The Final Cut

~Too many missed opportunities~

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By Todd Karella
October 15, 2004

Rated PG-13

Alan Hackman (Robin Williams) is a cutter, someone who takes the memories of a recently deceased individual and cuts them down into a sanitized collage for their family to watch at their rememory service.
Whenever someone needs some particularly horrible memories removed they call on Alan. He's the one who can handle seeing anything, including, murders rapes, and child molestations.
When Alan is hired to cut the memories of a former executive for the memory implant company Zoe, he finds something that even he cannot handle.

This was obviously the turning point in Alan's life and what has made him such a good cutter. His feeling guilty all these years has made him able to remove others' sins from their rememories and to show only the good parts.
   The reason that he never knew his friend didn't die is never explored and is a real weak point in the story.
   While Alan wrestles with his own demons, the world continues to go on without him.
   He has a very brief yet awkward relationship with Delila (Mira Sorvino) whom he forgets about for months at a time as he is caught up in his job.

There are many interesting questions that arise as Alan searches for his past. How does someone's behavior change when they find out on their 18th birthday that everything they do or say is being recorded? Is it right to subject a fetus to a lifetime of using the Zoe chip? Should the recorded information be used to solve crimes or capture criminals?
Unfortunately, all of these questions left untouched by the film would have been far more interesting than the simple childhood tragedy.

A few twists make the film more interesting as Fletcher (Jim Caviezel) a rogue cutter finds out about Alan's latest client and will stop at nothing to get ahold of the chip in order to embarrass the Zoe company and force them to stop producing the chip.
It's against the cutter code to release someone's rememories for profit or personal gain and Alan refuses, risking his own life in the process.
Still searching for his friend, Alan comes across some of his own medical records and makes a startling discovery. He has his own Zoe implant.

Once again Robin Williams gives another quality performance in this dark film that leaves you thinking about the possibilities of the future in our own society where the idea of a camera in your head does not seem so farfetched.
Also classified as science fiction, it would have been nice to have seen something more of the future than Alan's home where he has a super computer that can record, sort and cut every second in a human being's long life.
With that much computer power you'd expect to see some other technological advances, but then again maybe that would have detracted from the story.

Alan Hackman-Robin Williams

It's not the shady dealings that he witnesses or the man molesting his own daughter that catches Alan's attention. Instead, it's something even more unbelievable, a man who wipes off his glasses similarly to the way his childhood friend did??? The same friend he felt responsible for getting killed.
As the film goes on, we see bits and pieces of what happened to him as a child and what became of his friend so many years ago.