Customer Reviews

The Final Cut

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(29)
3 star:		(29)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

In the indeterminate future, people can choose to have a chip, called a Zoe implant, embedded in their brain that will record their memories. Upon their death, a cutter will edit those memories down to a two hour movie called a Rememory for loved ones to view. Alan Hackman (Williams) is not only a cutter, but he is one of the best. He can make a low life criminal look like a saint, and there is no job he will not take. He is a sort of Sin Eater, taking all the bad events of a person's life upon himself. He is somewhat antisocial, with a kind of-girlfriend named Della (Sorvino). Their relationship suffers because of his dedication to his job, and while she is not happy, he seems somewhat content.

Hackman is hired to do a Rememory for a wealthy man with a shady past. His widow wants the Rememory to make him look good, and knows that he can do it based on his reputation. Enter Fletcher (Caviezel), a former cutter who now is a leader of a group opposed to Remories. He wants to take the rich man's Zoe implant and use it for his own purposes. Hackman naturally refuses, and so begins a cat and mouse game to see who will end up with the implant.

Finally, interspersed with the story is a memory from Hackman's childhood that may have shaped his career path and the person he is today.

This is an interesting and entertaining movie. Once again, Robin Williams shows that he is excellent in more serious roles. Cabiezel is good as the bad guy, and Sorvino does her best with the small part that she has. This is an intelligent science fiction story that will make you question the nature and truthfulness of your memories. "The Final Cut" is a pleasant surprise that is in very limited release, so search it out and see it.

Alan Hakman (Robin Williams) has the world's worst job. Set in the future, he operates a business that is responsible for "editing" the memories of rich, dead executive-types who's families want their memories to digitally be replayed during their funeral ceremonies. Some offer as much as $500,000 to Hakman for his services, and the sum of money is typically predicated on just how many skeletons the recently expired loved-ones had in their overpriced closets, and just how good a job he does at "cutting" those memories.

Hakman is himself no saint. A tragedy from his own childhood still haunts him and drives him to border-line paranoia. He is unsure of how this past episode actually happened, but is quite certain he was directly responsible for the incident, at least in his own mind. When Hakman discovers that one of his clients has hired him to erase certain memories of her dead husband in order to essentially expunge his dark involvement with their pre-teen daughter, Hakman's own personal ghosts come howling back to confront him and besiege him with questions on whether he should continue to dissolve certain memories of these shady dead men in order to continue making a living by splicing their memories and making them appear almost saintly.

This was a completely original and very entertaining film. Jim Caviezel and Mira Sorvino co-star. I recommend this film to anyone desiring an original plot with a highly-engrossing storyline.

I really liked The Final Cut. It may not have enough excitement to appeal to some viewers, but it is intense in its own narrow, low-key fashion. The story takes place in a futuristic setting, but rookie writer/director Omar Naim doesn't approach the story from a what-if science fiction angle; this is really the story of one man's inner soul and how one significant memory can haunt you even as it is shaping your destiny.

The story is centered on a fascinating premise - that one's memories can be recorded and played back after the individual's death. The Zoe chip makes this possible; it's a synthetic implant that grows along with you as it records every single moment of your life. After your death, a sort of highlight reel of your most significant memories is put together and shown in a special Rememory service for all your family and friends to watch. Condensing someone's life into a couple of hours is a tough job, and it takes a talented professional cutter to do the job right. Alan Hackman (Williams) is one of the best cutters out there. He sees everything from each person's life, including some pretty awful stuff, but he gives the family the good memories they yearn for. There are plenty of protesters out there opposed to the Zoe chip, including one of Alan's old colleagues. Like leftist protest groups everywhere, these guys have no problem resorting to intimidation and violence - they only worry about the ethics of their opponents, not their own. Everything comes to a head when one of the bigshots behind the Zoe chip dies. Hackman has the job of cutting the Rememory, but the protestors want the data in order to pin something on the dead guy and bring down the company.

Hackman sees someone in the subject's memories that take him back to a memory that has haunted him his entire life. He rather desperately tries to find the individual and gain some kind of psychological closure for himself, throwing his monotonous life into turmoil and placing himself in great danger. It's a mission of self-discovery - and that only complicates matters.

