November 26, 2006
déjà vu
The amusing and the troubling thing about Enemy of the State were the same thing: that the glossy, staggering surveillance tools of the NSA were operated not by grizzled spies or desk veterans but still-adolescent video-game weasels (an uncredited Seth Green, Jack Black, and less colorful sorts) who might otherwise have been apprentice derivatives analysts, sitting around hi-fiving and still adjusting to their haircuts as they zeroed in on the Fresh Prince.
Déjà Vu is the Scott/Bruckheimer team's return to Enemy of the State, with couple notable exceptions, most obviously that "the State" is now the good guys, and their implausibly panoptic, futuristic surveillance technology is no longer sinister-going-to-murderous but neutral-going-to-redemptive. The operators are now pleasant, concerned, diverse; a kinder, gentler technocrat. Sweet sixteen's turned 31; 1998's turned 2006. Shit happens. Things change.
But you know what they say about things changing. It's still a movie that images total power as having the totality of images at one's disposal, and moreover, in this film's turn of the ideological screw, having access to them as reality. There's a book or two about this lying around somewhere. Even if the achingly slow among us are still discovering that this is fascinatingly metacinematic (I almost suspect this reviewer's lighbulb moment of being satire about credulous film critics, but alas, he seems so excited at this new idea! Has the Voice in its parlous reformation taken to hiring Rip Van Winkles?), it's not a film about film; it's a movie that struggles, rather ineloquently but not too boringly, to figure out what might count as plot in the era of total information awareness, while pasting a candy heart on the sleeve of the PATRIOT act. At least it is in some way of its moment.
Thus the last irony, which is that Déjà Vu pretends to be ahead of its moment, presenting a surveillance environment not yet in existence. Of course, so did Enemy of the State — but did anyone really doubt that technology was already in use in some bunker, and would be publicly offered soon enough? Fiction is just the beta build of fact. And Enemy of the State was merely the first official release of Google Earth Cinema; this must somehow be good news. By our calculations, we have no more than a handful of years to wait before we can download Google Time.
Posted by jane at November 26, 2006 08:50 AM | TrackBack