According to Edward Snowden, the NSA has been collecting phone metadata and broadly mining internet communications. This is worrying to me, since surveillance can be used either for or against people in many contradictory ways. On one hand, it helps promote security. On another, it’s sort of creepy: “I know what you did last summer” hardly touches the surface.
In the spirit of paranoia, here’s five films about how NSA surveillance could have been applied, but probably wasn’t.
The Informant! (2009)
Based on a true story, Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) is the president of Archer Daniels Midland, an agricultural corporation. Southern gentleman he is, he tells the FBI to report that his company has been engaged in price fixing to collectively raise the cost of lysine and wears a wire to collect information on ADM’s clandestine meetings with competitors. Unfortunately, the stress of coordinating surveillance for the FBI takes a toll on Whitacre’s already-scattered thoughts.
Matt Damon as Mark Whitacre is the best narrator ever. He told me about butterflies in South America that have enough poison in their wings to stop a man’s heart. He told me that the German word for saucer is “undertasse” – the undercup. He told me that the state bird of Hawaii is the nene.
Clearly, the substance of Whitacre’s surveillance efforts are not as important to the film as the style and the protagonist’s deteriorating mental state since the film is leisurely in pace and scored with bright circus music.
Minority Report (2002)
In 2054, John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is an officer in the Precrime Division: a preventative measure that relies on the efforts of three future-seeing precognitives to catch murderers before the act. As a result of the precrime act, the murder rate has nearly flatlined. However, the precognitives’ next vision predicts that Anderton himself will soon murder a man he’s never met, forcing him to flee from his own officers and search for a way to prevent the murder.
Steven Spielberg did a great job integrating the plot with the realities of a mostly benign but still pretty creepy surveillance state. Minority Report is rife with features like eye-scanners as ubiquitous as PRESTO machines, and holograms resembling online ads tailored to one’s individual shopping experience: “John Anderton! You could use a Guinness right about now.” Thus, the festive fight scene music did not fit in with the GUIs that look like they were designed by Tony Stark. But none of the gizmos or gadgets ever distract from the core of the story, which blends the philosophies of predetermination and a classic mystery yarn featuring a disgraced sleuth with a heavy heart and a mysterious woman with a bone to pick.
Special kudos to Lois Smith as Dr. Hineman for an amazing performance as a biologist and Peter Stormare as Dr, Solomon the shady, possibly Swedish, eye surgeon. They were the cherry-on-top of an ingenious movie.
The Cabin in the Woods (2011)
Five genre-saavy friends pile into a van take a weekend trip to a backwoods cabin. Unbeknownst to them, a team of watchful scientists manipulate them into fulfilling horror movie archetypes using hallucinogenic gases and a “zombie redneck torture family.” The teenagers lose their minds and start making foolish decisions like “let’s split up into groups!” and run straight into the rotting arms of their hosts.
The first two thirds of The Cabin in the Woods are pretty good – better, if you’re into zombie redneck torture families. The scenes of zombies stalking hapless teens are juxtaposed with humourous vignettes depicting the scientists supervising the project from above. At one point, the labcoat-clad staff bring up the office pool on which disaster will befall the nubile youngsters. Will they be attacked by the mermen or Lars Trier’s Angry Molesting Tree? Will the teenagers cotton on to their omniscient watchers? Will the scientists succeed in killing everyone? That really isn’t the point.
Sure, there are some scares, and I love me a good zombie redneck torture family movie. But this is a story bigger than the scientists and the teenagers and the zombies: it’s a love letter to horror films and the unfortunate beings that inhabit them. Definitely worth a watch.
Rear Window (1954)
L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart) breaks his leg on a photography assignment and is confined to his apartment during a summer heat wave. With nobody but his nurse (Thelma Ritter) and fiancée Lisa (Grace Kelly) to visit, he spends his days peeping on the neighbours across the courtyard. Rather than being drawn to the dancer who warms up in her underwear every morning, he notices the odd behaviour of a neighbor and becomes convinced that he has murdered his wife. The mysterious deliverymen, machetes in the sink, and the nosy dog found dead, fuel his paranoia.
The pacing of Rear Window is slow, which makes sense, since Jeff is stuck in a wheelchair during the entire movie. As strongly as I yearned for Jeff to get off his ass and get a better look in his neighbour’s apartment, he physically couldn’t. So I was stuck peering through the windows with him, trying to get a glimpse that would reveal what happened with the neighbor and his wife. We piece the story together just as Jeff does. We see only what Jeff sees. It is very frustrating until the final payoff. And in that way, the director Alfred Hitchcock carefully and realistically builds tension without reverting to the idiot ball that burdens many modern action heroes or being horribly boring.
Eagle Eye (2008)
Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf) works at Copy Cabana while his twin is a recently deceased Marine. Soon after the funeral, suspicious amounts of money are funneled into his bank account and terrorist paraphernalia is delivered to his apartment. Meanwhile, a voice on the phone (Julianne Moore) tells him he’s been “activated” and instructs him on how to evade captivity like Morpheus to Neo in The Matrix. Jerry, like Neo, has no choice but to follow. Elsewhere, a woman named Rachel (Michelle Monaghan) is threatened by the voice to help Jerry or risk her son’s safety. The duo find that overhead cranes and synchronized traffic signals seem to aid their flight from federal agents and wonder what person has the power to rearrange their lives… and to what ends?
If you found the machinations of Ocean’s Eleven too simple for your liking, then Eagle Eye kicks up the contrived timing and complex maneuvers at the loss of Danny Ocean and the stylish slickness of his schemes. Not that you’d notice, given the frantic pace and frequency of chase scenes in Eagle Eye. I mean, I do enjoy a Rube Goldberg machine style plot, but not with pawns too frightened to resist the chessmaster.
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