Reminiscence: Recalling the Many Things that are Good and Great about It

So here we are again.  Critics are giving Reminiscence (on HBO Max) mixed reviews, saying it's derivative.  I agree that it's derivative, but think it's excellent.  In general, I think being derivative is not a bad thing, and I disagree with the myopic critics who miss how well Reminiscence does it.

Yes, Reminiscence is reminiscent of Blade Runner.  Even more so in some ways of Total Recall, and for that matter, of all things Philip K. Dick.  But it also recalls a lot of Christopher Nolan's work, as well as movies as far back as the 1940s like Laura, and even Body Heat in 1981 to some extent.  And if it harkens to Westworld, well, Lisa Joy plays a central creative role in both.

I was a little bothered by Thandiwe Newton's character Emily motivated by the exact same thing as her character Maeve in Westworld -- finding her daughter -- but that's just one unnecessary misstep in a long list of gambits and interludes done very well in Reminiscence.  Among them are the deft mix of a flooded world and the refuge in memories, and outstanding acting by Hugh Jackman in the lead role, and Rebecca Ferguson as his all-consuming love interest Mae.

This is first time I've seen Ferguson, and I'm very impressed.  She's Swedish, and even before I knew that, she reminded me of Ingrid Bergman.  Come to think of it, Jackman's Nick Bannister reminded me a bit of Bogart.  Is that supposed to be bad?  Of course not.  It makes Reminiscence even more fun to watch.

I won't go into the plot, so as not to risk spoilers.  I will say that I like happy endings, and I'll leave it to you to decide where the ending of Reminiscence resides on the happy/sad meter.  Nick tells Mae that there are no happy endings, especially of happy stories, presumably because to end them is sad.  Mae responds that therefore she'd like to hear a happy story that ends right in the middle.  That's the kind of dialogue that lifts Reminiscence into a top tier, and if it reminds us of triumphs in cyberpunk ranging from Incandescence to Altered Carbon, so much the better.

Tenet: A Re-View

Well, I -- at last -- just saw Christopher Nolan's Tenet (on HBO).  It was an excellent, sometimes seminal, time travel movie -- in particular, time reversal -- but not without its flaws.

Let's start with a few of those:

1. Although the movie starts off with a good action scene, there's no clear time reversal I until about 50 minutes in,* when the Protagonist has a battle with at least one guy moving in reverse time. We later learn that the Protagonist was actually fighting with two guys, one traveling in normal, forward time, the other in reverse time. This is a "time-pincer" mode of combat, which is one of the hallmarks of the narrative.  All of that is very good stuff, but it took too long (50 mins) to first happen.  We also learn that Protagonist's two combatants are later versions of himself.  Also a nice touch.  And we see the same scene from the other side at about 1 hour and 50 minutes into the movie -- also fun to see.  But my first point, that this excellent sequence took too long to commence, still holds.

*There was some time reversal in the opening scene, but it happened so quickly that at the time it wasn't clear that that was what was happening.

2. The grandfather paradox is explained too curtly, as, if you travel to the past and kill your grandfather, how did you exist to travel into the past in the first place?  This leaves out the essential element of: you had to kill your grandfather before he impregnated your grandmother (who then would give birth to one of your parents), otherwise there would be no paradox.  Yeah, I'm a stickler for getting it right in discussing paradoxes, they're mind bending enough when properly stated.

3. It's mentioned that you can't run into your future or past self when you're time traveling because that could annihilate yourself or even the world.  That injunction has become a staple of the genre, and was a central principle in the 12 Monkeys TV series. But just to be clear: there's no reason that running into yourself would result in your, let alone the world's, annihilation. It might unhinge your mind, sure, with a cascade of impossible, self-referential memories, but that's not the same as annihilation.

But there were lots of thoroughly excellent parts of the movie.  I really like that the people in the future don't worry too much about accidentally annihilating themselves by messing around in the past.  After all, they exist, so they couldn't have done too much damage to their future.  This could have been a little more clear in the movie, but kudos to Tenet for at least expressing that inherently optimistic sentiment.

The backwards in time action and cinematography were outstanding, especially the cadre-level pincer movements, one going forward, the other going backward, in time, which reminded me in its own brief way of a battle scene out of Lord of the Rings.  From about 1 hour and 24 minutes into the movie and onwards, it's pure cinematic gold, with twists and turns and quickly delivered metaphysical puzzlers at every turn.

Ok, I'm going to conclude this now, and record a podcast, which should be up in an hour or less.  Look for it below.  I may or may not say something more than what I wrote above.

some talk of cleaning up "loose ends" in Tenet