Eagle Eye: big, bad computers

This evening, my brother, my sister and I went to the cinema, and we watched Eagle Eye, because it seemed entertaining and fun, judging by the trailer. Plus, in Belgium, it’s the “Brico Film Days”, which means three days where cinema tickets only cost 3 Euros, and we got ours free.

At first, I thought it would be a really cool plot of cyber-terrorism. But then I saw who the “big baddie” was, and I was really let down.

(warning: spoiler ahead)

That’s right. The baddie was a letdown. It wasn’t a British bad guy, which was a relief (Hollywood seems to love British bad guys, with their good manners and refined language). But it was a computer.

Now, the film “I, Robot” was probably my favourite “computer logic = evil” film, and on of the reasons I liked it was that it wasn’t set in today’s world. The computer was believable in the sci-fi environment.

Here, however, the idea is that the USA have built inside the Pentagon an intelligent supercomputer, and that it monitors everything everywhere in the USA (and apparently the rest of the world – of course, the USA is the world in the eyes of many, but that’s a debate for later).

And then, out of nowhere, it decides that it wants to test a special operation involving the killing of the US President and his cabinet.

The film had got me confused when the supercomputer was first shown, but I was even more confused by this evil scheme. The logic behind it was that the President hadn’t followed the computer’s advice once, so he had to go, along with all his entourage.

Now, don’t misunderstand me: the film was very entertaining, and lots of fun. But had Hollywood run out of baddies?

They could have had a British team of cyber-terrorists, and I would have still found it more fun. But no, they wanted to be more original. The next choice would have been any kind of Islamic fanatic. Not original enough. Even more overdone than the British bad guys lately. So they stuck with the third choice, the computer.

Ah, well, too bad. At least, they didn’t screw it up too much. The film was gripping when the computer wasn’t shown. And if the hero had died at the end, I would have applauded the film-makers’ courage. Sadly, that didn’t happen (instead, we were nearly awarded with the usual All American Patriotic Moment of Glory – the hero was awarded his medal, but fortunately the scene wasn’t accompanied by the emotion Americans love to put in film in those circumstances).

And to think that the last “new film” I saw was Indiana Jones and the Trans-dimensional Aliens. I hope the next film I see in the cinema (whenever that happens) isn’t Hellboy 2, or I’ll have seen in those three films every kind of evil non-human bad guy Hollywood has imagined so far.

/randomness over

Eagle Eye: big, bad computers

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