The Final Cut showcases a great story - dark and personally claustrophobic, poignant, and always fascinating. Happy it isn't, nor is it conventional. It is serious, intelligent, and contemplative, raising all sorts of moral questions on both sides of the Rememory debate. By this point, we all know that Robin Williams is a master of drama as well as comedy, but it is still somewhat mesmerizing to see him carry this entire movie with his remarkably low-key persona. Some people may not like the dark cinematography and tone of the film, but I think they are great strengths that reinforce the artificial nature of the whole Rememory business. Hackman is basically unphased by all of the evil things he witnesses on his guillotine cutting machine, but you can only internalize so much without it exerting some kind of effect on you. The price he pays to do his job well is his increasing isolation from his fellow men. This character, not the Rememory technology, is the story here. As such, The Final Cut may not give everyone what he/she wants and expects from it, and I think that explains the mixed reviews.

Imagine in the future we all will have an implant in our heads that will record everything we see and hear. The main character, Alan, played by Williams is a "cutter". He takes your implant after death and edits all the footage so that your family can come and watch a "Rememory" of your life.

Alan leads a lonely, depressing life, completely devoted to his work. When a big project comes up he jumps at the chance but then he sees something that changes his entire life..

It's a really well made, moving, thoughtful film. Robin Williams at his best, similar to One Hour Photo but not to hectic or monotone. It'll remind you of gattaca and of how far technology and the human race will go. What if we could relive everything a person ever saw? The real question would be: would we really want to?

This one does get off to a good start and the Rod Sterling-esque premise is interesting. Williams, in one of his few truely "straight" roles, is effective. Yet the film does have countless flaws: the over "emoting" is way out of place in this sci-fi comic book setting, while the "editing room" scenes could have been better elaberated. And, by the second half, the drawback begin to outway the advantages. (Plus, what it took the film makers to do in 105 minutes, Sterling could have done in 30!) Still, despite these minuses, you will not come away from the movie feeling you been riped off of two hours of your life.

This movie started well, but then faltered. For example, Robin Williams' character failed to take a moral stand on possible incest, choosing instead to edit out that portion of a client's life. It seemd that the only thing that shook him was his discovery that he had been implanted with a Zoe chip.

Perhaps a better plot would have saved this movie from mediocrity. Mr. Williams is a great actor (see ONE HOUR PHOTO), but this time, he seemed a bit flat. Mira Sorvino and James Caveziel were complete wasted in this film.

It's difficult for me, even after all this time and the evidence of such films as One Hour Photo, The Fisher King, and so forth to get it into my head that Robin Williams is not so much a 'comedian' as he is a consumate actor capable of portraying 'on the edge' characters. His portrayal as the disturbed and disturbing Cutter (one who edits the organic tape memories of a person's entire life for presentation to loved ones after that person's death)in The Final Cut is nothing short of awe-inspiring. As usual with most of his (serious)movies, you're going to be left with more questions than answers, more doubt than certainty. The supporting cast, all reduced to mere cameo roles by director Omar Naim, truly do support Mr. Williams' portrayal of a character one unfortunately must acknowledge is not too far off in our future. I doubt I'll ever watch this movie again, and I'm damned glad I didn't miss it.

While the premise for this movie is great--a person carries in his brain a chip implanted at birth that records all experiences throughout his/her entire life--the execution is strangely lacking. When the person dies, the chip is removed and, if the individual's family can afford it, "processed" by a cutter--someone skilled in extracting from the thousands of hours of recorded experience the highlights of the person's life, which are then shown at a "rememory", a memorial service in which the video of this life experience highlights is shown to all mourners.

Aside from the confounding logistics of the cutter having enough time to select highlights from hundreds of thousands of hours of "tape" (for lack of a better term), there is a puzzlingly sparse emotional resonance characterizing this movie. Only very rarely do we see brief moments that capture the most poignant essence of life, or the most emotionally powerful--whether negative or positive. The filmmaker, Omar Naim, could have done so much with this terrific premise and has not. Instead we have a film that focuses on a subplot involving the main character, a cutter (Robin Williams), with a childhood experience that is permanently enmeshed in his memory, a primary plot point involving this cutter processing the "life tape" of a high-powered executive who's apparently hiding dark secrets from his public persona of a charitable man and loving husband, and a former cutter (Jim Caveziel) who, along with heavily tattooed protesters, opposes the entire implant-cutting technology.

