Memento Mori

The 'near future' is always an amazing time in Hollywood. The human race’s fantabulous technological feats of a year or two ahead as dreamed up by leading scriptwriters - purely as a tool to hook on some kind of weird and wonderful storyline, of course - are always fun to contemplate. Remember Bladerunner’s hugely sophisticated replicant technology, fantastic aerial highways and advanced space travel? Well, if we go by the Hollywood timeline, that’s all scheduled for us in a mere 17 years, in 2019. Empire Online fears the big screen’s imagination will once more expose science’s unacceptable tardiness in Nicolas Cage’s new film, Back Up. Set in that nebulous time of the 'near future,' humans can be resuscitated after they shuffle off the mortal coil and their memories backed up on a couple of floppies ready for recently returned souls when they wake up. In a strange but promising hybrid of Memento and Face/Off, Nic Cage’s policeman goes through this rather uncomfortable process when he wakes up 90 days after his own death with an inconvenient hole in his backed up memories where his demise should be. That’s IT support for you. To make a bad day worse, Elvis’ new son-in-law then discovers that not only was he murdered but that his wife had upped and left him too. Rather than sitting down to philosophically ponder on the effect of this scientific feat on the whole idea of the body-soul dichotomy, it’s probably safe to say that Cage – after doing his best confused face - will unhesitatingly hunt down his killer, find out his best friend did it, win his woman back from said best friend and just parade around with a very big, futuristic-looking gun. Hollywood hokum at its best.