‘Restore Point’ and Cinematic Reality

Plus: What’s the point of all this?

‘Restore Point’ (XYZ Films)

I spent a large portion of my review last week decrying the state of the modern action blockbuster, particularly those that originate with streamers. Movies like Apple’s Argylle or Netflix’s Red Notice and Rebel Moon feel like they’ve taken the art form backwards a bit, particularly as it relates to the use of green screen backdrops. We are inundated with a deluge of unreality, but not the immersive, believable sort that the best of speculative cinematic fiction can offer.

Restore Point is the sort of movie that can restore your faith in the ability of sci-fi to feel both innovative and real, both abstract and grounded. If a film can be made as efficiently as Restore Point and look as real as pictures with nine-figure budgets like Blade Runner 2049 (a movie from which it draws obvious inspiration) and several times better than pictures like Red Notice, hope yet lives for the medium.

The setup is relatively simple: in the future, a new technology allows people who experience brain death to be resurrected as long as they’ve made a backup of themselves within the last 48 hours. Spiraling crime has led the government to make “restoration” a constitutional right. Terrorists who believe this whole process to be an abomination have taken to killing people after disconnecting them from their backup devices for 48 hours, resulting in “absolute murder.”

How this technology works, precisely, is murky; it doesn’t seem that new bodies are created, for instance, just that … things are restarted. Which leads me to some questions about what would happen, precisely, if one of the murderers say, decapitated his victim. But I digress. Let us not get bogged down in details.

We open on Detective Em Trochinowska (Andrea Mohylová) as she’s trying to track down a Tree of Life member who has kidnapped several people; she arrives too late to stop the killer, who jumps to his death after the fact. Europol and her boss aren’t entirely sure she didn’t kill the radical out of spite, given that her own husband was killed by the Tree of Life in a way that guaranteed he could not be restored. What follows is a cyber-infused noir in the vein of Blade Runner and its sequel, the under-appreciated Alex Proyas picture Dark City, or even Christopher Nolan’s Memento, movies that are all very much concerned with notions of memory and identity and how much we believe memory and behavior define us.

But the twists and the turns of the film interested me less than the look and the feel of the world built by director Robert Hloz. He seamlessly integrates massive, intriguingly designed skyscrapers into Prague’s (increasingly futuristic) skyline without calling attention to the artificiality of it. He envisions a world of Minority Report-style screens working seamlessly within and without glass, of recorded holograms that can talk and walk, seemingly living memories. And he builds it all on top of traditional set dressing that gives the world a grimy, rundown feel to it; the flash of the new contrasts sharply with the rust of washing machines dotting the woods like tombstones for a previous age. It helps that he frames his shots with care and precision; the blocking and lighting of a straightforward chase through a dusty old building are all done at a very high level. Hloz isn’t reinventing the wheel here, but he is getting every penny out of the $2 million or so that was spent on the picture, putting to shame much bigger movies with much bigger budgets.

Restore Point reminds me a bit of The Creator: While both are occasionally a bit derivative of other, better pictures in the plot department, both films also serve as a reminder that we really don’t have to settle for movies that look as though they’ve been slapped together by a guy with a green sheet hung up in his garage.

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On Across the Movie Aisle this week, we reviewed Argylle. And we were all so annoyed by Argylle that we decided to use the bonus episode to recommend something different, and better, to watch. So if you need something to watch this weekend and you’re looking at the multiplex with dread, check out this Friday’s ATMA and see what we have to recommend.

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Links!

What, precisely, is wrong with modern criticism? The question seems to be going around of late. Richard Rushfield is the latest to ask it:

Does reading critical opinion about film make you more excited about films in general and specific films in particular? Do they ignite and lead a conversation about films that is infectious and finds people excited to join in?

Or have they become tedious scolds, enforcing a conformity of taste marching lockstep with an army of identical opinion-holders, glacially handing down pronouncements instead of provoking informed conversation?

Richard’s piece echoed similar sentiments in Jacob Savage’s Tablet essay:

It’s unsettling when you know how a film will be received before it’s even released. For a movie like She Said or Bros or Nyad or Origin (“movies about important events or formerly under-represented groups”) critics will praise a standout performance, talk about how important the subject or the “moment” is, and spend paragraph after paragraph flattering their readership’s political sensibilities. For films like May December or The Irishman or The Fabelmans (“new releases from old white guys who aren’t problematic—yet”) critics will praise the craft, talk about the past, and gloss over the fact that the old guys have nothing left to say.

Rushfield and Savage are coming at this problem from slightly different angles and for slightly different reasons—Savage believes critics are afraid to truly criticize ideologically sensitive movies; Rushfield is more worried about the growing uselessness of critics to the business of film distribution—but it’s telling that they both decry the emerging conformity of taste.

I have more thoughts on this topic than this newsletter has room for, though I remain convinced that if 19 out of 20 critics think and vote and speak the same way on all the sensitive topics of the day, you’re bound to see a certain amount of conformity in the way they write about movies. It’s not fear that keeps the critics in line, exactly, it’s the simple fact that they all more or less believe the same things in a fairly narrow range from center-left to left. That said, it’s just as boring to read criticism from conservative “iconoclasts” who spend their efforts decrying films or filmmakers for being too “woke,” for being too beholden to the political orthodoxies of the day. Reducing every film to an ideological Rorschach test is a horribly numbing way to go through life.

All of which is to say that I don’t have a great solution for the conformity problem: I am my idiosyncratic self and it’s all I can be.* One thing critics can do that I have resolved to make a greater effort at in recent weeks is to aid in discovery. It’s why the top of this newsletter was dedicated to Restore Point; it’s why I reviewed The Promised Land this week; it’s why I highlighted First Time Caller a couple of weeks ago. It’s something I have to consciously resolve to do because the data makes it very clear that readers and listeners are more interested in mainstream fare than they are in independent cinema. I’m sorry, that’s just a fact: supply and demand remain a factor, even in the business of criticism. It’s why the numbers are always better for reviews of Marvel movies and big releases like Oppenheimer and Barbie than they are for essays on foreign or independent pictures like The Promised Land.

So if you find yourself getting something out of these recommendations, I hope you let your fellow film lovers know. Forward them these reviews! Tell them to find more critics they trust so they can be freed from the tyranny of Rotten Tomatoes; I only reviewed The Promised Land this week because Bilge Ebiri, a critic I trust, raved about it. And stay tuned for next week’s review of … hold on, I’m checking my notes, let’s see what’s … coming … oh no.

Madame Web.

Well. Maybe I can find something else to recommend to you in addition to filling you in on Madame Web.

*Much to the chagrin of you Barbie fanatics out there. Sorry guys, part of rejecting conformity in criticism is dealing with someone who doesn’t worship your sacred cow! But if any one of you says a single bad thing about Oppenheimer, well. You’re dead to me. So I get it.