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Reminiscence: Hugh Jackman's a detective of the mind in trailer for Westworld creator's neo-noir film
Lisa Joy, co-creator of HBO's Westworld, transplants her panache for high concept science fiction to the big screen with the first trailer for her feature-length debut, Reminiscence.
Looking like a tantalizing blend of Blade Runner, Minority Report, Inception, Shutter Island, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the upcoming neo-noir stars Hugh Jackman (X-Men, Logan) as Nick Bannister. Haunted by his experiences an an interrogator during a recent war, Nick now works as a rugged private investigator in a flooded vision of Miami, helping clients relive lost memories via a technology developed during the conflict.
Watch the trailer (and a faux ad for Bannister's memory service) below:
During the film's virtual trailer event on Wednesday, attended by SYFY WIRE, Joy explained that she wanted to explore "memory, our lives in general, and the moments that pass by and maybe disappear. Those connections don't stay with us necessarily, but [they] meant something; [they] changed us and touched us — and how nice it would be to be able to go back to those memories fully for a moment. To love that life and feel the way you felt when you experienced them ... It's those small moments that mean everything and so that gave me the idea of how much of life that we value is in those small moments and how it's a universal. Those moments of love and connection and beauty that we have, and wouldn't the most amazing thing to be able to revisit them?"
With water levels and temperatures on the rise, most people choose to escape the doom and gloom of the present by escaping into happier recollections of the past. Like any good hardboiled protagonist, Nick is addicted to the preferred narcotic of this future: nostalgia. When a mysterious femme fatale known as Mae (Mission: Impossible's Rebecca Ferguson) shows up at his doorstep, looking for her lost keys, Nicks enters a passionate love affair. Not long after, Mae turns up missing and Nick finds himself drawn into a winding case that leads to a violent conspiracy.
"My character is a fairly broken man at the beginning," Jackman explained during the press event. "[He has] a fairly tough exterior. His experiences in the war — on the front lines and also as an interrogator — have left him really quite broken and sort of disengaged and distrusting of the world. He has this company, which is fading at best and into that world comes the incredible Mae. That changes everything because he's not expecting to rock him in any way ... He's just immediately intrigued and drawn in and mesmerized and increasingly becomes ... obsessed with her and needs to discover what has happened because he knows in his heart that something bad has happened to her. And he just won't accept any other version of the events and goes on this great odyssey."
The project marks a mini Westworld reunion between Joy, Thandiwe Newton (who plays Bannister's business associate), and composer Ramin Djawadi. Daniel Wu (Into the Badlands) rounds out the main cast a high-ranking member of Miami's seedy criminal underworld.
Rated PG-13, Reminiscence follows the clues into theaters and onto HBO Max Friday, Aug. 20.
