Evil Computer Forces Filmmakers to do Dumb Things - 'Eagle Eye' Review...
Eagle Eye displays an almost perfectly stratified layering of the good parts and the bad parts. The first 30 minutes or so of the movie are pretty highly entertaining, involve real-world situations and, with a little stretching, are believable enough. The second act introduces a major computerized character and the movie immediately suffers a massive, stomach-turning dip in believability, and the third act just falls off a cliff and ultimately all we're left with is a smoking, Wile E. Coyote-ish hole in the dirt. Oh, and believe it or not, it may very well surpass Babylon A.D. for the Stupidest Ending of the Year award.A series of faulty intelligence reports leads to the accidental air-bombing of an Arab funeral in the beginning of the movie, which then cuts to Jerry Shaw, a young man who we meet while he's hustling some of his colleagues out of their Friday night money in a back room poker game at the Copy Cabana where they work. We're at a loss to explain this jarring jump cut until much later, after Jerry and a young woman named Michelle have both begun to be terrorized by the same woman who calls them on the phone threatening their lives and the lives of their families should they not do exactly what she says within a few seconds of being ordered.
[caption id="attachment_20623" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="The movie could have been called "Shia LaBeouf Running..."]
[/caption]Ok, so that's what we have for about the next 30 or 40 minutes, which are padded with relentless and not ineffective chase scenes. The only problem is that the catalyst for these chase scenes is the fact that this woman on the phone, whoever she is, can control every traffic light, every security camera, every cell-phone (which can also be used as a tracking device, whether on or off), and she can even control elevated trains to such an extent that she can slam on their brakes and send them careening down the tracks in reverse should Jerry and Michelle hesitate a few seconds too long to follow orders. Oh yeah, and she can also observe them visually no matter where they are, even if it happens to be in a desert field (almost exactly like the one in the last scene of Seven) surrounded by power poles. Jerry also goes to his ATM one day and discovers an extra $750,000 in his checking account. Nothing ever comes of that money in the rest of the movie, but you get the idea.
[caption id="attachment_20624" align="alignright" width="300" caption="...and Running..."]
[/caption]And no, that's not all. I especially liked the scene where they are ordered into a Circuit City home theater section to receive instructions. The woman on the phone takes over control of the televisions covering the walls (which have an overwhelming tendency in real life to be hooked up to a single DVD player and nothing else), each one showing a different aspect of Jerry's and Michelle's life, just so they understand who's in control.
By this point we have reached the crescendo of the story of intrigue and espionage that the trailer had promised, with only a relatively tiny hint of the avalanche of stupidity that was to follow. A super-secret and super-powerful organization is forcing the cooperation of regular people under the threat of death to perform some super-important but unknown task and for an equally unknown reason. Exciting! In fact, I still can't help thinking what a better filmmaking team would have done with this premise. Hitchcock would have made a cinematic milestone.
[caption id="attachment_20625" align="alignleft" width="201" caption="...and running..."]
[/caption]Nope. Not these people. The next thing you know, we learn that it's not Julianne Moore on the phone at all, as we were clearly led to believe in the trailer (in fact, after strenuously combing the internet, I have failed to discover who provided that voice. That's a little embarrassing...), it's actually a gigantic golden orb revolving around this enormous room examining tremendous amounts of intelligence reports at a speed that we probably can't even try to think about without getting a headache.
This computer, this intelligence analysis center, unfortunately, is the movie's first major CGI effect, but the only effect it had was of nearly deafening me with the sound of so many palms simultaneously smacking so many foreheads (including mine) in the theater where I saw the movie. Ouch!
Think of a combination of the evil computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey combined with what Wolverine cleverly dubbed Magneto's "Big Round Room" in X-Men, cover the walls with little golden hemispheres and you'll have something of an idea of what's going on here. But then we are asked to believe that the government has constructed this super-super-super-computer for the purpose of analyzing intelligence reports from all over the world, organizing and prioritizing responses, and oh by the way, also keeping an eye on the people at the highest levels of American government as well.
[caption id="attachment_20626" align="alignright" width="300" caption="...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz""]
[/caption]Right.
Pretty soon, as you can see, the movie's scathing political commentary becomes clearer and clearer. In the fantasy world of the movies, we have this crazy computer to protect us, even from ourselves, while in the real world we have the Department of Homeland Security. Say what you will about modern American politics in the Age of Terrorism (basically the last eight years), but regardless of your political standing, the juxtaposition of Aria, the computer, and reality is a little bit hilarious.
And by the way, it seems that Aria was upset that the bombing at the beginning of the movie that resulted from faulty intelligence was a sufficient crime against humanity to justify activating something called Operation Guillotine, which commands the murder (and cover-up as a terrorist act) of all of the highest members of government from the President of the United States and right on down to lower-level members at Aria's discretion. She also decides who will be the next president after the guillotine has been dropped. Who designed this thing??
[caption id="attachment_20627" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Billy Bob dodged a bullet somehow. The movie is a train wreck but he still looks cool."]
[/caption]There is supposed to be some major intrigue caused by the fact that the entire movie is a story about an effort not to assassinate a president, but to remove the entire Executive Branch of the American government. Unfortunately, however, it's a movie made with an American audience in mind, who I hope know a little more about the world surrounding them to understand that, for all the mistakes our government has made, it is not so stupid as to let two civilians with no military training whatsoever waltz into the room where the President is giving his State of the Union Address. And not only walk in with almost no trouble, but while one of them is armed with a gun and the other with a piece of something called Hexamethylene, a crystallized explosive that is, if I remember correctly, "80 times more powerful than C4." The entire security infrastructure of America, from rent-a-cops to the Secret Service, is taking a major, major flogging in this movie. WOW.
As far as acting, there is not one memorable performance, and the only one that is mildly interesting is Billy Bob Thornton as a FBI agent who knows that some kind of attack is imminent and who is determined "not to go down in history as the a**hole who let this thing happen." You can make up your own minds about who the movie is calling a**holes for letting the last thing happen. Billy Bob is in his usual form and even has some good lines ("If I don't get some good leads soon, you're all gonna be demoted to something that requires touching sh*t with your hands!"), but Shia LeBeouf and Michelle Monaghan are given nothing to do but look scared and shocked all the time.
[caption id="attachment_20628" align="alignright" width="300" caption="They're pathetically late, but the Secret Service eventually does catch on..."]
[/caption]The movie's tagline, "Where do you run when the enemy is everywhere?" is an idea with tremendous possibilities, and all of those possibilities are summarily run over by the movie, which chooses instead to ignore all of the limitations and parameters of reality and instead go crashing around the country destroying stuff like a gigantic 9-year-old. If you look closely you can still pick out some charred remnants of what might have been the story's original message, about the dangers of increasing surveillance and of giving machines too much control (how's that for an original idea?), but it is so overwhelmed with panicky action and whirlwind chases and crashes (which ultimately are rendered meaningless) that it's just...I don't know. I'm sifting through my vocabulary and nothing seems quite adequate to explain what's going on here.
How about this, here's the most interesting thing to me about the entire movie. It was released on September 28, 2008, but for some unknown reason it takes place on January 26, 2009. That's today!
The Bean-Meter
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1.5 beans out of 5. That's not good...
