Review of Final Cut (1993) by Ophelia G — 09 Jun 2008

Overall, I found The Final Cut to be a good movie, though rather disturbing. The idea of people having microchip implants that record their every move from birth to death - which essentially gives nobody any real sense of privacy anymore may seem like science fiction, but if you really think about it, we are already subjected to a similar kind of intrusion in our everyday lives today. Think about surveillance cameras in stores, banks, parking lots, cell phones equipped with camera and video capability, webcams, and so on. Also think about the ease of which these images/videos can be uploaded to the Internet, redistributed and shared with others. You just never know who is watching you and may be watching you in the future. It can really drive one to paranoia if one would let it.

The movie also raises the question of the validity of people's memories. One's memories or recollections of particular events could be very different from another person's memories of the same event, or even from what actually happened. The best example shown in the film was how Robin Williams' character was, for many years, haunted by something terrible that happened to him as a child (a horrible secret he kept from everyone all his life), but when he bravely decided to look back at his life through a risky process that is generally done only when one is already dead and viewed by special editors called "cutters" (who then put together a "fitting" memorial film to celebrate the life of the deceased), he discovered that he had remembered things about his past incorrectly. It was only after viewing the events from this time of his life as they actually happened that he was finally able to free himself of the guilt he carried with him for so long. Thus he was finally able to accept what happened and move on.

So, while the movie may have been disturbing to a certain degree, it is certainly thought-provoking. It reminds me of other films that tackle painful memories and how we deal with them, such as Vanilla Sky and Memento.