OPENS SEPTEMBER 17, CERT 15, 93 MINS Imagine a society where past events, friends and lovers can be wiped from your memory using high-tech neuroscience. Now imagine that Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind has been surgically scrubbed from your own brain. No matter, because here is a bizarrely similar plot reborn as a globe-trotting sci-fi romance from Michael Winterbottom and Frank Cottrell Boyce, the prolific director-writer team behind 24 Hour Party People and other Britfilm gems. Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton play illicit lovers whose brief encounter sets off a lethal domino effect across a scarily plausible globalised class system, where only possession of the right genetic insurance papers allows escape from the Third World wasteland into the fortress citadels of privilege. Shot in China, India, Dubai and Britain, Winterbottom's latest effort may nod to Gattaca or Minority Report in style, but it also serves as a companion piece to his docudrama In This World. Although slow and opaque, there are more provocative ideas lurking in these low-budget depths than in a dozen Will Smith blockbusters.
OPENS SEPTEMBER 17, CERT 15, 93 MINS
Imagine a society where past events, friends and lovers can be wiped from your memory using high-tech neuroscience. Now imagine that Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind has been surgically scrubbed from your own brain. No matter, because here is a bizarrely similar plot reborn as a globe-trotting sci-fi romance from Michael Winterbottom and Frank Cottrell Boyce, the prolific director-writer team behind 24 Hour Party People and other Britfilm gems. Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton play illicit lovers whose brief encounter sets off a lethal domino effect across a scarily plausible globalised class system, where only possession of the right genetic insurance papers allows escape from the Third World wasteland into the fortress citadels of privilege. Shot in China, India, Dubai and Britain, Winterbottom’s latest effort may nod to Gattaca or Minority Report in style, but it also serves as a companion piece to his docudrama In This World. Although slow and opaque, there are more provocative ideas lurking in these low-budget depths than in a dozen Will Smith blockbusters.
