If last week’s review of Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep was about a movie that tried to make real life look like a comic book, Christian Volckman’s first feature-length film, Renaissance, tries to make a comic book look like real life. The basis of the movie’s imagery is motion capture technology, by which the movements of an actor’s body are recorded by sensors attached to his clothing (used memorably by Peter Jackson in the creation of Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy). In this way real actors create lifelike movements in computer-generated animated scenery. When the movie was originally released in France in March, the dialogue was recorded by a French team of actors, but this fall’s American and U.K. release features a different group of actors performing in English.

Set in Paris as imagined in the year 2054, the story follows a police captain named Barthélémy Karas (voice by Daniel Craig), who scowls his way through the movie, working at the edge of legality to locate and rescue kidnapping victims. After he rescues a kidnapped boy in the opening series of scenes, he is put on the case of Ilona Tasuiev (Romola Garai), a young researcher for a shady body-enhancement company called Avalon (their creepy commercial tagline: “We’re on your side . . . for life”). Karas works with and occasionally against the victim’s sister, Bislane (Catherine McCormack), to learn the real motivation behind Ilona’s kidnapping. This being a noir thriller, of course all that time they spend together is not just about solving the crime. In spite of all the scientific advances made by Avalon in this version of the future, life is essentially the same as it is today. Most importantly, you will be relieved to know that Parisians are still smoking fifty years in the future. In spite of the government’s efforts, even in France, some things will never change.