The first official trailer for the upcoming science-fiction film, Reminiscence, has been
released.
Starring Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Ferguson and Thandiwe Newton, Reminiscence
is the directorial debut of Lisa Joy, who is most known as a co-creator on Westworld.
Her fellow co-creator of the show, Jonathan Nolan, is also a producer on this movie,
and with us covering a lot of news and breakdowns surrounding Christopher Nolan, I thought it
would be a good idea to discuss this latest trailer and breakdown everything
that was on display.
I will leave a link in the description to the new Reminiscence Trailer if you haven't
seen it already.
But before I get into my breakdown of the trailer, if you want to see any of my future
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But without further ado, let's dive into the first official trailer for Reminiscence.
So after directing one of my favourite episodes of Westworld, with Season 2's Riddle Of The
Sphinx, Lisa Joy is directing her directorial debut with Reminiscence.
Her episode of Westworld showed that she could
direct a compelling story alongside making it feel like its own contained project, and
the aesthetics, filmmaking and performances she got out of her actors, all
combines to create a mind-twisting turn of events.
Well with this new trailer for her first film, we get something that promises
to be thrilling, interesting and something that the sci-fi genre may need.
The plotline for the film involves Nick Bannister, played by Hugh Jackman, a private investigator
of the mind, navigating the darkly alluring world of the past by helping his clients access
lost memories.
Living on the fringes of the sunken Miami coast,
his life is about to be changed when he takes on a new client, Mae, played by Rebecca Ferguson.
A simple matter of lost and found becomes a dangerous obsession, as
Bannister fights to find the truth about Mae’s disappearance, uncovering a violent conspiracy,
and aiming to answer the question of how far would you go to hold on to the ones you love?
As we see in the trailer, the film also stars Thandiwe Newton, who has a major part in Westworld
as Maeve, alongside Daniel Wu, and Cliff Curtis.
I must say, I really loved this first trailer and it gave me an essence that relates back
to Inception and how Christopher Nolan took the heist genre and combined it with science
fiction.
In a similar way, Lisa Joy has taken a romance and is challenging it through the lens of
sci-fi, all while mixing the drama and action that comes with these two genres.
The themes on display also call back to Hugh Jackman's film with Christopher Nolan, The
Prestige, showcasing a focus on obsession, with this film
showing the addictive nature of the past and other visual cues to memory, like the waves
crashing against buildings, which we also saw with Inception and its marketing.
Despite the film’s impressive production design, sleek visual style, and mind-related
plot mechanics, Reminiscence is not related to Christopher Nolan’s Inception, but it's
cool to see these callbacks, especially when the people making this are related to the
auteur blockbuster director.
But this first full trailer gives us an insight into what Lisa Joy was able to craft during
her first time in the director’s chair for a theatrical film.
But coming to the main breakdown of the trailer, we learn that Reminiscence takes place in
the near future in which some of Miami has flooded due to rising water levels,
and its residents rely on nostalgia as a means of escape.
Technology exists that can let people fully immerse themselves in their previous experiences,
reliving memories not only visually, but through all of their senses.
With that as the backdrop, Hugh Jackman plays a private investigator of the mind who meets
an alluring femme fatale, played by Mission: Impossible actress Rebecca
Ferguson, and quickly becomes obsessed with her.
The concept of the film is simple, but one that presents a lot of compelling questions,
like, what would you do if you had the ability to go back and revisit old memories, especially
if your present is far from ideal?
Reminiscing is one thing, but when Jackman's private investigator finds himself obsessing
over what could have happened to the mysterious Mae, he'll go down both the physical and the
mental rabbit hole to try and uncover the truth — even as he's warned against going
down a dangerous path.
It also feels like a sci-fi movie infused with classic noir sensibilities, and quite
frankly, it looks really impressive.
“We’re going on a journey through memory,” Jackman says in the trailer, in a meditative
noir voice.
“All you have to do is follow my voice.”
In a preview event for the trailer, Joy explained that the idea for the film came to her after
the convergence of two experiences: the birth of her first child, and the hope of savouring
those early sense memories forever; and a trip to Slaithwaite, England, after her father’s
death, in which she packed up all of his belongings, and realized he had a photo of a woman he
met during a war, whom he never met again, but also never forgot.
“Something about her made such an impression that it made him name his house after her,
and he kept the photo,” Joy said.
With this film, for all this action-thriller grandeur, Joy said she hoped to explore the
moments that pass by, that change us, and the idea of “how
nice it would be to go back to those memories fully, and feel the way you felt when you
experienced them.”
As with Westworld, there’s also plenty of catnip for fans of speculative science fiction.
Nick’s memory-jumping machine was inspired by a fact Joy picked up way back in science
class when she learned that touching certain neurons during brain surgery would help patients
relive memories.
And the film takes place in a futuristic Miami that has built walls to keep out the rising
tides of climate change — an infrastructure move that’s literally being debated right
now.
“When the waters began to rise, and war broke out, nostalgia became a way of life,”
Jackman says in the trailer.
“There wasn’t a lot to look forward to.
So people began looking back.
Nothing is more addictive than the past.”
It’s an interesting setup for a sci-fi film, and the amount of world-building and plot
it successfully gets across in the trailer is exciting.
Watching this preview, I feel like I get just the right idea of what
the movie is going to be without too much information being provided too that feels
spoilery.
Hopefully, it turns out that it’s all the primer one needs to dive into the blockbuster.
Lisa Joy wrote, directed, and produced this movie, which appears to be the type of original
film aimed at adults that we often blame Hollywood for not making very much.
Hugh Jackman as a mind investigator seems like a perfect opportunity, and I love seeing
the actor partnered up with Thandiwe Newton, who has worked extensively with Joy on the
HBO series Westworld.
A case could be made that Jackman is at his best when he plays obsessive characters like
with The Prestige, which we mentioned before, and with Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners, but
I’m curious to see what the actor will add to the long history of cinematic detectives
who become obsessed with a dame who haunts into their feelings.
And Rebecca Ferguson, who is also great in the recent Mission: Impossible films, seems
to be really embracing the fun of playing a mysterious character who seems to be potentially
containing some kind of dark secret.
But that was my brief breakdown of the new official trailer for Reminiscence.
I thought this first footage was very interesting and it's definitely a film that has gone up
to my list of anticipated movies for 2021, with
the potential to bring great performances and a complex plot with many twists and turns.
We'll have to see if it's as intriguing as something like Westworld, but from an originality
point of view, it does look really promising.
Let me know down below what you thought of this new trailer for Reminiscence, alongside
your perspectives on what you think Lisa Joy's directing approach will be.
For more videos on Lisa Joy's Reminiscence when it releases later this year, then subscribe
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