The final cut

Year of release : 2004

Run time : 1h34m

Genre : Sci Fi / Psychological Thriller

Cast : Robin Williams, Mira Sorvino, Jim Caviezel

The movie was written and directed by Omar Naim.

When he was a child, Alan played with a kid he met on a trip he was on with his parents. They found an abandoned building, and Alan walked a plank placed very high. His friend followed him, but being afraid, fell. Alan lived his whole life with the memory of that child falling to his death, remembering the red blood around him.

Alan is now a cutter, a person who cuts and edits Zoe footage. He lives by a code, that a cutter can’t sell or give away any Zoe footage, that he can’t have a Zoe implant, and that he can’t fix Zoe footage from other people’s lives to make a Rememory.

When a person dies, their family gets the implant from their head, and is asking the cutter to find the memories of them that they loved, to put it in the funeral memorial movie that people watch like at the cinema at the funeral home.

Being a cutter, Alan knows their deepest secrets, how bad or good they were as people.

Although he’s working on cutting someone’s memories for the funeral, he is asked by his friend, Thelma, also a cutter, to take another job, to cut Charles Bannister’s memories, as she can’t handle the bad people, giving her nightmares. She said that she took a brief look at Bannister’s memories, and she was disgusted.

Alan has the reputation of being very discreet, and of making any villain look like a saint, so he is always courted by the families of bad people.

Bannister was the lawyer for Eye Tech, the company manufacturing these implants.

Alan has a girlfriend he kinda forgets about, as he completely forgets the world when he cuts memories, but when he remembers her, he takes her to his place to show her some of the memories he cut, that he knows she likes, as in, footage of aging backwards (we find out later why he knows she likes this, and it’s disturbing). She thinks he is like a practitioner, a priest or taxidermist.

Alan sees himself as a sin eater, as that childhood event haunts him, and he doesn’t see the bad in people, feeling sorry for them, hence the discretion he handles his cases with, and why the footage portrays them as “saints”.

Fletcher, a former cutter, approaches Alan, asking him to give him Bannister’s implant, for he suspects him of being a pa3doph1le, and he wants to take Eye Tech down, for he thinks nobody has the right to go through someone’s head. Alan refuses.

Speaking of which, Bannister’s wife probably knew about it, as she doesn’t let her daughter talk to Alan about Bannister. To me she is as guilty as him, if she knew and didn’t do anything about it!

Cutting Bannister’s memories, he finds footage suggesting such things, and also a man who is cleaning the glasses in the same way his childhood friend did. He becomes consumed with finding out who he is, and finds out he was Bannister’s daughter’s teacher, Louis Hunt.

Breaking into Eye Tech to see if the man had an implant, to watch his memories, and see what really happened when they were kids, he finds his own file!

I personally enjoyed the movie, it’s one that makes you think, although that implant made no sense! The parents implant it into their children (prenatally or when they are born!) but neither them or the one who has it can access it, only after they die they can get it out of them, for their loved ones to play it to their funeral, what?! What’s the point of having something like that if you can’t access it? It’s like a diary that everybody gets to watch after you die, and know your deepest secrets and most embarrassing moments. It doesn’t make any sense to me why would a parent want this for their child, because definitely most of the ones having it don’t want it.

The people who find out they have one and don’t want it, get tattoos which interfere with the implant’s frequency. Others k1ll themselves in such a way to destroy the implant, so no one would have anything to watch.

Even Alan, when he finds he has one has a panic attack and goes to the tattoo parlor to get a tattoo which blocks its transmission. See, his parents died when he was 12 years old, and the parents tell their kids they implanted them when they turn 21.

Alan is marked and defined by the childhood moment when Louis fell.

I also liked how it’s shown that he remembered it wrong, like memories usually work. People remember things in different colors, things being placed differently, even a different dialogue.

There are anti-Zoe implants protests at funerals, and the protesters are considered weirdos and hippies.I don’t know about you, but I don’t want such a thing either. It’s nobody’s business what I do, I don’t want to have my life displayed when I die to strangers.

They talk about respecting the dead with these movies made from their memories, but they have no idea what that means, for if they respected the dead, they wouldn’t go through their memories, putting them on display for strangers to see! To me this is invasion of privacy, and there should be laws against such things if it were to happen. It’s not the people asking for the implants for themselves, it’s the parents doing it to the kids without their approval! It’s disgusting! Nobody should have the right to do this to another person!

The acting was good.

The visual effects were good.

The soundtrack was good.

The movie received ratings under 6.7 from the audiences and critics of Metacritic, and under 45% from the audiences and critics of Rotten Tomatoes. IMDB graded it a 6.1.

You can watch the full movie for free on the Ok.Ru platform.

Rating : Worth a watch !