07-08-05 Renaissance (2006)

Seen: July 26th, 2007
Format: DVD
Rating: 7

There are certain films that are known for their style rather than their substance. It's a tricky proposition to do something visually new or at least original in film without overshadowing the story itself. While many films do a decent job walking this very thin line, few are exceptional.

Renaissance isn't one of them.

Don't get me wrong, I like this film. In many ways, it's an homage to one of my favorite films, Blade Runner. Like that film, it has a very strong and distinct visual style. Unlike that film, the style itself is so prominent that it makes it difficult at times to follow the storyline.

Renaissance is presented primarily in black and white, and by that I mean black and white. Shades of grey are infrequent, and color almost completely absent. This extreme contrast is an homage to the high contrast style used by Fritz Lang, amongst others. It's also prevalent in many noir films, which tend to be visually dark, using high contrast to accentuate movement and composition.

The style is taken to an extreme in Renaissance, leading to an almost comic book appearance. Robert Rodriguez employed very high contrast techniques while filming Sin City, in an attempt to bring Frank Miller's comic to the screen, but Renaissance goes a step beyond.

The film is completely animated. It used motion capture for a majority of the acting, but the actual characters and their surroundings are are modeled and rendered via what are becoming common computer animation techniques.

Despite all this, the film maintains a degree of organic feel. While certain scenes are blatantly mechanical (I don't think it's possible to mo-cap dancing), many are well done and are natural enough that they don't draw attention to themselves.

Up to this point, it's all been about style. The story itself is passable. It's SF, which is always fine with me. But it's not terribly original. While it does have a few interesting variations, it's basically fundamentally a corporate conspiracy film. Someone learns something they shouldn't, corporation wants to retrieve their intellectual property and silence those who can harm them. It's not new, and has even been set in the future a number of times, Blade Runner itself being a slight twist on this storyline.

There are a few interesting characters (some seemingly inspired by George Alec Effinger's works). They're not completely compelling, but do help flesh the story out. They're not complete caricatures, but can definitely be found in other films in these genres.

See this film for an interesting stylistic take. While the story couldn't support a modern well on it's own, here it's simple enough not to conflict with style. If it were more complex, paying attention to style and substance might be simply overwhelming.

The Good: Style and story

The Bad: Style vs. Story

The Ugly: Selling out humanity