a plot with drawers with a flat realization and an aberrant scenario

The opinion of the “World” – We can avoid

In a Miami of the future partly submerged under water, the inhabitants prefer to take refuge in their memories than to face this reality after the third world war. Veteran Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman) provides them with this service using equipment that allows him to reconstruct and project the mental scene of his clients. One evening, a mysterious young woman, Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), resorts to it in an alleged attempt to find her keys.

Nick begins a brief affair with her before she suddenly disappears. Bewitched, the man leads the investigation by diving into his own memory, where the image of the absent plays, as in Alice in Wonderland, the role of the “white rabbit” – that is to say, of guide.

Mess of tinkering

For her first feature film at the cinema, Lisa Joy, co-creator of the series Westworld, tackles the “Dickien” anticipatory thriller – similar in spirit to the writings of Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) -, as in his time the Blade runner (1982) by Ridley Scott. However, nothing in the writing or the direction comes even a little bit to these honorable models.

Aesthetically flat, narratively aberrant, Reminiscence is never very far from the shipwreck, starting with his imaginary of pasteboard that one would believe to belong to the panoply of the 1990s (electrodes and transparent bathtub as a mental machine).

Rather than exploring the meanders of memory, the film is content to unfold its desperately linear plot with drawers, whose innumerable breaches suggest a mess of tinkering in writing as in editing. That a $ 68 million B-series like this barely stood out from a TV by-product does not bode well for the health of American cinema today.