Realive (2016) poster

Realive (2016)

Rating:


Spain/France. 2016.

Crew

Director/Screenplay – Mateo Gil, Producers – Iben Cormenzana & Ignasi Estape, Photography – Pau Esteve Birba, Music – Lucas Vidal, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jordi San Agustin, Makeup Effects – May Effects (Supervisors – Pablo Perona & Lucia Solana), Production Design – Alain Bainee. Production Company – Arcadia Motion Pictures/Achman Films/Noodles Production/Scope Pictures.

Cast

Tom Hughes (Marc Jarvis), Oona Chaplin (Naomi Heller), Charlotte Le Bon (Elizabeth Mansfra), Barry Ward (Dr Samuel West)


Plot

A hundred years after his death, Marc Jarvis becomes the first person successfully woken from cryogenic suspension at the hands of a team led by Dr Samuel West. As Marc adjusts to the future, he uses a device called Mind Write that allows him to remember back into his past. He recalls how he ran a successful advertising agency. With news that he had a terminal cancer, he elected to end his own life and be frozen. His deepest regret was having to leave behind Naomi Heller, where the two of them loved one another but never found the right time to connect in a relationship.


Realive was a directorial outing from Mateo Gil, previously best known as a writer for Alejandro Amenabar on films such as Tesis (1996), Open Your Eyes (1997), The Sea Inside (2004) and Agora (2009). Gil had made his directorial debut with Nobody Knows Anyway (1999), followed by the horror film Spectre (2006), the English-language Blackthorn (2011) and after this went onto make the romantic comedy The Laws of Thermodynamics (2018).

There have been a good many films about cryogenics made over the years. One of the predominating story strands derives from H.G. Wells’ The Sleeper Awakes (1899), which began the premise of a cryogenic sleeper waking up in a very different future world. Variations on this have appeared in works like Planet of the Apes (1968), Sleeper (1973), Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979), Demolition Man (1993) and Idiocracy (2006). (I have an essay on the subject here with Films About Cryogenics and Suspended Animation).

Most cryogenics films mentioned in the abovelisted essay are rarely about the cryogenic process – it merely serves as a form of one-way time travel to transport the protagonist into a future world or from the past into the present-day, or else have them awake in a different environment such as another planet. In this regard, Realive emerges as one of the better films where the cryogenic process is a central element to the story. And certainly, Mateo Gil gives the impression that he has done his reading on the topic of cryogenics. (Cryogenics also factored in as a plot element in Open Your Eyes).

Cryogenic sleeper Tom Hughes in Realive (2016)
Cryogenic sleeper Marc Jarvis (Tom Hughes)

Where the film works well is in moving back and forward between the present-day and its future (which is never sketched out in any detail beyond the walls of the institute where Tom Hughes wakes up). It becomes a story of two people who loved one another but never quite had time to commit to a relationship until time itself was given a finite end for Hughes. Of the two characters, the good looking Tom Hughes proves slightly blank but great animation is provided by Oona Chaplin, granddaughter of Charlie.

Where the film started to fall down for me was in the ending. It creates an interesting set-up but then due to a seeming lack of dramatic resolution to this creates a straw moral indignation to stand upon and condemn the experiments. Right towards the end, Barry Ward’s scientist is revealed to have engaged in ethically dubious means of reviving other frozen subjects, which ended with them in great pain and agony, before finally succeeding with Tom Hughes. This is something introduced solely to add a Frankenstein Science element, which is compounded by the nasty sting that comes in the final shot of the film.


Trailer here


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