REALIVE – Review

REALIVE will be in Theaters on September 29th and on VOD and Digital HD on October 3rd

Review by Mark Longden

I expected not to like this. First up – it’s a SyFy movie, the channel that brought us “2 Lava 2 Lantula”, “Bermuda Tentacles” and “Space Twister”, among many many others. Second up – it prominently features a large group of young beautiful people partying and having the sort of perfect lives that adverts are made of. But then it ended up being an extremely profound movie about love, bad timing, loss, what you’d do when you knew exactly how long you had left, and the future. Flipping from a birth in 1982 to a “death” in 2015, moving between moments in a man’s life then showing his “rebirth” in 2084, it’s superbly edited and deeply moving.

Marc Jarvis (Tom Hughes) is an artist, sort of, in a relationship, sort of, with the extraordinary, perfect Naomi (Oona Chaplin). A voiceover, which is a constant presence, narrates their thoroughly modern journey through love, and we gradually get the information that he has a brain tumour which is completely inoperable.

He’s a self-admitted narcissist so rather than choosing to ebb away his life attached to tubes, as his father did, he chooses “cryonising” himself, and the whole discussion of giving up his life is superbly written. All this is happening at the same time as his technological marvel of a reawakening in the future, so we already know how these debates will end – he’s attached to a digital umbilical cord which keeps him alive, for instance. The internet has mutated into “MindWriter”, a set of glasses which allows you to broadcast your thoughts or record them and has replaced all forms of entertainment. It’s a pretty decent idea of what the internet will become, and the indication that even in 2017 it’s beginning to replace memory is writ large.

As he begins to very gradually recover, with the help of 2084 nurse / helper / lover Elizabeth (Charlotte Le Bon), he explores the history of “Project Lazarus” as he doesn’t believe he’s the first revivee. He also discovers a letter from Naomi in his personal effects which hugely affects his life in the future and the way he’s processing his memories.

Lots of elements of this future society are thrown out there, indicating a well-thought-out and rich backstory…or that this is all the last dream of a dying man. Because, as well as being an excellent story in its own right, it could also be read as his dream from back in 2015, re-ordering his memories as they begin to fade so they have more meaning for him (this idea of memory being a selective and distorting thing even becomes a minor plot point later). One could see the man he was in 2015 thinking this would be a perfect future to live in, until he actually had to live in it.

The central performances are all solid, but Oona Chaplin is just amazing as Naomi. One can totally believe a man giving up his entire dream of the future just to maintain the memories he has of her. She feels completely real, and the way that no character is without sometimes huge flaws is to the movie’s credit.

Director Mateo Gil has made a rare foray out of Spanish cinema with this – his original “Abre Los Ojos” in 1997 was the inspiration for the super-underrated Tom Cruise movie “Vanilla Sky”. One can only hope that this is a big enough hit so he’s given more money to bring his fascinating visions to the screen, although I sort of suspect it won’t be. But I think a lot of people who go to see this will love it.

Gigantic kudos to SyFy for funding such a dark, introspective movie that manages to talk about truths that are central to our human experience, pretty universal. Perhaps I’m giving it too much praise because of how much it resonated with me, but all I can say is please go and watch it on its upcoming cinema release, or watch it as soon as it comes to a VOD service near you.