A star lineup lends their voices to the eye popping, noirish cop thriller, "Renaissance." A futuristic film that spends too much time on the visual piece rather than the story piece.
The year is 2054, Paris, where a talented young scientist named Ilona Tasuiev (Romola Garai) is kidnapped causing much commotion and panic for the regeneration company she works for, Avalon. Captain Karas (Daniel Craig) is leads the case to find Ilona. As Karas creeps farther into this labyrinth known as Paris, he finds information that he himself doesn't even want to know involving disastrous events linking to Avalon and its CEO, Paul Dellenbach (Jonathan Pryce) in the year 2006. With help from Ilona's sister, Bislane (Catherine McCormack) and Dr. Jonas Muller (Ian Holm) Karas slowly finds his way out of confusion only to find himself in a tangled web of violence and mayhem.
It's an interesting story, yes, but the story is not really the reason anyone would see this movie. Its for the visual piece. Visually, "Renaissance" is spectacular, filmed in a "Sin Cityish" way with a black-and-white animated feature with extreme contrasts giving it and eerier, noirish touch which makes the film that much better to watch. However, the animation can't account for everything, and isn't even perfect itself (many movements of the mouth and body seem robotic or delayed to an extent). As a movie, "Renaisance" is nothing new. Adding cheap thrills including shootouts and car chases to keep the audience locked for it's 1hr. and 45 mins. duration. Beyond that, "Renaissance" tries to hard to become a true noir film adding twists and turns at every corner throwing the film in a new direction, and by the end it's completely lost itself and the audience in a web of confusion it created.
Visually, "Renaissance" scores a 10, on everything else that counts, much lower. Averaged out, it comes out to just an O.K. film barely worth a recommendation. Personally, I would like to see more films made in this animated/contrast form, only I hope that the next time they use it, they have a better story to go along with it.
The year is 2054, Paris, where a talented young scientist named Ilona Tasuiev (Romola Garai) is kidnapped causing much commotion and panic for the regeneration company she works for, Avalon. Captain Karas (Daniel Craig) is leads the case to find Ilona. As Karas creeps farther into this labyrinth known as Paris, he finds information that he himself doesn't even want to know involving disastrous events linking to Avalon and its CEO, Paul Dellenbach (Jonathan Pryce) in the year 2006. With help from Ilona's sister, Bislane (Catherine McCormack) and Dr. Jonas Muller (Ian Holm) Karas slowly finds his way out of confusion only to find himself in a tangled web of violence and mayhem.
It's an interesting story, yes, but the story is not really the reason anyone would see this movie. Its for the visual piece. Visually, "Renaissance" is spectacular, filmed in a "Sin Cityish" way with a black-and-white animated feature with extreme contrasts giving it and eerier, noirish touch which makes the film that much better to watch. However, the animation can't account for everything, and isn't even perfect itself (many movements of the mouth and body seem robotic or delayed to an extent). As a movie, "Renaisance" is nothing new. Adding cheap thrills including shootouts and car chases to keep the audience locked for it's 1hr. and 45 mins. duration. Beyond that, "Renaissance" tries to hard to become a true noir film adding twists and turns at every corner throwing the film in a new direction, and by the end it's completely lost itself and the audience in a web of confusion it created.
Visually, "Renaissance" scores a 10, on everything else that counts, much lower. Averaged out, it comes out to just an O.K. film barely worth a recommendation. Personally, I would like to see more films made in this animated/contrast form, only I hope that the next time they use it, they have a better story to go along with it.