Renaissance (2006) Review

By Alex Del Negro

“Renaissance” is sort of like the cinematic equivalent of a sub-average student altering their report card to make it appear as though they really received a B in calculus. You’re not fooling anyone, you know. We all can tell you don’t know how to find the derivative of a linear function. Now stop trying to solve for delta y by drawing the symbols artfully in order to buy more time, and sit back down in your chair. Your parents will be in shortly.

The problem with the film, quite simply put, is that it is a sub-average story dressed up in an uncommon animated style in order to make it appear more interesting than it actually is. In a way, one can almost feel bad for it, in that it’s the sort of movie where, if it were just released earlier, it might actually have gotten away with it. Of course, there are many films which could claim this as an excuse as well, and I’m quite sure they’d be right. Certainly, if one wished to test this hypothesis, it would be an easy task to construct some sort of omni-temporal travel matrix that would allow a person to slingshot back into the late 1940’s with a copy of the 1998 version of “Godzilla,” and I have little doubt that that person would subsequently be hailed as one of the most revolutionary directors of the century. I would do it myself, if it were not for my unhealthy obsession with wanting to answer once and for all the age-old paradox of what would happen if I hunted down and murdered my own Grandfather, coupled with my unrelenting fear of the consequences said action would bring upon our time stream. I don’t, for instance, want to have to wake up one morning to find that because of my bloody time rampage, the Dinosaurs are back and one of them is emperor of Earth and the Greater Perseid Star Cluster. I just don’t want to deal with something like that.

In the case of “Renaissance,” it might have been considered a better film than it was if not for the fact that “Sin City” came out first. As it is, we’ve already seen this sort of film noir, animated black and white art style before. Perhaps if it had been released in 1998 when work on the film began, it very well may have been considered a revolutionary piece of cinema. In this day and age, however, the only revolution it might hope to provide is in the field of capitol punishment, where it holds the promise of humanely liquefying an inmate’s brain by way of the skull-pounding headache one gets after staring at a screen with no depth or grayscale for over an hour and a half.

The story takes place in the far-distant future of 2054 Paris. We know it’s Paris because of the Eiffel Tower, and we know it’s the far-distant future because billboards talk. As a side note to all this, I’d just like to state that if I knew for a fact billboards in my lifetime will constantly be hawking their products noisily outside my bedroom window at all hours of the night, I will completely rescind my prior stance on the consequences of temporal grandfather killing. I’m sure T-REXXAR, Lord of Dinosaurs and Heir to the Greater Galactic Empire, wouldn’t stand for that kind of nonsense in his domains.
The film at its heart attempts to be something of a thriller. The basic tenant of a thriller, of course, is that there is something for the main character to lose. This could be something tangible like an object or a person, or intangible like pride or a sense of station that drives an individual in their quest to stave off and unravel the motives behind those who wish to see them fail. In the case of “Renaissance,” the film seems to set up at the start something of a personal agenda for the main character Karas, in this case voiced in the English version by the capable Daniel Craig. We see a young Karas, no more than ten or twelve, with an equally young friend in what can only be described as a dungeon. A man outside approaches down a hallway with a pistol as the two children frantically loosen the bars in the window. One escapes, but Karas is discovered by the pistol-wielding thug and presumably left to suffer a rather grim fate.

Somehow, as we learn a few minutes later, Karas survives to adulthood. How he escaped death at the hands of a man brandishing a pistol at a child in a barred and locked cellar, we don’t know, but one gets the feeling that this incident will eventually play a large role in tying our main character into the greater arc of the film’s story. At least, wouldn’t you think so? Especially considering that the rest of the film centers around the disappearance of a young woman who was continuing the work started by her mentor, who, it is revealed in the course of the film, years ago experimented on a group of children in rather horrific ways. Would this not then prove the perfect link to Karas’ past, thereby providing him not just a professional reason for rescuing this woman as an extension of his job as a police investigator, but a personal quest to unravel what happened to him and why when he was younger?

The film certainly encourages us to make that connection, at least for a little while, until suddenly we’re confronted with the fact that these two incidents could not possibly have anything in common with one another. What we’re then faced with is the same old story of corporate conspiracy, police procedure and the standard shady elements of the criminal world which are all the staples of the mundane thriller genre. But really, that’s our fault for expecting anything more of the filmmakers. We should have known that this movie was never really about anything as pedestrian as a sensible and thrilling plot, after all, but about the far more exciting prospect of black and white water subways in the air and billboards which verbally assail you for beauty crème.

I will admit, though, that I did find one thing inspiring about this film, and that was the office of the corporate executive who is secretly pulling the migraine-inducing, black-and-white strings behind the scenes. For an idea of what his office looks like, picture the St. Louis Gateway Arch and then suspend below the center of the arch a completely transparent glass office; supported by and accessed through two horizontal struts anchored into the arch uprights on each side. There is nothing more astoundingly wasteful and supremely decadent than a massive structure, the only purpose of which is to display oneself prominently in a small glass box to onlookers for miles around. And for that, “Renaissance,” our Dinosaur Lords salute you.

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