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The editing of a person's chronograph is tactfully and humorously used as an analogy of news editing in the sense that both can hide the bad and highlight the good in message conveyance. This contrivance is quite interesting and innovative although the ideation arises to certain extent from Robin Williams' previous film "One Hour Photo" (Dir: Mark Romanek, 2002). Similar to "One Hour Photo", the narrative is restricted and the personality of the key character, Alan Hackman (Robin Williams), is not completely revealed before the end of the film. This serves to establish a suspense right at the beginning of the story. The film comes with a sci-fi package but its theme is about reflection on life, joys and regrets.

The temporal orientation of the film is the present era but the core narrative substance that builds up event causality and perpetuates story progression is the technology of planting the organic Zoe chip into the human body, which is not available at present. Although the technology is a compositional futuristic element in the narrative, other visual filmic elements such as settings, props and costumes in the film are neither scientific nor high-tech. The control panel of the editing machine is designed on the traditional parameters of large manual snobs and simple key pads of the 70's. In this way, director Omar Naim retains futurism in narrative but suppresses it visually to re-establish the parity between the story and realism.

The spatial and narrative orientation contains 3 dimensions: (1) the dimension of the present in which the characters are depicted by the objective camera; (2) the subjective view of the dead persons and Hackman through their Zoe chips and (3) Hackman's subjective perception through his own memory (not through the Zoe chip) in a flashback sequence. The temporal and spatial dimensions are intermingled along the plot but the change over is so explicit that it does not confuse the viewer.

POV shots are used intensively for the subjective views of the dead persons and Hackman. It is perhaps a film in which POV shots are most intensively exploited in the recent years. A montage sequence in reverse chronological order of a person's life (brushing teeth in front of a bathroom mirror) as captured by Zoe chip and edited by Hackman is particularly interesting. Split screen (split into more than 2 and in a shot more than 50) is adopted at the second half of the film. Together with the use of extreme close-ups on the eye of Hackman and juxtaposed sounds, this filmic technique creates tension on the part of the viewer and signifies Hackman's psychological discomfort. There is a little surprise near the end when the narrative becomes unrestricted.

The film is not as good as "One Hour Photo" in terms of suspense and tension. Nevertheless, Williams stages well in expressing Hackman's intrinsic regret to what he did in his teenage. Viewers who like "One Hour Photo" and the kindred genres would find satisfaction from this film although the ending seems a bit abrupt.

註：本評論純屬影評作者個人意見，並不代表本網立場。
Note: This views presented in this review is solely the views of the critic who wrote it and do not represent the stance of our website.

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