Renaissance
In the not too distant future grizzled but honest cop, Barthelemy Karas (Daniel Craig) finds himself wrapped up in a big brother type mystery involving the ubiquitous Avalon Corporation. When one of their scientists is kidnapped it is Karas who is tasked with finding her. Once he’s jumped down the rabbit hole in search of missing witnesses and underworld leaders Karas finds that his preconceived notions of who’s running things begin to be turned upside down.
There are two things that ruin this film with the first being its overall look, which is unfortunate since that appears to have been Renaissance’s main selling point. Even if you put aside the fact that at times the animation doesn’t come close to capturing the drama, the stark visuals are just tough to look at. Using motion capture, the actors were digitally painted over in black, white and the occasional shade of grey. What you end up with is a film whose Java-style animation carries no real drama and utterly kills any action sequence.
The second misstep in this film is really the script. Renaissance is set up to be some futuristic film noir, but more attention is paid to the noir than to the story. There is very little in Renaissance that hasn’t either been seen or told better somewhere else and when you add hackneyed dialog that at time is plain silly, you end up with a film that borders on tedium. It’s the kind of film that appears like it’s doing or saying something, but in actually there’s nothing here and halfway through you’ll be disheartened by the fact that you’re only halfway through.
The voice work in Renaissance is just absolutely terrible, but I don’t think it’s fait to lay the blame on the actors involved. One of the many drawbacks of the highly stylized visuals is that they don’t accurately capture emotion. What you end up with is characters having an intense back and forth but they are pretty much standing there stone faced. It almost comes of as comedy; much in the same way that having marionettes give dramatic speeches in Team America: World Police did.
There’s going to be a certain segment of the population that will say this film is awesome and generally Renaissance will probably and fortunately only be seen by those people. Within in this crowd it will spread like wildfire and much like Waking Life before it they will assume that they are seeing something good simply because it looks “cool”. Meanwhile, you will know that poop is poop, even if you put a bow on it. If you want to see something in this vein just go ahead and rent Blade Runner or Minority Report and nod politely when someone excitedly suggest that you see Renaissance.
The Grade
- Story: D
- Acting: C
- Visuals: C-
- Originality: C-
- Enjoyability: D-
- Overall: C-
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