Prudence and Madness

“Drop to the floor…you have 4 seconds.”

WARNING:  There are spoilers in this post about the movie, Eagle Eye.  Read at your own risk!

In the movie, Eagle Eye, Shia Labeouf plays Jerry Shaw, a Stanford University dropout who had worked odd jobs to sustain himself, living away from his rich parents and his twin brother, Ethan Shaw, a promising member of the U.S. Air Force.  One day, he received a phone call from home, telling him that his brother is already dead.  Coming home from the funeral, he finds his apartment filled with explosives, guns, training manuals and various passports with his pictures in it.  He receives a call from an unknown number and the woman’s voice tells him that he had to flee the vicinity in 30 seconds, if he did not want to be arrested by the FBI.  Confused and stubborn, he did not follow the instructions and soon fell in the hands of the arresting officers.

Another important character, Rachel Holloman, played by Michelle Monaghan, is a mother to a young boy who’s set to come to Washington to play his instrument, the trumpet, with his group.  One night that she was at the bar, she receives a call from an unknown number and the woman’s voice tells her that she must do whatever she tells her or else, the train bearing his son to Washington will be derailed.

Jerry Shaw and Rachel Holloman were then two strangers thrown together into sharing several increasingly dangerous situations, as directed by the calls from an unknown woman.  They were made to receive packages, rob an armored van, and sneak into a military cargo plane, with the FBI Agent Thomas Morgan (Billy Bob Thornton) and Air Force office Special Investigations Agent Zoe Perez (Rosario Dawson) on their trail.

As the story unfolds, with all the adrenaline-pumping car chase scenes and race through the densely populated city, Jerry and Rachel were to discover that they have been under the control of a powertripping, calculating mind with a tendency to speak in the third person.  Also, she’s a super computer called Aria (I’m not so sure with the spelling, though), who has the ability to access and manipulate any electronic gadget to observe, hear, and record anyone’s activities.  She resides in the hub called Eagle Eye.  She has, in fact, interwoven Jerry and Rachel’s lives, together with other people whom she had controlled, to put into high-gear Operation: Guillotine, a task to kill the top 12 officials of the United States of America and to make the Secretary of Defense (Michael Chiklis) the next President.  The operation was triggered when, in the recent past, the president made a wrong decision in killing a suspected terrorist, apparently attending a funeral, even when positive ID cannot be obtained and that there are far too many innocent civilians who will be killed.  Ethan Shaw came into play when he, as a technician working on Aria, has discovered her plans and locked her down to prevent her from carrying it out.  He was then killed and the death made to appear as accidental.  Other characters that have been manipulated by Aria via phone calls contributed to bringing a certain crystal that explodes as triggered by specific sounds and the trumpet that will be played by Rachel’s son.

Events brought all the characters to the Capitol for the State of the Union Address, in which Rachel’s son is set to play and Rachel becomes the carrier of a crystal set to explode when the band plays the note corresponding to the word, free, in the last verse of the national anthem.  Jerry Shaw only got to stop the band from playing the last note by shooting in the air, throwing the crowd into panic and secret service agents gunning him down.  Agent Zoe Perez also managed to drain the energy source of Aria and eventually physically destroy her.

Eagle Eye’s one of the much-awaited action thrillers for the year.  And when it finally arrived, it garnered mixed reactions, both from the movie critics and the average movie goers.  And in those I’ve read, Peter Travers gave the most negative criticism of all:

Questions: Did everyone involved in this botched thriller OD on speed? Does jimmy-legs director D.J. Caruso think if he slowed down the action we’d figure out how stupid the plot is? Did Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan think there was any acting involved in playing characters on the run from a computer intent on global domination? Are BlackBerrys and iPhones the enemy because they make us easy for the computer to track? Can the computer make me forget this movie?

GMANews.TV also gave it a dismal review:

Jerry is an underachieving copy store employee and Stanford dropout whose identical twin brother, a rising Air Force star, recently was killed in a car accident. Rachel is a single mom whose young son is on the way to Washington to perform with the school band at the Kennedy Center. The adventures into which they’re thrown become increasingly far-fetched, to the point where they’re not even mildly intriguing, just laughably ridiculous…

…”Eagle Eye,” a DreamWorks Pictures release, runs 119 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.

I strongly disagree that this is a dismal movie.  I don’t know for sure if the writers of those negative reviews were simply prone to vertigo, as most complained about the dizzying shots of cars crashing on other cars, twisting and turning, with shattered glass everywhere, or if they’re simply unwilling to believe a movie who suggests technology enabling artificial intelligence or AI.

I don’t think what the movie is suggesting is that too farfetched.  What, with all wiretappings of phone conversations, the CCTVs, the webcams we use to monitor our homes?  Some even foresee that in only several years, we would be able to control most of our household electronic-based gadgets via Internet.  And remember, the military right now may be using far more advanced technologies than what we are familiar with to further enhance their capabilities to protect the ordinary citizens.  Also, with the heightened awareness of increasing cyber crimes, people just have to accept that the electronic world and cyber space have more than just invaded our average lives; we live with it.  We perform increasingly a lot of activities online: educational classes, online casino games, business teleconferencing, and social networking.  Thus, we must do something to impose some kind of control or a measure of security so things will not go out of hand.  But up to what extent are we willing to go to just to protect our liberty is something we have yet to find out.  And perhaps, the movie is giving us that gentle reminder that we ought to remember when the time comes.

Interestingly, the visual design of Aria in the movie was based on Super Kamiokande, a neutrino observatory designed to search for proton decay, study solar and atmospheric neutrinos and keep watch for supernovas in the Milky Way Galaxy.  The observatory can be found in Hida, Gifa Prefecture, Japan.  See the observatory’s website and compare it with the computer in the movie.

I have to agree, though, that how the story arrived at its ending is quite not so appealing.  Remember that scene in which Agent Zoe Perez and another major tried to drain Aria’s energy sources to, perhaps, slow her down.  However, the computer managed to upload some of her memories while her energy is being drained.  In her “fury” she threw the major out into the water, but failed to do the same to Agent Zoe Perez.  Aria went for another try, closing in on Agent Perez, but she was able to grab a lose metal bar and literally poked the eagle eye.  It somewhat looked comical, at its best, and, at its worst, an unimaginative ending for a supercomputer.  However, I’m guessing that scripwriters may have intended it to be that way to show that with all the electronic sophistication by computers, humans can still outsmart it by resorting to physical violence.  It’s like saying that the caveman’s club ain’t going to be forever useless.

I also hate that there had to be a love angle at the end of this movie.  Why, oh why, do main characters have to like each other?  Or even fall in love?  Can’t we just have the movie and the main story without having to inject a love angle to it?  This movie could have done away with that last part and would have been better off ending with the presentation of medals to Jerry Shaw and the Shaw’s twins father.  Writers could have thought of a different way of telling the audience that Rachel and her son survived what happened at the Capitol.

But overall, it’s a decent, action-packed movie.  I’d recommend it to those who want to watch movies with more-action-less-boring scenes, and an elaborate plot, even if it may seem too sci-fi.

But then, of course, I’d also have to say to not really rely on movie reviews.  If the trailer, the lineup of actors, and the small synopsis already intrigued you, then, far better to go watch it for yourself and be the judge than to let another one do it for you.  What makes up an excellent, entertaining movie for Juan may not be the same for Pedro.