It's ironic that this relatively derivative, though not uninteresting, addition to the dystopian sci-fi genre is titled Renaissance. Instead of innovating, the Christian Volckman film serves up well-crafted special effects and futuristic visions that have been done better elsewhere.
The film follows a confusing, fast-paced story arc centering around Barth‚l‚my Karas (Daniel Craig), a hard-boiled detective tracking down a missing woman in 2054 Paris. She is a scientist for a powerful, insidious corporation called Avalon that sells eternal youth and beauty, and her disappearance triggers a series of discoveries about concealed past events and the true aim of Avalon's laboratory. Karas spends the film criscrossing through a dark, gritty and confusing urban world where everyone is under surveillance.
Animated over live action in stark black and white, the movie certainly looks cool. The comic strip-like quality and the bold, high contrast images make for a thrilling vision of Paris while serving to highlight the dark, nebulous nature of the futuristic world. But compounded by the lack of color, the animation makes it very difficult for the characters to express emotional or moral subtlety. The result is a film that fails to engage the audience emotionally or create believable characters.
Like much of science fiction, the film warns against the dangers of technological innovation by presenting a future in which science is exploited by those in power. In this case, Avalon is searching for the secret to immortality. The message of Renaissance, that it is mortality itself that makes our individual lives meaningful, is thought-provoking, but the film presents this theme, as well as certain character's pasts and ambitions, in a melodramatic way that ultimately undermines its attempts at insight.
