The Discovery has the premise of Black Mirror episode and the spiritual optimism of Chicken Soup for the Sci-Fi Nerd’s Soul.
It's the not-so-distant future, and Dr. Thomas Harber (Robert Redford)
has collected overwhelming scientific evidence that upon death our
brainwaves make an exodus on a subatomic level. The “soul” leaves the
body.
Where consciousness goes, nobody knows, but the loose
thread is enough to unravel humanity, inspiring an epidemic of suicides.
When life is too painful, there's always the option to take the next
train out of the station.
(Heads up in advance: this review contains minor spoilers.)
Two years and millions of suicides after the discovery,
Dr. Harber’s estranged son Will (Jason Segel) returns home, hoping to
convince dad to recant his findings and, in doing, so save the world
from systematically offing itself. Will’s serendipitously joined by Isla
(Rooney Mara), a suicidal curveball of a character prone to explicit
descriptions of her depressive idiosyncrasies. Their meet cute is an
irritating extended riff on their names, how Isla looks vaguely
familiar, and some other stilted small talk that will clearly mean
something by the final act.
Will and Isla find Harber in a dreary mansion — formerly a
summer camp for troubled youth — where the good doctor has secretly
designed an experimental looking-glass into the afterlife. Barren
mahogany smoking rooms are littered with retro-future hardware borrowed
from the set of Alien, and one wonders how this old house has
enough outlets. Dr. Harber is joined by a handful of quirky, cultish
recruits, including his son Toby (Jesse Plemons, with too little to do
beyond a chill guitar solo) and a menacing young woman (Riley Keough)
whose largest chunk of dialogue has her wondering aloud how long it will
be before suicidal folks start volunteering others for the afterlife.
How long, indeed!
What’s the genre?
Inspirational sci-fi pseudo-romance.
What’s it about?
The film oscillates between the technical quest for
insight into the afterlife and Will and Isla’s sleuthing into one
another’s tragic pasts.
The former is compelling enough busy work, with Dr.
Harber and his son revealing, refining, and testing a machine that they
hope will provide a live stream from the afterlife. The contraption
looks sort of like an MRI machine topped with a nest of wires. The
patient, who wears a crown of thousand diodes, is briefly and medically
killed. In theory, something then appears on a tiny black and white
screen. Of course, it can't be that simple: the method is likely to
vegetate its host.
As for Isla and Will, I won't spoil their grim
backstories. The film does that well enough on its own, signposting each
reveal long before it lands, making a slow film slower. There tragedies
are sad, but why they matter within the world of the film isn’t
revealed until it’s far too late to care.
After a lot of emotional and metaphysical handwriting,
these two lines converge for a bizarre twist that raises profound
questions of morality, all of which the filmmakers ignore for a climax
that is paradoxically saccharine and morbid. And it undermines film’s
core question about the afterlife by allowing purgatorial wiggle room. I
am neither joking nor exaggerating when I say The Discovery shares a good deal of its metaphysical logic with the ghosts of 1995’s Casper.
Okay, what's it really about?
Regret. The film’s marketed around one question: what happens after death? But the The Discovery’s real question isn’t quite as sexy: how do we recover from our biggest regrets?
The film perplexingly doesn’t interrogate the idea with
clarity until the final minutes. The script spends over an hour dancing
around its characters’ motivations. How frustrating then that the big
ideas are condensed to the point of meaninglessness — amended to a film
when they should be the film. And what it does have to say is
bizarrely both non-scientific and non-spiritual. It’s just a “feel good”
fantasy solution, a deus ex machina for film that tacitly speculates if
there’s even a God.
But is it any good?
I will say this, the art direction is fantastic. The mansion is a mash-up of the Deus Ex
reboot and 1980s Macintosh design lab. It doesn’t feel like real
technology — for the emphasis on bulkiness and complexity of retro tech,
the spaces are stark and roomy — but that allows for a compelling
dreaminess. I’d argue the set takes the most successful shot at the
film’s ambitions.
Everything else isn’t bad so much as it’s dull. An
exceptional cast does their damndest with what they have, but the lines
hang in the air like watching a high school theater starring a gaggle of
anxious teens.
What should it be rated?
The film doesn’t have an official rating, but I’d give it
a PG-13 for awkward sex, the theft of a corpse, dramatically easy gun
violence, and metaphysical theory that shouldn’t be allowed to escape
from AP Philosophy.
How can I actually watch it?
Netflix acquired the film last summer, and the film be available to stream on the platform March 31st, 2017.
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