BEFORE: I don't have any special movie for Independence Day - maybe I should have saved one of those alien flicks that ripped off "Independence Day". And I realized too late that "Cloverfield" is on the list, and the poster featured a prominent image of a damaged Statue of Liberty - oh, well, I'll get to that film next week. I got on a sci-fi head-trip chain, and this film is also based on a story by Philip K. Dick, so it shares that with "Total Recall". Also linking from "Total Recall", Colin Farrell was in "Daredevil" with Ben Affleck (last seen in "Changing Lanes").
THE PLOT: A mysterious job for an engineer to net him millions of dollars leaves him on the run for his life, trying to piece together why he's being chased.
AFTER: I can only describe this as a high-concept piece, and that concept seemed dumb at first, and then really cool in the middle of the film, and then pretty ridiculous by the end. Still, I applaud the effort. That concept is: a man works as a "reverse engineer" - a company gives him an end product, or perhaps the idea of one, he locks himself in a lab for two or three months, and then once the thing is built, his memory is wiped, presumably so he can't market the thing himself or give the idea to a competitor. In the case where the thing he designed is illegal, the benefit here is that he can't feel guilty, because he doesn't remember a thing. (NITPICK POINT #1: However, he still could be held responsible, as there still could be evidence that he did that illegal thing, plus he got paid to do so.)
He's given a chance to work a three-year job, essentially losing three years of his life, getting to work on a fabulous piece of mystery technology, and to be paid enough so he'll never need to work again. Intrigued? So was he - and there's no possible way this job could go wrong, right? Wrong.
After his memory gets wiped, his personal items are returned to him (NITPICK POINT #2: He lived in an office building for three years, without any personal stuff? Seems odd.) but they're NOT the same personal items he surrendered upon entering - they are 20 seemingly random, seemingly useless items. And they turn out to be exactly the items he needs to get himself out of danger.
I'm tempted to reveal too much here, and I'm going to try and hold myself in check, because this is the part where the concept actually takes off. What the machine does, who sent him the random items, and how he manages to do what he needs to do, well, that's the whole ball of wax. But I liked seeing how an envelope of useless junk essentially became a bag of magic tricks. He is an engineering genius, so that actually does make sense - if you can imagine MacGyver starring in "Memento", you start to see where this could go. Except he's not piecing together past events, he's trying to piece together future ones. And that's darn cool.
Let me be clear on one thing - there is NO time travel in this film. Nobody rewinds time, or changes time (or...do they?), but it's darn close, because essentially we're dealing with the gift of foresight, or some equivalent of it. I almost need to use the same language as time travel, when I ask: is there ONE future, or MANY potential futures? Because the knowledge seems to come from the fact that there are many, and one is clearly better than the others, but then that complex fact sort of pokes a hole in the balloon that's carrying the plot basket, so to speak. So, which is it? (Is light a particle or a wave? Yes.)
NITPICK POINT #3: He KNEW his mind would be wiped after three years - why would he then start a relationship with someone else in the company? Did he figure the connection was so strong that he'd remember it, no matter what? Or did he just want to savor it for what it was, knowing it would be taken away? Either way, it's a distraction, and the whole point was that he would work for a limited time with NO distractions.
NITPICK POINT #4: This whole concept of "reverse-engineering" is given great weight, it makes all things possible, becoming the magical equivalent of "hacking" in a tech movie made in the 1990's. But since he loses all that knowledge at the end of each job, why would the next company want to hire him, since he has lost all of the knowledge and experience he's gained in the last few years? Isn't his tech knowledge constantly outdated, by definition?
NITPICK POINT #5: Redacted because it gives away too much. Let's just say it makes no sense for a character to struggle for 3/4 of the film to do one thing, then turn around and do the opposite.
NITPICK POINT #6: Redacted because of the events in the final scene. I'm gonna let this one slide.
Also starring Uma Thurman (last seen in "Kill Bill, Vol. 2"), Aaron Eckhart (last seen in "Battle Los Angeles"), Paul Giamatti (last seen in "The Ides of March"), Colm Feore (last seen in "The Chronicles of Riddick"), Joe Morton, Michael C. Hall, Kathryn Morris.
RATING: 6 out of 10 newspaper headlines
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