These
days, kids will stick anything in their ears, even if it causes hearing damage
or memory loss. You cannot blame the latter on earbuds. That is all Jack Clè’s
doing. He has developed the Oubli, a Blue Tooth like device that vividly
recalls your happiest memories. One of the so-called side effects is a
generally dimming of unpleasant recollections, but opinions differ as to just
how bad that really is. However, his daughter and marketing director starts to
experience some rather nasty malfunctions on the eve of their product launch in
Jose Nestor Marquez’s Reversion (trailer here), which opens
today in New York.
Sophie
Clè is not just an Oubli user. She is unhealthily dependent on it. Rather than
living in the present, she constantly revisits the last happy memory she has of
her late mother. Thanks to her hype and some creative regulatory evasion, Jack Clè
stands to make a fortune off the Oubli, but his triumph is jeopardized the
night before their big Steve Jobsian media event, when Ms. Clè is kidnapped by
a disturbed woman raving about her implant. Unfortunately, she seems to fiddle
with a similar implant Clè never knew she had. She manages to escape soon
thereafter, but Oubli use no longer has the same soothing effect. Instead, she
starts experiencing violent flashbacks of her mother’s death that seem to
implicate her father.
With
the help of her loyal driver-bodyguard Ayden, Clè will seek answers from the
unstable Isa and her father’s estranged research director, Elizabeth. Clearly,
some kind of conspiracy is afoot, but like Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, it is not clear whether she can handle the truth.
For
the most part, Reversion is a slickly
competent near future thriller, but rather than being cool and exciting, the
implications of its new technology are quite sad and depressing. Granted, we
should always remember our loved ones, but we still need to move on. That is a
worthy message, but Reversion still
has its strange headscratchers, like why does the bodyguard know where all the
corporate secrets are tucked away?
As
Sophie Clè, Aja Naomi King (How to Get
Away with Murder) comes apart at the seams pretty convincingly. Of course,
a smooth talking ambiguously villainous figure like Jack Clè is right in Colm
Feore’s power zone. Arguably, he is the best part of the film, especially
considering how he carries out the big reveal. On the other hand, Gary Dourdan’s
Ayden looks like he hasn’t slept for days, which could in fact be true. Unfortunately,
the tragically twitchy Isa is also rather underwhelming, while Amanda Plummer
phones in her near cameo as Elizabeth.
