Resurrection Is A Surreal Sci-Fi Masterpiece
Bi Gan’s dense sci-fi epic is a breathtaking ode to cinema history.
There’s no film this year like Resurrection. Bi Gan’s monumental new sci-fi epic is a centuries-spanning saga told in six chapters, charting the history of cinema, and the way that it has interacted with and impacted humanity over the course of its existence. There’s a plot — involving a far-fetched sci-fi premise and the hunt for the last man who still dreams — but really, Resurrection is about the interplay between art and emotion, and the sheer breadth of human imagination.
This is not an easy film to pin down or explain. Truly, every frame feels like it needs to be seen to be believed. If this review can convince you in some way to see Resurrection, then I’ve done my part. Bi Gan has achieved something here that is worth experiencing -- a feat of cinematic artistry.
In the far, far future, humans have achieved immortality. But the way they have done so is by sacrificing their ability to dream. The few remaining people with the ability to dream are called “Deliriants,” and are hunted down and slaughtered out of mercy by individuals called “The Other Ones.” Because what poor souls would still want to dream?
One such Deliriant (Jackson Yee) has taken refuge in the past. But living so long in the dreamworld has mutated him and turned him monstrous. Taking pity on him, the “Other One” tasked with hunting him, Miss Shu (Shu Qi), decides to grant him a merciful demise by setting up a film projector inside of him and letting him live out the final moments of his life in his cinematic dreams. Thus begins the chapters that each act as a love letter to a different decade in film. The first chapter plays out like a silent film, complete with the washed-out, yellowish color palette and grainy title cards, with Miss Shu discovering the Deliriant as a dazed victim of an opium den. The second takes us to a 1930s spy thriller where the Deliriant stands accused of murder. The third finds the Deliriant 30 years later, stranded in a haunted Buddhist temple. The fourth is a sunny ‘70s crime drama where the Deliriant is a con artist who takes an orphan girl under his wing. The fifth plays out like a ‘90s Hong Kong drama, with the Deliriant falling in love with a gangster’s girlfriend on New Year’s Eve, 1999.
Resurrection is jam-packed with striking images that feel like they’ve never before been rendered to the screen.
Not since the Wachowskis’ Cloud Atlas has a movie attempted to so ambitiously portray the breadth of human experience, both past and present. But unlike the Wachowskis’ misbegotten (but admirable!) 2012 sci-fi film, Resurrection manages to succeed in every possible way. Each distinctive chapter, more than simply being shot in the look and style of each era, manages to capture the feeling of each decade in way that is hard to articulate — the hard shadows and paranoia of the ‘30s, the aimless ennui of the ‘60s, the wild lawlessness of the ‘70s, the hopeless, and hopeful, abandon of the turn of the millennium. That every single frame looks unlike anything else rendered to film makes Resurrection feel all the more monumental. A camera travels through a man’s mind — his eyes and face transparent — and breaks through a window and into a train. A haunting silhouette of a man cloaked in smoke and shadows morphs into a monster behind the looking glass. A woman’s shadow looms over a youths scrapping under a junkyard.
Bi recreates Andrew Wyeth paintings in all their bleak watercolors, stages imitations of Wong Kar Wai’s moodiest and most iconic imagery, and pays homage to Chinese cinema at its height. Yet still the filmmaker manages to create images that we’ve never seen onscreen. It all culminates in a movie that feels not just like an exquisitely made ode to cinema, but like artistry come alive — a time capsule that has gained sentience and burrowed its way out of the ground and into your brain.
As the Deliriant stumbles through his cinematic dreams, we’re plagued by a sense of doom; that this is all fated to end, eventually. Each demise that the Deliriant experiences is a little emptier, a little more ordinary. The undercurrent of melancholy that Bi weaves throughout his film strengthens and morphs into grief, especially as Resurrection reaches its tragic climax. he final shot of Resurrection certainly seems to seal this: we sit in a wax movie theater filled with figurines that all melt as the screen is set on fire. Is this the final dying rattle for cinema as we know it? A last gasp of artistry? Perhaps, with AI and industry implosion on the horizon, it’s all destined to go down in flames. But if it is, at least we’ll have this masterpiece to bit it farewell.
