“‘Sci-fi Noir’ in the tradition of Dark City, Blade Runner,” well that is enough to get me intrigued by this new film coming out next month. Synchoronicity sounds like a film worth checking out. Check out the trailer here:
Also read the review over at Slash Films here:
Renaissance is an animated sci-fi neo noir made in 2006 using CGI, Motion Capture, and only Black and White with no shades of grey. This film is French and directed by Christian Volckman, but since it is animated it does not have subtitles, but is re-voiced in English. Daniel Craig voices our main character Karas.
This film takes place in a future Paris of 2054 and combines a classic noir look and story in part, with a futuristic sci-fi plot line. The film starts with our hard-boiled detective, Karas having a nightmare of his past. This shows his hard upbringing and his mind state in the present. The film takes us to a flashy club where we meet two sisters. They are an yin yang pairing as one is a hard driven scientist and one is a slacker who just wants to have fun and can careless about work. Our hard-working scientist is kidnapped while leaving the club with no trace. Karas is brought on to the case to find her and she has to be alive. The girl works for a big corporation called Avalon and they work on anti-aging and health products. They are also very powerful. This is where Karas starts his investigation. Was our kidnap victim part of corporate espionage? a victim of circumstance? Did she discover something in the lab she shouldn’t have? Will Karas find her?
This film is more style then substance. It isn’t a bad story, but your senses are drawn to the visual style more than anything.
This is a fun film to watch, think a mix of Sin City and Blade Runner. If this sounds amazing to you, you should check out this film. Though I would recommend both of those films over this one, it is still worth watching.
Alphaville is the first sci-fi neo-noir film that I’m aware of. It is the predecessor for films like 12 Monkeys, Donnie Darko, and Predestination, but it may be closer to Matrix, Terminator and Blade Runner. Why? you ask…, the theme. The Theme of this movie and the other three are not time travel but machines taking over and running the humans. This film is very strange, beautiful, unique, challenging, and trippy. I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t understand a lot of this film. I think each person that watches it may take something different away from the experience. A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution is the tag line of this film and seems to be a far assessment.
This film is written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, a french director that started directing in 1955 and is still going strong today. He has made a few noir type films and I look forward to reviewing some of those later on this blog. This film is filmed in a classic film-noir fashion, black and white, interesting angles and lighting, an odd perspective that makes it interesting to watch. It takes place in the future in the city of Alphaville, but is just filmed in than modern-day 1965 Paris. This gives it a unique look, its futuristic for classic noir era, but probably felt old-looking to 1965 viewers.
Eddie Constantine plays Lemmy Caution in this film, he also played this character in 13 other films. Though I have never seen any of these other movies, they look to range from traditional crime dramas in the 1950’s to musicals to a drama in 1991, also directed by Godard. This is interesting to me and would like to see a few of these to see how the character evolves over time.
Anna Karina plays our femme fatale, we never know if we can trust her, if she is just a pawn for the computer Alpha 60, or she is working with her engineer father to take down Caution. Karina was married to Godard at this time and starred in many of his films in the 1960’s.
I still don’t know what to think of this film, it will definitely stay with you and make you think. It may be a movie worth watching a couple of times to get all the subtleties. I would not recommend this film to just anybody, but if you find the science fiction neo-noir movies I listed above interesting and some of your favorites, I would check it out. Would this replace any of the above movies on my favorite 1001 movies of all time? No, but this movie gave me some prospective of where they came from.
everythingnoir 