Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Reminiscence’ on HBO Max, a Retro-Futuristic Noir Starring Hugh Jackman As a Hopelessly Nostalgic Sot

Now on HBO Max (again), Reminiscence is the feature directorial debut of Lisa Joy, one of the Emmy-nominated creators of HBO series Westworld. She brings a bit of the acclaimed series’ virtual-reality concept to the movie, about a man with a machine that allows people to relive their memories. It’s an original idea — I know, gasp, right? — bolstered by a terrific cast, led by Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Ferguson, Thandiwe Newton and Cliff Curtis. But after we’re done watching the movie, is it one that we’re going to want to (insert cliche about reliving memories or forgetting here)?

REMINISCENCE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Miami. It’s pretty much underwater, and its denizens stay inside all day because it’s too damn hot. I was tempted to say the film was set in an alt-universe 1980s, when climate change kicked in a few decades early, because everybody drives old big-boat ’70s cars and the tech on display is more analog than digital, but then there’s a late scene in which a character whips out an iPhone like a long-pocketed plot device, so that theory is shotgunned. Let’s just call it retro-futuristic. We meet our protagonist, Nick Bannister (Jackman) as he slops through an omnipresent inch or six of water on the street, and you know how greed-mongers in The Purge cashed in by selling security systems? Well, in the Reminiscenceverse I bet the galoshes manufacturers are now among the one percent, who live in nice, dry homes because they can afford to build dams around their communities.

So anyway, Nick, he walks into work, and his assistant Watts (Newton) says, “You’re late,” and he replies, “Late is a construct of linear time — we don’t deal in that.” Indeed they don’t: His clients want to jump into his thingamajig, a half-submersion tank with a headset gizmo, and revisit memories, guided by Nick with the soothing timbre of a hypnotist. Nick and Watts can watch the memories in action, projected as holograms for no reason except to give us movie watchers something to look at during these scenes. (Don’t worry, Nick and Watts aren’t leches — they turn away when those memories might get a little steamy.) This present is so horrible, the nostalgia biz must be lucrative, but Nick is doing merely OK, because he tends to give freebies to his vet buddies from the Border Wars so they can relive happier times. Authorities pay him to plumb criminals’ brains for clues, and others, well, they just want to find their keys.

The latter is a request from Mae (Ferguson), who femme-fatales her way into Nick’s life, justifying his hardboiled, hopeless-romantic noir voiceover (e.g., “Memory is a boat that sails against the current, and I’m the oarsman”). She’s a lounge singer in low-cut/high-cut silken gowns who could melt iron from 100 paces by raising an eyebrow a sixteenth of an inch, Bacall-style. This dame, you see, she saunters into Nick’s life and drops her dress to climb into the thinky-thingy, and before you know it, she’s found her keys and Nick’s added one to the ring: It opens his heart. They spend enough time together to cultivate Nick’s impending obsession, y’know, the one that hits high gear after she disappears. Now he’s gotta find her, at any cost, and guess what his best method is? That’s right. The old brain game.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Reminiscence is a kind of damp-undercarriage Blade Runner combined with bits of Minority Report, Inception and some tasty noir via Hitchcock.

Performance Worth Watching: Newton strains to turn her one-note character into at least a modest piece by a string quartet, and while the effort is visible, the result is disappointing. Her and Jackman’s characters show signs of a thoughtful and unusual platonic dynamic, but it goes nowhere as she’s relegated to the margins. It’s a missed opportunity.

Memorable Dialogue: Are we supposed to giggle at stuff like this?

Mae: Tell me a story. One with a happy ending.

Nick: There’s no such thing as a happy ending. All endings are sad, especially if the story is happy.

Mae: Then tell me a happy story, but end it in the middle.

Sex and Skin: Highly stylized and heavily passionate shadow-drenched clothed straddling (as stuff falls off tables and countertops, glasses shattering on the floor? Yes, as stuff falls off tables and countertops, glasses shattering on the floor).

Our Take: As Nick quests to find his lost lover and find out if she ditched him or scammed him or what, he becomes the stereotypical sad-sack Noir Guy on a private-dickish quest that involves digging up clues and getting his ass kicked. He visits meticulously designed sets amped with CGI, meets a shady character who gives a long and tedious speech, gets socked in the gut for the trouble, repeat. It’s a repetitive slog — more like the Greatest Slow-man, right? Right?

Joy cribs from familiar dystopian sci-fi fodder — including her own Westworld work — and regular-rotation Turner Classic Movies titles and comes somewhat close to crafting a fresh and compelling collision of past and future aesthetics. Reminiscence is at its best when it’s stripped down to action and punchy visuals, such as a sequence in which Joy uses a wide-angle lens to distort the frame as two men wallop each other in an abandoned mansion whose first level is entirely underwater, making it all the easier to stage a surreal near-drowning sequence. But that same near-drowning sequence ends up deviating into the same old life-flashes-before-your-eyes stuff; cliches are as seductive to Joy as Mae is to ol’ Nick.

Nick’s tragic-romantic quest takes him all over the place, to so, so many seedy underbellies, opening the door to some half-realized world-building. The war and the vast gorge between the haves and have-nots exists merely as a blurry backdrop for Nick’s vague, navel-gazey crapola about the nature of loss and memory and the melancholy passage of time, laced with some there’s-no-light-without-darkness quasi-philosophical chestnuts. Here, I’ll add some more: Cherish what you have while you have it. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may be kaputskies. Live laugh love. Oh, and one last one: Don’t waste your time on inconsequential things, like watching this movie.

Our Call: Reminiscence? Forget it! SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Reminiscence on HBO Max