[yasr_overall_rating]
The daughter of a billionaire tech mogul questions her own memories about her mothers death after being kidnapped by a stranger.
Memory is a tricky thing. While the good memories formed over the course of a lifetime can sustain a person through difficult times, the bad memories – though often painful – can be critically important to establishing a person’s identity.
Jack Clé (Colm Feore), a billionaire tech CEO, is preparing to further increase his wealth by introducing a device called an Oubli, which is worn around the ear like a Bluetooth and amplifies users’ good memories. Clé’s brilliant daughter, Sophie (Aja Naomi King), has taken the lead on marketing the device and is preparing for the Oubli’s all-important launch. Sophie, who lost her mother, is severely overusing her Oubli to amplify her last memory of their time spent together. After dodging a creep at a bar, Sophie is kidnapped by a woman in a ski mask. Though her stint with her kidnapper is brief, the revelation that she has a computer chip in her brain that she doesn’t remember putting there, leads her deeper and deeper down a road filled with questions and leading to a wholly unexpected place.
On the whole, the cast’s performances leave something to be desired. King does well in making Sophie believable as an intelligent and capable person, but does little to get the audience to empathize with her. Feore certainly sells the “evil businessman” bit, but comes across as somewhat one dimensional, even when the “big twist” is revealed at the end.
If the first half of the movie is marked by a confusing plot and slow pacing, the second half is almost entirely its opposite. Once Sophie becomes aware that her father knows much more about her brain chip than he is letting on, she enlists her loyal bodyguard Aiden (played by Gary Dourdan, who has arguably the best performance in the film) to help her learn more about the dark history of the Oubli device. Ultimately, the answers Sophie finds are less scientific than personal, and much closer to home than even her father’s involvement in the company would lead viewers to suspect. I left wishing that the film had spent more time following Sophie and Aiden on the road, and less time featuring Sophie blankly listening to her father’s obvious lies.
Overall, the film’s style and pace felt a bit to me like a poor man’s “Gattaca.” The plot device – which is, both literally and figuratively, the Oubli – is an interesting idea that I would’ve liked to see expanded on a bit more, but does a good enough job of sustaining the viewer through a sluggish first half. “Reversion” is the equivalent of a mediocre short story from a science fiction anthology brought to life. It will appeal to fans of the genre, but will likely not play as well with people who don’t have an interest in pie-in-the-sky technologies.
In select theaters October 9th in New York (Empire 25) and Los Angeles (Universal Citywalk) with a wider national release to follow
