I don’t know how I missed The Final Cut with Robin Williams and Mira Sorvino. I spent a couple of hours the other day looking at movie previews and came across this movie. It sounded interesting, so I ordered it at NetFlix. I watched it while doing my daily run last Saturday and I was astounded by how good the movie was. I thought that if I hadn’t heard anything about the movie and it didn’t even show up in my local theaters, then it must have been BAD. Instead, I’m sitting in awe of its greatness.

The movie follows the life of Alan Hackman (Robin Williams). He is a cutter. Instead of splicing together movies, he cuts and pastes lives. Eyetech has created an implant that can record every sight and sound a person experiences during his entire life. The implant is installed when a child is an infant and grows organically, nearly undetectable. After death, everything the person saw or heard is accessible from the chip. It’s Alan’s job to edit the lifetime down to an hour and a half for the benefit of the bereaved loved ones.

Alan is given the hardest of the jobs. He will take the worst of humanity and create a “Rememory” that the family can be proud of. It’s not a job that many can handle. A former collegue of his couldn’t handle the pressure and turned on the entire profession, joining the anti-implant hippies. Alan is able to handle the worst of the nightmares he has to view on the screen, until his own nightmare comes crashing into his life through the memory of a client.

If you are a member of NetFlix, go there right now and put this movie at the top of your queue. If not, you might have to search a little bit to find it at your local video store, but it’s totally worth it. I was expecting a silly sci-fi movie and I was hoping that maybe there might be one good idea there. Instead, I was treated to an elegant story and inventive sci-fi that felt as if it could have already been invented forty years ago. Genius…