 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: Proyecto Lázaro aka Realive aka Project Lazarus • Year: 2016 • Country: Spain, France • Director: Mateo Gil • Main cast: Tom Hughes, Charlotte Le Bon, Oona Chaplin • Runtime: 112 minutes • Production company: Arcadia Motion Pictures, Achaman Films AIE, Canal+ España • TRAILER |
In the first day at the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival 2016, the first movie I saw was this Proyecto Lázaro (also known as it’s english translation Lazarus Project, or Realive). Most of the people I went with to the screening were quite reluctant about this movie. I shared some of their resons myself, like the fact that a spanish science fiction movie has never been convincing. Also its director Mateo Gil, recognized as the story writer of the spanish well known director Alejandro Amenábar (he wrote his films Tesis (1996), Abre los ojos (1997) that later became the Hollywood remake Vanilla Sky (2001) or Agora (2009)) doesn’t bring me any warranty of acceptable quality; his first film as writer and director Nadie conoce a nadie (1999) is still in my list of the worst spanish movies ever made. But well, I very much enjoy the science fiction stories so even if the film was awful maybe I could scratch something acceptable from the whole thing. At least that is was I had in mind when I entered the theatre, and also that was the only thing I kept in my head when I left.
The Lazarus Project that gives the name to the movie is a scientific experimental program in the future with the purpose of bringing dead people back to life. Marc Jarvis, the main character of the movie, is a young and successful business man and artist whose life gets truncated when he finds out he has a last stages deadly cancer. Knowing that he only hast one year left to live, he decides to freeze his body while is still in a good shape hoping in the future medicine would had advanced enough to bring him back to life and heal his disease.
With this interesting enough start point, Mateo Gil develops a movie where he focuses more in the drama and the reasons behind all the actions, leaving aside to build a strong and interesting story. The feeling through all the film is that the purpose of stealing the easy tears from the audience, or creating empty moral debates, are more important than the developing of a solid plot. And at the end, that makes the movie to succumb into boredom.
Both the aesthetics of that portraited future and the visual effects are not very innovative. The actors are not bad, but they look like totally lost in the action because of a very poor direction. At times the filmmakers push the moral factors too hard, doing a very hollow depiction of what is good and what is wrong, but the facts shown in this film are not so banal. The decisions taken by the main character or the righteous morality they try to impose along the final part of the film are quite childish and dumb, and here is when the movie fucks up.
A good story like this in the hands of a competent filmmaker could had made this piece something to be in the history of science fiction, perhaps even sharing a spot with titles like Minority Report (2002), Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001) or despite the differences 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but instead it is just another forgetable wasted bunch of good ideas. Still, the scientific and science-fiction component is interesting enough, so I feel like rating Proyecto Lázaro with a probably not deserved 5,5.
RATE: 5,5/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4074928
