The Life of a Suburban Overlord

<This post contains spoilers from the Eagle Eye movie>

Capsule review: A well told bad story.  Healthy thrilling Eye Candy, bad brain junk food.

Even the most dense of movie goers will get the core message of Eagle Eye without effort:

Technology, bad!  Computers, bad! The US’s well founded but out of control obsession with security, bad!

As my friend Overlord Danny said it, Eagle eye is a good action packed thriller but fails on many levels.

First and foremost, it’s based on such a failed premise that it makes any self respecting writer/geek repeatedly scoff and groan from the Frakensteinian clichés.

First, for a good 80% of the movie, the action is driven by ONE character, the Secretary of Defense’s near Omniscient and quasi-Omnipotent A.I. All others, including the lead actors, are mere pawns that obey her every whim.

Call this professional pride because of my other gig as a Dungeonmaster, I really dislike stories where the main characters can’t make choices or have a significant impact on moving the plot.  See The Last Mimzy and the first Chronicles of Narnia movie for other examples.

Then, there’s the idea that a super advanced computer would be given full control over all automated processes in the US (if not the world) WHILE STILL IN BETA!

I mean, as far as a super evil scheme, that’s awesome!  But supposedly coming from the US Government it…

…Oh wait…

Nevermind, it makes perfect sense now! 

Add to it a cheesy patriotic end where the overshadowed slacker gets the overly neurotic single mom and a medal. It just makes a weird package.

I’m usually able to turn my brain off to enjoy a movie.  Heaven knows I did it for Charlie’s Angels and the last Die Hard. For Eagle Eye, while I must say I enjoyed most of it, my brain just seemed to reactivate in places to tell me: “And you seriously want to keep suspending your disbelief over THAT?”

Your mileage may vary.

Tags: Movies

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 6:12 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.