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Final Cut: Mark's Take
01/05/2005 . Source: Mark R. Leeper 
Final Cut is intelligent and literate as very few science fiction films are, says Mark. Five percent of the population have chips implanted in their bodies that record and play back everything that they see and hear. Robin Williams plays a "cutter." A cutter copies the life movies of the recently departed and edits them down to one or two hour home movies. His character has deadened all his emotions so that he does not overly react to the uncensored, full-length memoir biographies that his clients have made of their lives. FINAL CUT looks at the implications to the world and the users, both positive and negative, of this invention. Rating: low +3 (-4 to +4) or 8/10
The play "Cabaret" was based on an earlier play called "I Am a Camera" by Christopher Isherwood. That is an intriguing title and an intriguing concept. What if people really were movie cameras all their lives? That is the premise of FINAL CUT, a film written and directed by Omar Naim. Five percent of the population are people who are walking cameras tacitly recording everything that they see and hear. At some unspecified time people can elect to have a chip called a Zoe placed in the heads of unborn children that will record all that they see and hear. On one hand, it is a priceless way for the family to see the world though the eyes of the recently departed. On the other, it really means that the person had no real permanent privacy. All the chip-bearer's experiences become the property of his family after his death.
Nobody wants to sit though a presentation of a life that is eighty years in length and is made mostly of the minutia of the departed person's life. And there is a lot that nobody really wants to know about the person. So editors called "cutters" come in to turn the dead person's life into a flashy high-level film about the length of feature film. It is not that different from having a photographer produce a summary of a wedding. These abridged lives are seen in a ceremony called a "Rememory." One of the cutter's most important functions is to delete those memories that nobody really wants to know about and that the departed would have wanted to keep secret. The editing machine is called a guillotine and the master of the guillotine is Alan Hakman (played by Robin Williams). The machine automatically categorizes and sorts areas of the life so the cutter does not have to observe scenes like trips to the bathroom. Perhaps Hakman is a little like the character Robin Williams played in ONE-HOUR PHOTO. He sees into his customers' lives, but his responsibility is to be discreet and keep his customers' secret. He must build a warm and loving and essentially dishonest portrait of the deceased.
Hakman is, however, not himself a warm and loving man. He is reserved and betrays emotional reactions to nothing. Perhaps this is because his profession he has bleached almost all emotion out of his being. After all, he truly knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men. Another reason for his condition might be his own private memory: one in which he as a boy caused the death of another boy. But Hakman has managed to live inside of himself and to shut off his personality altogether. The film asks how someone can edit 70 or 80 years of memory objectively without putting much of himself in the result? Does the cutter have a responsibility to keep the life he edits private or in cases of actual evil, should he reveal what he knows.
The film also is about the condition of the person with a Zoe chip implanted in his head. Since the chip is implanted pre- natally, the person had no say. It means that no sin he has committed is ever really buried. The person with a Zoe must just trust the cutter to use discretion. He is naked to the cutter as he is to nobody else in his life. There never is any privacy and no statute of limitations. All his sins are remembered. Some people find the pressure so bad they commit suicide. One character finds redemption though the ability to look at his memories. There is a sizable and angry resistance movement protesting the entire system. This is a picture of an entire society at the mercy of a technological capability. That is one of several ways that this film is comparable to Andrew Niccol's GATTACA.
Some of the set design is very stylish, but for the most part the film shows only glimpses of the society. Perhaps that is because it is impossible to place this film in time. The Zoe technology must have been around for the entire lifespan of people who have died in their eighties, yet the society does not look advanced several decades beyond our own. Perhaps it occurs in a Neverland or an alternate present.
Naim's script is intelligent, but not always easy to follow. It is an example of a fully adult science fiction film and one that does not require any special effects. I rate FINAL CUT a low +3 on the -4 to +4 scale or 8/10. This film and THE ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, two films about memory and technology, are the two best science fiction films we have seen in a while.
Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 2005 Mark R. Leeper
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