Embers

Watched this on Amazon. Truly one of the worst movies I have ever watched. Stupid premise... Humanity has been decimated by a virus that causes humans to be incapable of forming memories. If humans could not form memories, we would not remember how to use language and would be incapable of talking to each other.... end of movie.

Imagine that you forgot what you were doing an hour ago. You don't remember your name. You don't know if you have friends or family. All you know is you're hungry and you should find a place to spend the night. This is the setting for Embers, a movie that explores human behavior and how it is influenced by our memories. We see a couple that tries to stay together. A kid that wanders the world aimlessly. A frustrated young man that has forgotten how to control his emotions. And then there's the young girl surviving in a bunker. She is unaffected and still has her memories, but her life in the bunker might be just as pointless as a life without memory. Some of the many story lines are connected, but don't expect anything big to happen. The power lies in the concept and the emotions that the characters portray. Enjoy this movie and remember to hold your memories dear.

I could not help but keep thinking about the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel "100 Years of Solitude" and the insomnia plague that invaded the town of Macondo along with contagious amnesia that attacked many of Macondo's residents. They would have to write notes like "this is a cow, you must milk it daily" and label the chairs and tables. I also kept waiting for Embers to take me to a similar place of magical wonder. It almost did but then the movie was over. There were also many technical inconsistencies in the plot that, for a thought-provoking movie proved too much of a distraction for viewers' busy minds that are trying to absorb every detail on the screen and make something out of them. If Miranda and her father had been in the bunker for 9 years, why does everything outside have such a "recently abandoned" appearance? Is the whole thing an experiment? a hoax? Nobody is dirty, people are relatively neatly groomed (i.e. nobody has 9 years' worth of unkempt hair). Also, why do Miranda and her father speak Spanish if she was born in Singapore? Is she really who she thinks she is? Was the "self-check" a way to overcome the amnesia? a trick developed to help her be Miranda? was she really sick without her own knowledge? I mentally gave the movie the excuse that perhaps they were diplomats and moved on. But, after seeing the ending, it would have been so nice if the plot could have gone in any of all those other directions. Perhaps I should mention that my father suffers from Alzheimer's, so lately I find myself looking for movies that play with the concept of memory and the memory of love. My mother recently told me the story of how the dog across the street "decided" to love my dad and how the dog would come over every morning, and how my dad would meet the dog every morning (sometimes "for the first time") and feel the happiness of new friendship. My mother would feel happy for my dad in those moments, even though my dad is very sick. She found the feelings conflicting. For those very personal reasons, the story of Ben/Mark and Katie in Embers was to me the only redeeming part of this movie. I kept hoping that they would stumble upon the child, then find a matching bracelet, and the child would love them... like my dad must do in his mind... but Embers never went there either. True love is not something one decides to do, I believe it is a form of knowledge. We know that we love, we don't remember that we do. And that is the look I see on my father, even when he doesn't quite remember my name or thinks that I am my brother. If only the movie had gone there more. Then again, as some already hinted, we have seen that before in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Ironically, if I could forget reading that Marquez' novel, I might have liked this movie more.

I really liked the premise of this movie. It's a post-apocalyptic story, but unlike most movies in that genre this one doesn't feature zombies or other mutants - it just features people. Everyday, normal people - but the result of the epidemic that has decimated humanity is that almost everyone has lost their memory and their ability to create and retain new memories. So relationships have to start anew every single day - if those in the relationships can remember that they're in a relationship. People are lost and drifting. They have nowhere to go and no particular reason to go anywhere anyway. The story seems truly intriguing and on the basis of that premise alone I was pulled in and wanted to see this. And, in the end, it left me disappointed. Like the people wandering aimlessly, this movie just didn't really seem to go anywhere. It was lifeless and listless. It packed no real punch; it had no real point. There was no particular storyline - aside from the global epidemic - and there was really no resolution at all to anything that we saw. In fact, if anything, the movie ended on as hopeless a note as was struck all the way through. There were moments when I felt some emotional connection (or at least some sympathy) with the characters as they struggled through this insane situation, but I have to say that those moments were few and far between. Overall, I was disappointed. I really did think that the premise of this story was interesting. It just wasn't well executed. (2/10)