"The Final Cut" (2004) - Movie Review

Clearly the third act of the film has been edited completely out by the director Omar Naim of the film “The Final Cut”, a thought provoking and profound science fiction with intense psychological drama. It puts forth a theory of imagination manufacturing in the brains as memories to be an hour and half film best scenes possible from it. This would enable a psychopath to have a film with empathy and sweet moments and the possibilities are endless. It is a film without any doubt cleverly and characteristically made but leaves you begging for a lot more. As mentioned a proper finish which it deserves and it could have been delivered by an able man Omar Naim in his feature film debut.

Some where in future time emerges a biological implant which can be embedded into some one as old as few second out of mother’s womb to begin recording what he/she sees through the eyes and what it get pictured in the mind. When they die, “cutter” or a life editor would assemble those with moving pianos and melancholic violin in back ground to lay out as a tribute to their life. This they call beautifully as “Rememory”. The cutter out here is Alan (Robin Williams), the best in the job who has a child hood memory turning him into what he is now. Cutter has three rules and one of them is that they should not be implanted with this device. A detached and insipid personality as he is sees life as a fictional account completely unrelated to his moral and social conscience. That’s what makes him numero uno in his line of work.

With privacy issues ripped off and vandalized, there are anti-group which has advanced from protest to devious violence. The company EYE Tech is the villain for these people and their lawyer’s life is given to Alan for Rememory. Fletcher (Jim Caviezel) an ex-cutter a current group member of the anti-group wants that badly since it would reveal the cruelty shoved under the basement of Rememory. But Alan discovers something very important to him, the child hood friend he motivated to take risk in an abandoned ware house which led to his fall and demise.

“The Final Cut” is not a thriller and surely not aims for cheap plots and obvious suspense. Thinking about the life being recorded every single fraction of second; right now we are surrounded by media with uber digital storages for many life times. We edit our own life using photos and videos only for marked occasions with guaranteed happy moments. But to acquire those real emotions on simple times can be captured with these implants. And the cost of it will be the entire nakedness of one’s life. The machine which is the editing hardware with the software tool is called “Guillotine”, a creative ironical name. A sudden death and butchering of the head dismembered but not damaged. The scientific machine and processing looks real and the tool separates the life history in to key topics. Childhood, School, University, Puberty, Masturbation, Romantic Life and it goes on and on filling the paranoid in the current media flooded world.

Robin Williams out here does not complicate things and the material drives his character. He is lonely and workaholic. Having seen many histories of human, he could only manage a night date with a librarian Delila (Miro Sorvino). And his capability gets unrevealed due to the shortage of further acts. The film with focused creativity and laying out the details and plot wraps itself well ahead. It is not that Naim did not want to take risk or afraid to dig the morality of the implant system and the rebels but it is a beauty of work left unfinished.

The investigation of Alan’s guilt comes into light when he gets to peep into his own thoughts clearer. Something sparked in me. It is a day to day event of convincing ourselves to do things what we want to. Accept it or not, there are multiple personalities in each of us fighting constantly and one of it wins. We do not know who it is but some one wins for the moment and the guilt or pain or regret or anything comes as the runner up shouting for help and even pounding on this external person we carry on. Did that happen to Alan in rewriting the truth for his convenience for escaping the guilt? In that case, does the whole notion of memories clearly been recorded as mind perceives might be after all, skewed as the videos and photos we take? “The Final Cut” is a movie I would strongly advice some one to watch. Yet it would be a constant reminder of a movie well made from start to credit roll only that it should not have ended out there.