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OK, what do we have here... The Final Cut. OK, it's some kinda cyberpunk thriller starring Robin Williams of all people, where his job is to take people's memory core dumps and edit them into a nice little video to show at their funeral. Well, I can already guess basically the entire plot, but I have a weird soft spot for Robin Williams doing weird dark stuff. Anyway, we start off with Fat Kid and Nerdy Kid playing in some abandoned farm, and... nerdy kid falls to his death in a sequence I don't especially buy. OK, they're walking along a plank, right? Fat kid gets across, nerdy kid gets scared halkway across, so he decides to jump the rest of the distance. That's one. He barely catches the edge, and the fat kid just kinda arbitrarily fails to help him up. That's 2. Rather than immediately run down to check on him (or just plain run) he stops to grab the funky little necklace thing off a loose nail that got caught up when he fell. That's 3. Then he realizes he's dead, and makes a big show of trying to cover his own bloody footprints before fleeing the scene... which he carved his name into, and was last seen heading to with the other kid. That's 4. And apparently his parents go along with his wanting to flee so he isn't... implicated for murdering another 10 year old I guess, and... I guess they move? That's FIVE things I can't buy about this scene.
Anyway, now we've got "the cutter's code" flashing up as a big ol' 3 point text screen which is probably pretty integral to the plot so I probably should have been paying more attention rather than yammer on about this kid's unrealistic behavior. Apparently the gist is, when you're born... no wait, just BEFORE apparently, your parents can opt to have a camera stuck in your eye, which records your entire life from your POV. Then when you die, someone who rather arbitrarily is not allowed to have one of these, under strict confidentiality, yanks it out of your head and edits your entire life down to a 90 minute movie to play at your funeral. OK, really movie? Really? You suggest this is something people would actually want? Would anyone NOT want to have one of these removed the instant they were told they had one (which is apparently when they turn 21)? And why would you want it edited down to something so short? Wouldn't the appeal be in having someone's ENTIRE life to re-watch?
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Pretty posh editing rig though. Big ol' multi-monitor computer set up with a big wooden desk serving as casing. But yeah, as I was saying we're making it out like being an editor here is some horrible joy draining life because you have to cover up the uglier bits of someone's life when they're beating girlfriends and stuff because we're trying to make nice happy memories. Seems to me that sort of thing would be a breath of fresh air after sitting through every single time someone went to the bathroom from a POV cam. To say nothing of masturbating, popping zits, staring at ceiling tiles, and really just the inherent horrible tedium of watching every single frelling day of someone's life looking for any moments interesting enough to include. I'm also kinda shocked at how low tech we're being about this. I mean, we're set in the near future exclusively for the sake of establishing that this whole death ritual has been around long enough that editing the memories down is an established profession. I mean, the movie we're compositing to start off with is from some doctor who died at the age of a hundred and change. So, yeah, it's the future, but seriously, there's nothing science fiction-y here. It's just a freaking camera and, apparently, huge capacity hard drive jammed into the heads of fetuses. We have the technology to do that now... and also the superior technology to stick a satellite uplink in there and not have to store things locally and lose the whole thing if someone dies of head trauma, which seriously, they established as a thing that happens.
So hey, here's some plot. Some rival douchebag is trying to get Robin Williams to give him the job he has coming up next, presumably for sinister reasons. Oh, OK. The editing software automatically sorts footage into categories, specifically so you can edit out all the going to the bathroom and masturbation as a batch order without having to actually watch any of it. At least we're addressing that issue. Seriously though, this movie seems to be setting out to demonstrate what a horrible technology we mustn't develop this is, but it's doing so on vague feat-of-change bad sci-fi thriller logic and not really getting into all the obvious problems that would keep it from ever getting off the ground... even though it seems vaguely aware of them... and oh @#$%. Is this guy about to rape his 8 year old daughter? OK, PG-13 movie so... I guess we're just, yeah, implying that that's coming up and deleting the rest of that scene without showing it, but still, that's totally what that scene was. Come to think of it, wasn't there also a child porn angle or something in One Hour Photo? The OTHER thriller with Robin Williams looking at the photographic evidence of people's lives? Did Jack have a creepy trying to get in the giant kid's pants scene I'm not remembering? Is there some sort of pattern in here?
