and, like the Internet and a whole host of other inventions, it had its origins in the military, where it was used to pry information out of the minds of prisoners. But Nick sees the therapeutic usage of such a machine, and along with Sparks (Thandiwe Newton) a fellow vet who enjoys both hooch and kicking ass, they spend their days allowing folks to relive moments in their lives that weren’t so terrible, or, you know, helping to get incriminating details out of felons that the DA thinks might be useful. Of course, however, there’s a dame — Mae, played by an alluringly-photographed Rebecca Ferguson — who manages to make the whole operation go screwy when she stumbles into Nick’s operation looking for where she lost her keys. The pair fall in love, enjoy a whirlwind romance, and, of course, she disappears. Nick, who previously kept away from the machine, pulls a Tony Montana and does the memory-machine equivalent of putting one’s head down in a mound of cocaine, scouring his memories for any trace of her. But one day, he gets a knock on his door and discovers one of her Jade earrings floating in the standing water outside his building in nearly-flooded Miami, and does what he can to track her down. What he discovers isn’t so nice.
Little is truly original here: With one key exception to that prior statement, Joy cribs from the same noir/pulp cinema playbook as Ridley Scott and Alex Proyas did when they made their masterpieces, but her approach is far less revisionist than theirs. The dreamlike nature of Scott’s hazy dystopia complicates the ethical murkiness of Los Angeles 2019, and the very fictive and stylized nature of Proyas’ Dark City itself is the rub, being a fantasy fed to captive minds by the Others. Unlike them — and her brother-in-law, Christopher Nolan, whom I want to avoid talking about as much as I can in deference to her skill as a filmmaker — Joy has no such ambition here, which is surprisingly refreshing in its own right when placed next to any number of dystopian fictions with metatextual matters on the mind. Reminiscence is just a sci-noir story told well, aware of its potential to subvert but disinclined to. This attitude allows Joy to draw on details that other films wouldn’t, such as evoking the post-war setting of many a classic noir, as all of our main characters are either veterans or those who suffered deeply at their hands, though with a decidedly less positive perception of those conflicts, given the difference in era and self-imposed censorship. And, importantly, it is nice to know that one’s not having a game played with them — there’s no giant metatextual twist for people to pour over on forums — and what turns you experience are ones you’re sharing with Jackman and the rest of the cast.
That doesn’t mean it hasn’t inherited issues from its forbears, as Reminiscence is saddled with a few issues somewhat endemic to this kind of neo-noir, especially when coming from modern studios, but none of them too major to totally derail the project. The story’s structurally backloaded, with most of its memorable images and scenes occurring past the 50-minute mark, and it’s paced as such, being mostly a slow-burn investigation that requires all the pieces to be laid out just so to be compelling, and of course, Joy takes her time putting the pieces together. This is only really an issue for HBO Max viewers, who might be lured away from the television by puking cats or burning lasagna or something domestic in nature, but it means something to the suits. The other big one is Jackman’s narration, which is on the level with Ford’s in the theatrical cut of Blade Runner in terms of its disinterested delivery and occasionally tinny writing. It doesn’t make it feel particularly hard-boiled to have Jackman growling at us constantly, given that the dude already looks like he’s going to go berserker mode on most people around him, and it might let the film breathe a little more freely. It’s also somewhat jarring to watch the film snap awake for the occasional studio-mandated gun-or-fistfight, which are surprisingly coherent and well-directed for something so superfluous, but, hey, that’s how you get stuff made these days.
Yet there’s one thing that makes Reminiscence stand out a little more than it should, perhaps, being the one exception I alluded to earlier: The setting. Nerds are overly concerned with “world-building” these days, which often means exposition-heavy justifications for why the world is the way you’re seeing it, but in the very smallest sense of the word, it’s the little touches that make up the mise en scene that enhances its plausibility. This future Miami isn’t a total metal-and-smokestack-fires hellscape ala Blade Runner nor is it one of Neill Blomkamp’s visions of a dusty and arid world beset by poverty: It feels like a place one might live naturally as humanity adapts to the pain of climate change. Dikes and levees are slowly overfilling, leaving the streets covered in water, and everyone wears rainboots when they head out on their morning commute. The car is replaced by the motorboat, which gets you from waterfront nightclub to waterfront nightclub, given that the only socializing one will do is at night, given that it’s just too damn hot to do so during the day. The poor are forced into the flooding areas, as the wealthy have dug giant moats surrounding their plantation homes that even some measure of sea rise won’t totally fill, but they survive, making Miami’s downtown into a new Venice, much like in the fictions of an eco-sci-fi writer like Kim Stanley Robinson. Lots of small touches help support this, from the characters’ consciousness of their fresh water usage (you won’t see a ton of sinks here), to the reclaimed retro-futuristic décor and couture of a society perpetually looking back at better days, to the lack of most futuristic tech beyond the Reminiscence machine itself — the most advanced computer I could see at any given time is a Dell laptop that would be decades old at that point.
It’s this feature of Reminiscence that takes an already compelling story and often well-told story and makes it into something memorable, and I’m looking forward to going back and picking out as many details as I possibly can from its backgrounds on my next viewing. Moreover, I hope this type of neo-noir becomes a viable genre rather than in the roughly 10-year-bursts that we seem to get it in (I know that’s not a totally accurate measure, but it certainly feels that way), because Reminiscence feels like it’s on to something thematically. As a landscape darkens, be it a post-war society beset by warming or, well, cinema itself, it can be rewarding for folks to look back at popular styles or fond memories for inspiration, and, frankly, the moment feels like it calls for neo-noir rather than the kind of desaturated action-thriller that we’re used to seeing in the multiplex. But that, I guess, depends on whether or not we want a Cinema of Comfort or a Cinema of Challenge, one that provokes us to thought even modest ways as Reminiscence does. Then again, as its presence on HBO Max suggests, it may be nothing more than a write-off in a bad year that will hopefully get someone to sign up if the Gossip Girl reboot wasn’t enough already.