Final Cut (DVD)

The Final Cut

In this futuristic tale, Alan Hakman (Robin Williams) witnesses the death of his childhood friend who had fallen off a plank of wood in the abandoned building in which they were playing. Flash to the present, and chips called "Zoe" are inserted into the brain at birth and record a person's entire life; when the person dies, the video is edited and shown at the funeral. Video editor ("cutter") Alan Hakman edits the recordings of people's lives according to the wishes of the subject's survivors, interviewing the person's family members to get an idea of what to look for in the recordings. Of course, in the case of some unscrupulous people, the bad parts are of course left out, but the entire recording of a person's life is therefore subject to scrutiny. So, in some cases, Hakman was knowingly burying the bad and highlighting the good. As a result, Alan is turned into a cold megalomaniac, but things change when he stumbles across a subject's memory of his friend, whom he thought was dead. In searching for a record of his friend's Zoe chip, he finds none, as only 20% of all people have the implants. What he does find is a record of his own implant, of which he was unaware. He goes about accessing the memory, which shows that Alan's friend was still breathing, and the "blood" Alan thought he remembered stepping in as he was leaving the building turned out to be paint. Meantime, the Zoe chip of his subject was destroyed during a confrontation in his office. Confronted by activists who want his subject's life opened to all, Alan attempts to flee because his memory chip recorded what he saw of the subject's life, but is shot and killed by the activist, who justifies his actions, hence Alan was not killed in vain. Mira Corvino and James Caviezel also star.