Directing: C-
Acting: C+
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Special Effects: B+

I basically wasted two hours watching Reminiscence in the movie theater. It’s also available streaming on HBO Max, and I wouldn’t even recommend you watch it there. You’ll still wish you could get those two hours back. Well, if you have any taste or sense of quality, anyway.

This movie really strains to be what I like to call “future noir,” a genre both introduced and perfected by Blade Runner in 1982. Many films since have tried and failed to replicate (no pun intended—bit of an inside joke there) it, this one merely being the latest. It takes an old-school mystery plot and grafts it onto a quasi-apocalyptic future setting. In this case, it’s Miami after significant sea level rise.

A lot of the wide shots of the city are reminiscent (ha!) of the sea level rise depicted in the Manhattan of the 2001 Spielberg film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. You may notice that when it comes to being derivative, there is a bit of a pattern here. And the renditions of all Miami’s skyscrapers wading in waters about two stories deep is a compelling one; in fact the most exciting shot in the whole movie is the opening one, starting with a wide shot from out over the sea, closing in until we’ve reached a section of the city where streets are only partially flooded with a few inches of water.

But, this world as presented by writer-director Lisa Joy, here with her feature film directorial debut, suffers from the same thing as the worlds in all those other Blade Runner rip-offs: it doesn’t feel sufficiently lived in. It’s more like a Sims version of a dystopian city—which, by the way, considering it’s Miami, has a curious and glaring lack of Hispanic characters. Oh, it has a couple, in very small, supporting parts. But they serve as little more than tokens when taking in the broad representation of the city, in a story that, of course, mostly centers white characters. Granted, the biggest part besides that of Hugh Jackman in the lead is Thandiwe Newton, but that doesn’t change the incongruity of a movie with such a large focus on a city whose population is 70% Hispanic or Latino, which treats that demographic as little more than window dressing. Or are we to assume the majority of them disappeared in this vision of the future?

That brings me to my biggest nitpick, which is that so many of the details of this world are just plain dumb. In several scenes on the streets where there is standing water on the road but not on the sidewalks, for some reason people are walking in the middle of the street and not on the sidewalk. I suppose that might be thought of as more“cinematic,” except that there is no logic in it. There’s also a battle scene in an old school band room, with instruments left by empty chairs as if the class once had to leave very quickly, presumably back when, as is mentioned several times, “the waves came.” But if the waves came, wouldn’t they have washed away the guitars and violins? Judging by this production design, the students all had to rush out in time for the room to fill with water like a slow stream from a corner faucet.

Hugh Jackson plays Nick Bannister, a guy who not only spends far too much time with hackneyed voiceover narration, but who makes a living selling time in a contraption that lets people relive the memories of their choice. (Shades of Strange Days meets Inception here.) Versions of this contraption, which for some reason necessitates stripping to your underwear and getting into a glass tube of water with a device clamped to your head, are also used to interrogate criminal suspects. Everything about how this whole process works, and especially the hardware necessary, comes across as wildly unrealistic: nothing of this sort would ever take up so much physical space. It even includes a giant circular platform over which a holographic projection of the memories can be seen by Nick, even though they aren’t even his own memories and he’s not attached to any of the apparatus. It’s all designed with cinematic aesthetics in mind, with no regard for practical realism. Memory is already well known to be wildly malleable and deeply unreliable; in what universe would these projections be so vivid it’s like watching a movie of what’s going on in someone’s head?

No one expects science fiction to be strictly accurate; given the “fiction” part, that would be impossible. But it still has to start from a jumping-off point of known truths, which Reminiscence seems to discard completely.

I’d try to share more about the plot, but on top of all this, Lisa Joy’s script tries way too hard to do way too much, using hollow dialogue in a delivery that often comes across as unrehearsed. Suffice it to say that a mysterious woman in the form of Rebecca Ferguson appears, and is the catalyst for Nick’s obsession after they have a three-month affair and then she disappears. Joy plays with the notion of memory as these scenes unfold in varying moments in the story’s timeline, a device that could be exciting and clever with a better story and actually has been done better by other filmmakers playing with memory and the perception of time.

Reminiscence feels like a first draft that somehow got filmed without any revisions or notes. And okay, so there is a lot of justified resentment out there for studio executives turning movies into something written by committee, but there also has to be a happy medium. Because if this movie is one person’s true vision, it’s a wildly underdeveloped one. This one could have used a pointer or ten.

*Behold, the only compelling part of the movie.*

Overall: C