If Naim had instead concentrated on the deeper emotional repercussions of what having an implant signifies, this could and would have been an entirely different film--one that could potentially have been immensely rich and satisfying. A rare exception to his running off in the more superficial directions this premise lends itself to is an all-too-brief sequence in which the cutter, Alan Hakman, shows his girlfriend (Mira Sorvino) a short "tape" of "defective" implant recording in which for whatever reason the implant in various people recorded their dreams rather than real life. The results possess this rich, emotionally resonant flavor we really want to see given the great premise.

This could have been a phenomenal science fiction-based drama. Instead we have a disappointing SF thriller that spends too much time on the outer layers and nowhere near enough time and energy investigating how people emotionally respond to this phenomenon--what they feel, not what they have to run from, which instead is the real core of this movie.

In an unclear future, Alan Hackman(Robin Williams) is the best "cutter" that Eye Tech has. He has been working to retrieve people's memories stored in a microchip which records events in life from birth until death. Yes, even masturbation is recorded. Along, with the pleasant events in life the non-so-pleasant events are also recorded. What is a "cutter's" job? Why he's to cut out the unpleasant parts of a person's life and show only the best and happy events. This means that a "cutter" sees everything a deceased person has done, yes even murders, rapes, and domestic violence is recorded. There are 3 rules of a "cutter" one of them being that you can not have an implant of your own for obvious reasons. You don't want to record the unpleasant parts of someone else's lives onto your own chip.


Reminiscent of such movies as Memento, One-Hour Photo, and 8mm, the movie begins with Alan Hackman(Robin Williams) being 10 years old and showing you a tragedy that occurs when he is with a friend. This event haunts him for the rest of his life. At age 51, after years of built up guilt he proceeds to undergo a risky procedure which has him hooked up to a computer screen downloading images of his life while his is still alive and breathing. Here he goes back to the memories stored at age 10. Back to the time when he began to feel guilt for an incident that doesn't quite look as tragic when he takes a second look.

During his time of guilt he is to "cut" a life of one of Eye Tech's lawyers, last named Bannister. Where it shows some potentially hurtful images that could put a stop to "cutting" or the implants all together. Jim Caveziel's character, the leader of the anti-EYE, anti-implants group decides to take matters into his own hands when Bannister's memories are accidentally destroyed by Hackman's girlfriend(Mira Sorvino). He then decides to make a "Final Cut" with the memories that are left in Alan Hackman's microchip. Remember, he sees all of the unpleasant memories before he "cuts" them.

In the not too distant future, parents can implant a neurological chip, called the Zoe Chip, into the brain of their unborn baby, and from the moment of birth till the time of their death, everything seen by their eyes and heard by their ears is recorded. People called Cutters then edit the footage to the likings of the loved ones of the deceased, and show a presentation of the chosen moments together in a movie of the person's life at a memorial service called Rememory for all friends and relatives to see.
I was totally into this movie from the start just because of the central idea around the movie. As fascinating and futuristic as this idea was, it seemed very believable and realistic. This kind of idea didn't seem too far out of reach in the world we live in today. It wasn't hard for me to believe that this could happen one day.
The film focuses on Cutter Alan Hackman (Robin Williams). Being a Cutter, he gets to see the worse in his clients, such as affairs and domestic violence. He of course cuts these moments from the final cut of the person's rememory film. So in a sense, he cuts out all the bad and leaves in all the good. But things get complicated when anti-Zoe Chip activists want the footage of a recently dead important Eye Tech (the manufacturer of Zoe Chips) figure to expose a scandal and Alan is the one with that footage. I won't go into too much more, but that's the general gist of it.
With an interesting idea like this one that is centered around a futuristic thriller style atmosphere, The Final Cut proves to be an extremely watchable and attention holding movie from start to finish. There were just so many parts to this film I liked, such as the part about dreams and daydreams and how the Zoe Chip couldn't figure out what was actually being seen and what the mind was seeing. Or how a lot of young people who were against having a Zoe-chip inside them got electro-synth tattoos, a way to disrupt th chip, very noticeably on their faces as a way to protest the Zeo-chip. I just thought the film was very well written, and this idea of your whole life being recorded was looked at in various, realistic ways if it were actually to happen.
And last but not least, Robin Williams puts on a fine performance. To be honest, I expected this film to be a futuristic One Hour Photo, but in The Final Cut, Williams' performance was matched by an equally good story.