Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

When I decided to do a month of sci-fi movies I feel like I should have already seen, I didn’t realize that all of the greats were going to be from the 70s or that they’d be experimental and transgressive to the point that I’d start to feel like maybe I hate movies. I only knew that I had to include this movie that I was aware of from almost the time it was published and came very close to watching several times but always pulled back for some reason. Maybe because I was afraid it was going to be too disturbing, maybe because I had it a little mixed up with One Hour Photo, another Robin Williams drama from about the same time.

Robin Williams was the first actor I decided to search for and watch everything that came up, though I started to question that decision when I saw Jakob The Liar, and I ended up leaving a lot of what already existed at the time unseen. I’ve since closed that gap a little bit, but this one, which should be exactly in my wheelhouse even if it’s not a comedy, since it’s a sci-fi story speculating on the mind and perception, I stayed away from, because I was worried about what secret from his past the character was going to be unsettled by.

After watching the movie:

Alan Hakman’s whole life has been haunted by an episode from his childhood. One day when he was ten, his parents took him to the city and left him alone to play. He met a boy named Louis and they explored an abandoned factory together, until Alan goaded Louis across an unstable plank over a high drop, and Louis fell, causing Alan to run away leaving Louis for dead, never telling anyone, and never returning to that city. Now, Hakman is known as one of the best “Cutters”, the people who edit the memories of the recently deceased from their “Zoe” implant into a feature length “Rememory” for their loved ones. As the implants record everything the person ever saw in 100% objective detail, Cutters must be discreet, and are not allowed to sell footage or have implants themselves. As a Cutter, Alan has a reputation for taking the memories of the most despicable people and delivering pleasant, sentimental, lionizing Rememories. He spends so much time living in other people’s lives that he barely lives his own, something he considers his lot as a self-elected Sin Eater. Charles Bannister, a central figure from EYE Tech, the company that makes Zoes, dies and his widow successfully sues to get his implant, the first time EYE Tech has allowed an implant from one of their employees to be released. Mrs. Bannister asks for Hakman specifically, and very soon a former colleague Fletcher comes to Hakman demanding Bannister’s implant, offering $500,000. Even if Fletcher wasn’t suspected to be involved with the Anti-Zoe movement, Hakman would have to refuse, but while organizing the footage from Bannister’s Zoe, after casually deleting a memory of Bannister molesting his young daughter like any other sin he’s erased in his career, Hakman sees footage of a party guest that is unmistakably the Louis that he left for dead 40 years ago, grown to adulthood, sending him on a quest to find Louis and what really happened.

It’s so refreshing to watch a techno-thriller that wrestles with some ideas without being extremely challenging. This is an exploration of how a single invention would change society. It’s not even clear this is the future. The only technology that’s different is the Zoe implant, the Guillotine editing console (which is not that different from a film editor’s console except the computer has some algorithmic sorting of memories that was only a dream at the time), and the medium they store information on, which appears to be a glass slab with a few inches of 35MM film inside. The modern day scenes could otherwise be the early 2000s and the scenes of Hakman’s childhood could easily be set in the 1960s, but a 1960s where it was already becoming mainstream for parents who could afford it to give their children the “gift” of Rememory. It’s only in whenever “now” is that the unintended side effects of having a generation of people whose own eyes and ears are feeding into their own personal black box recorder are coming home. Looking back on this movie 20 years later, it’s easy to project social media or smartphones, which were just at their mainstream dawn at the time, onto this, and wonder if the inspiration was some futurist’s pondering about where we were headed with those.

It’s probably a disservice to Robin Williams that we remember him as a comedian with occasional dramatic turns. We love him as a clown, but his 90s and 00s body of work demonstrates just how much range he really had, but we put aside the more thoughtful pieces in favor of the genie, the alien, and the fat suited nanny. Strangely enough, I had just been wondering for the last few weeks what Jim Caviezel had done other than The Passion of the Christ and the recent movie based on a child slavery crusader’s questionable autobiography, and then I ended up watching this and something else with him (he’s the main antagonist in the Stallone thriller Escape Plan) in the same week. It’s unfortunate that Mira Sorvino’s character is barely there. As Hakman’s girlfriend, her role is to complain that he only turns up when it’s convenient for him, and then to go justifiably ballistic when she realizes he edited her ex-boyfriend’s Rememory just before looking her up.

I really loved the music in this. I don’t think it was always necessarily meeting what the scene needed (always erring on the bombastic side), but it’s both a little too familiar yet fun to listen to in suspenseful scenes. I’m not sure if it seemed familiar because of playing too closely to temp tracks I would have heard before or just because it leans on some very common motifs like whirly strings, but it was nice to listen to.

I appreciate that the movie doesn’t have a simple answer. We see the good and the bad, and we know that reform is coming soon, but the movie doesn’t want to tell us this is unilaterally wrong, as some characters believe it is. It just wants to play in the gray areas, show us how it can be abused but also the beauty it can bring. Is the one worth the other? That’s left as an exercise for the viewer.