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So now the plot is rather awkwardly jumping forward. After that bit, he spots what appears to be dead nerdy kid as an adult in this guy's memories and is going off on some crazy quest to find him. Seriously, crazy quest. Step one is to ambush some criminal type in a bathroom and blackmail him for info. Oh and here's more vaguely addressing the problem. People secretly videotaping other people with their eye cameras and not getting permission! Oh noes! That's so much worse than videotaping your whole childhood from your own POV without your knowledge! Also oh hey, it's what'shername from Angel. Evil lawyer gal. Speaking of Joss Whedon shows, I have the same problem with this movie as I had with Dollhouse. Here's a horrible premise! We're going to gradually explain to you part of what makes it such a horrible premise despite it being immediately obvious to anyone who thinks about it for half a second!
Back to the actual plot though, talking to little victim girl here, it turns out nerdy kid from the beginning not only didn't die from that scene at the beginning where he totally died, he grew up to be her teacher, but apparently died in a car accident a year ago. So... now he's desperately looking to see if he left one of those memory movies it seems, and again, the opening premise of this movie is so stupidly unbelievable. If your friend is in a serious accident when you're TEN, you don't convince your parents to flee the state, and even if you DID, you would try and stay on top of the situation. At least to the extent that someone would stay in touch with someone else for at least the, oh... few hours it'd take for word to get out that they were rushed to the hospital and pulled through? I could see having this plot if he actually attempted to murder the kid and was desperately trying to cover his tracks, but... this is an awful movie! I cannot suspend this much disbelief! You have failed in what is perhaps your most important duty as a writer!
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So... OK, it's actually a brain mounted implant.Here's him showing his girlfriend his secret stash of bugged out recordings of people's dreams and hallucinations (which are very very boring). OK wait. These get thrown away normally? What the hell? Wouldn't the ability to do that be way more expensive than a camera, and wouldn't being able to see someone's dreams be way more interesting and informative than what they saw and heard? The terrible premises never end! Oh hey, here's another. Apparently it's all the rage to get this special technobabble tattoos that emit a constant EMP that prevents the privacy destroying implants from recording stuff. Robin Williams just went and got one because he's all weirdly paranoid for totally arbitrary reasons that make no sense. As I've mentioned. Repeatedly. He's also carrying a gun. And here's his girlfriend, who... I guess was the girlfriend of some dude whose memories he edited, just kinda breaking into his office and watching all his old recordings. So yeah, nice to know that these people who are trusted with astounding privacy violating jobs have no security of any kind on their offices and equipment. Anyway, she shoots the chip from his dead friend that's still being searched I guess.
So yeah, now he's going to meet his bosses and confess how sneaking around stealing his dead friend's hard drive he discovered that he actually has one of these chips too, his parents just never told him. But doing this for a living and having one of these chips is ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN! Because... uh... bad writing? Seriously, I can't think of anything approaching a legitimate reason to have that rule. But anyway, apparently there's a super secret method with a bunch of arbitrary restrictions where he's allowed to watch his own memories. Seriously, he can't back anything up and there's a timer and he gets fired after and there is literally NO attempt to justify ANY of this. This movie is the worst written piece of garbage I've seen in quite some time, and remember I go out of my way to FIND poorly written pieces of garbage all the time. Anyway, turns out he wasn't even bleeding after that fall, he just landed near some cans of red paint. Of course, this totally doesn't match up with the version of events from the beginning of the movie on a number of points, so I kinda have to call BS on that whole revelation.
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Oh yeah, and we still have this other plot thread where this other guy is all rararar I want this child molester's memories you've got... which we never went into in enough depth to care about any of it, and apparently this chip was also destroyed when his computer was shot, which is weird because I thought we established that was the one from his friend. I guess it was both somehow. Somehow of course meaning terrible writing. I mean, seriously. With how simple this movie's plot is, you'd figure at least some small part of it would hold together a little. Anyway, now bad guy wants to kill Robin Williams because he knows he has a secret head camera that has a sucky bootleg recording in it of the child molester dude's life, which he really really wants for reasons which, seriously, were never established. Is it to show people the unedited version and prove how people are covering things up as some kinda political thing? Is it some sort of corporate espionage? Is it because he had him murdered, because I guess he had him murdered. OK, I guess it's the murder coverup bit, because he does the same job and could get political coverage easily on his own... no wait, apparently not. Now he's watching Robin Williams' memories after killing him and tearing up and talking about how it's for the greater good and his life will mean something... so... yeah. Half the plot hinges on totally unbelievable character motivations, and the other half on totally UNEXPLAINED character motivations. We end with him finding out his friend didn't die, which was already established, quite firmly, maybe 20 minutes into the movie, and then with something totally incoherent. No message, no twist, no particular emotional response provoked from the audience, just... yeah, terrible movie. I guess the moral is... uh... don't do things in the near future. It's bad for society. Or maybe good. Or something.
