Rent Rememory (2017)

Might Need the Machine Itself to Remember this Film Once You've Watched It - Rememory review by Strovey

Peter Dinklage undoubtedly can play characters with some great weight of responsibility, guilt or other highly emotional heft on his shoulders. He is superb at it. So far so good and just to add to the burden, on his shoulders, he carries this film.

It just as well because despite the acting and compelling story what he is really at the front of is a fairly standard murder-mystery-thriller wrapped up in science-fiction. The memory machine just being a replacement for 'Detective Exposition' that rolls up in these films normally.

This is not to say Rememory is a bad film, it is not, but it is placed front and centre as a science-fiction mystery and without the unlikely and huge plot-hole machine it is not really that.

The story unfolds in a convoluted fashion and characters seem to be motivated to do things just to prolong the story and make it more confusing. So many characters seem to have some dark secret or problem that the memory machine uncovered that it would have been obvious to any corporation/scientist that this needed further work.

Peter Dinklage’s character seems to be trying to find one important thing out but it really is something else. There is a slight twist near the end that might make you sit up if you were not paying attention but really every character seems to skipping past and jumping over plot-holes.

The acting in general is strong with Dinklage remorseful and sad like he has a great weight on his shoulders and his foil Julia Ormond as the scientist Dunn’s widow, matches him with a quite different but believable and sympathetic character.

The film's main threads are regret, guilt, remorse and redemption right there, front and centre, as you would expect a film dealing with delving into a person’s memories to be. The problem is this has been done before and after and much better. There seems no need to twist the story up in a murder mystery that had to be solved and to add a plot device memory machine, whilst raising interesting questions, seemed a bit like lazy writing.

The cinematography, overall acting, look and feel of the film are good, although the memory machine seems a bit PlayStation 4, but there are few glaring leaps of logic. In particular a thing that has to be addresses delicately, Mr. Dinklage is a well-known and superb actor that never lets his size affect anything he plays, but and it is a big but, he is a little person and carting around a memory machine, being a mystery man that no one seems to know who he is or what he is doing, not one investigator/questioner says ‘Oh yeah it was a little fella, you can’t miss him’.

Overall Rememory will not stay in my memory for long and the subject of the story could have been treated in an entirely different matter and still drove the point home.