FINAL CUT
(a film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: FINAL CUT is intelligent and literate as
very few science fiction films are. Five percent
of the population have chips implanted in their
bodies that record and play back everything that
they see and hear. Robin Williams plays a
"cutter." A cutter copies the life movies of the
recently departed and edits them down to one- or
two-hour home movies. His character has deadened
all his emotions so that he does not overly react
to the uncensored, full-length memoir biographies
that his clients have made of their lives. FINAL
CUT looks at the implications to the world and
the users, both positive and negative, of this
invention. Rating: low +3 (-4 to +4) or 8/10
The play "Cabaret" was based on an earlier play called "I Am a
Camera" by Christopher Isherwood. That is an intriguing title
and an intriguing concept. What if people really were movie
cameras all their lives? That is the premise of FINAL CUT, a
film written and directed by Omar Naim. Five percent of the
population are people who are walking cameras tacitly recording
everything that they see and hear. At some unspecified time
people can elect to have a chip called a Zoe placed in the heads
of unborn children that will record all that they see and hear.
On one hand, it is a priceless way for the family to see the
world though the eyes of the recently departed. On the other, it
really means that the person had no real permanent privacy. All
the chip-bearer's experiences become the property of his family
after his death.
Nobody wants to sit though a presentation of a life that is
eighty years in length and is made mostly of the minutia of the
departed person's life. And there is a lot that nobody really
wants to know about the person. So editors called "cutters" come
in to turn the dead person's life into a flashy high-level film
about the length of feature film. It is not that different from
having a photographer produce a summary of a wedding. These
abridged lives are seen in a ceremony called a "Rememory." One
of the cutter's most important functions is to delete those
memories that nobody really wants to know about and that the
departed would have wanted to keep secret. The editing machine
is called a guillotine and the master of the guillotine is Alan
Hakman (played by Robin Williams). The machine automatically
categorizes and sorts areas of the life so the cutter does not
have to observe scenes like trips to the bathroom. Perhaps
Hakman is a little like the character Robin Williams played in
ONE-HOUR PHOTO. He sees into his customers' lives, but his
responsibility is to be discreet and keep his customers' secret.
He must build a warm and loving and essentially dishonest
portrait of the deceased.
Hakman is, however, not himself a warm and loving man. He is
reserved and betrays emotional reactions to nothing. Perhaps
this is because his profession he has bleached almost all emotion
out of his being. After all, he truly knows what evil lurks in
the hearts of men. Another reason for his condition might be his
own private memory: one in which he as a boy caused the death of
another boy. But Hakman has managed to live inside of himself
and to shut off his personality altogether. The film asks how
someone can edit 70 or 80 years of memory objectively without
putting much of himself in the result? Does the cutter have a
responsibility to keep the life he edits private or in cases of
actual evil, should he reveal what he knows.
The film also is about the condition of the person with a Zoe
chip implanted in his head. Since the chip is implanted pre-
natally, the person had no say. It means that no sin he has
committed is ever really buried. The person with a Zoe must just
trust the cutter to use discretion. He is naked to the cutter as
he is to nobody else in his life. There never is any privacy and
no statute of limitations. All his sins are remembered. Some
people find the pressure so bad they commit suicide. One
character finds redemption though the ability to look at his
memories. There is a sizable and angry resistance movement
protesting the entire system. This is a picture of an entire
society at the mercy of a technological capability. That is one
of several ways that this film is comparable to Andrew Niccol's
GATTACA.
Some of the set design is very stylish, but for the most part the
film shows only glimpses of the society. Perhaps that is because
it is impossible to place this film in time. The Zoe technology
must have been around for the entire lifespan of people who have
died in their eighties, yet the society does not look advanced
several decades beyond our own. Perhaps it occurs in a Neverland
or an alternate present.
Naim's script is intelligent, but not always easy to follow. It
is an example of a fully adult science fiction film and one that
does not require any special effects. I rate FINAL CUT a low +3
on the -4 to +4 scale or 8/10. This film and THE ETERNAL
SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, two films about memory and
technology, are the two best science fiction films we have seen
in a while.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Copyright 2005 Mark R. Leeper
========== X-RAMR-ID: 39625 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1373338 X-RT-TitleID: 1136952 X-RT-AuthorID: 1309 X-RT-RatingText: 8/10
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