This... was not a good movie. I wanted very much to like something, anything about the movie, anything at all to justify the 100 minutes I spent watching it. But as the credits rolled I found myself struggling to come up with a single element of the film that I found enjoyable — and I came away empty handed.
Let us take a moment to talk about the fictitious technology that the film revolves around. Mandatory high-tech implants allow for every person’s every waking moment to be recorded, stored, and accessed later. Everyone, from the youngest baby to the oldest grandfather, from the richest CEO to the poorest maid, has these implants. Little pop-ups in their vision deliver helpful and 100% accurate information about the people they pass on the street, about the model of car parked outside their building, about music that’s playing in the background. Access to these memories is available at any time, for both private recall and for sharing with others. You see where this is going? Crime is theoretically impossible in this world, because crystal clear recordings of what a person sees and experiences can only ever show the truth of what happened. There are no cases of mistaken identity, no hearsay, no lying. Unless someone were to figure out how to “hack” that technology…
The basic conceit of the film is one that’s gotten a lot of buzz in the new millennium: in a world where your average citizen is a totally complicit cog in the surveillance state machinery and privacy has been utterly erased, a person’s identity is never in question. In this world, memory is unimpeachable and anonymity is an unthinkable threat. I don’t fault the producers for choosing to explore this topic. This is toothy stuff! There’s a lot to dig into! There are valid reasons why audiences want to consume stories that mirror our hyper-connected, hyper-scrutinized modern world! Done well, it can be a terrifying reflection of our society, or a prediction about how certain technologies can evolve! But there was no nuance or care taken with the subject matter. No aspect of the film’s take on the subject felt unique. The way the surveillance technology (the crux of the film! the driving tension!) was dreamed up deployed didn’t have any sense of depth or humanity to it.
Take, for example, the constant deluge of information our main character is subjected to. The visual clutter is totally bland and impersonal. Even the advertising in this future (all carried out in augmented reality) was soulless and boring, rendered as colorless company logos pulsing gently against the facades of featureless glass buildings and digital mannequins rotating unobtrusively outside boutiques. If you’ve ever driven down an interstate and seen the miles of billboards crowding for your attention, or seen Times Square on a normal day, you know how unbelievable a future like that is. The world building for the whole film felt like that, as the protagonist goes to work in a converted angular-concrete-shapes-and-useless-architectural-dead-space factory that now serves as law enforcement headquarters, before commuting through empty, dreary streets and going home to his sparse, impersonal apartment.
But it wasn’t just the story and the mise-en-scene that left me wanting. The dialogue in particular feels like it was written so that any line uttered throughout the runtime could end up in the 2-and-a-half minutes of trailer. The script aims for "snappy" and "cutting," overshooting that by a mile and ending up with a result that reads like a series of CSI Miami pre-opening-credit crime-puns strung together.
The delivery of said lines isn’t at all helped by the actors. The only thing the actors deliver are stiff, uncomfortable performances, as if the subtleties of human emotion are somehow rendered beyond their grasp the moment the camera turns to them. In scene after scene after scene Clive Owen recites his lines in the same growling monotone. Whether he’s discussing impossible murders with his colleagues, ruining intimate moments with a hookup, or calling his ex-wife to remind her that today would have been their son’s tenth birthday (if only their son hadn’t died tragically, causing an irreparable riff in their marriage!) – the tenor remains unchanged. His character, “Sal,” is supposed to carry the emotional heartbeat of the film, and it’s a heartbeat that viewers can feel flatlining the longer the film goes on (if there even was a pulse to begin with).
I was also very disappointed with Amanda Seyfried’s performance. I’m sure her character was meant to evoke Lisbeth Salander, or perhaps Trinity from the Matrix films, both badass ladies with clearly demonstrated skills to back up their cool reputations. But I was unconvinced that “The Girl” (her character doesn’t get a name, she’s not even “The Woman,” only ever “The Girl”) had anything to offer besides a pouty face and some limp one-liners. She runs around "hacking" the implants and enabling others to commit crimes, and for what? To live in a modernist nightmare of a penthouse? To escape from the prying eyes of the public? There’s no convincing motivation for her actions, nothing in the sliver of backstory revealed in a few seconds of footage and voiceover the audience is treated to (something something trailer park, something something bonfire), no real reasoning behind her most memorable exchange with Sal: “It’s not that I have something to hide,” she tells him. “I have nothing I want you to see.”
…aaand then there’s the softcore pornography. Sprinkled liberally throughout the film, perhaps every twenty minutes or so, viewers are presented with about thirty seconds or so of bare female breasts; mostly in conjunction with tepid, stultifyingly choreographed sex scenes. These encounters run the gamut from disappointing love scenes for main character “Sal”, to a transparently “titillating” lesbian encounter that ends in a double homicide, to a scene wherein Amanda Seyfreid’s “The Girl” undresses in front of a mirror and scrutinizes her nude body (while unbeknownst to “The Girl,” a team of detectives observes her personal strip show through her implants, having surreptitiously hijacked her visual feed in an attempt to deduce her location). The nudity contributed a grand total of nothing to the film’s plot. It felt like an awkward grasp at a higher rating on the Motion Picture Content Rating scale.
The nude scenes also served the purpose of making me deeply regret choosing to watch this film… with my father, who is a fan of the sorts of sci-fi thrillers this movie advertised itself to be. As the film chugged along and the inevitable next scene of breasts would arrive, I felt compelled to announce them, as if this could make things any less awkward. “Look,” I said, “here comes another uninspired sex scene.” This did not, in fact, make things less awkward, but I couldn’t stop myself once I’d begun. “Ah,” I announced through gritted teeth. “There are those breasts again. It’s been almost fifteen minutes since they’ve been gratuitously featured.” If I had hoped that I could skip even a single, mortifyingly awkward nude scene by ducking out of the room at an opportune moment, I was wrong again. Every one of those scenes was, without fail, played back by the squadron of sour-faced detectives investigating the various crimes committed throughout the film, or by the hackers who erased and distorted the supposedly un-hackable memories of the populace. Back and forth, rewind and press play, no escape from the gyrating hips of a fully clothed Clive Owen, nor from the jiggling flesh of whichever female character his dour little lawman was sleeping with at any given moment of the movie’s runtime (there are several). How ironic, I mused, that the film featured scenes of gratuitous and uninspired sex being erased from the memory of the protagonist, when I myself could never forget (nor forgive!) that I’d been forced to sit through it twice.
I walked away from viewing the film feeling enormously disappointed, for a variety of reasons. Across the board, “Anon” failed to deliver on storytelling, on acting, on worldbuilding, and on entertainment value.
I Quote Amanda Seyfried Here, "Nothing I Want You to See"
This... was not a good movie. I wanted very much to like something, anything about the movie, anything at all to justify the 100 minutes I spent watching it. But as the credits rolled I found myself struggling to come up with a single element of the film that I found enjoyable — and I came away empty handed.
Let us take a moment to talk about the fictitious technology that the film revolves around. Mandatory high-tech implants allow for every person’s every waking moment to be recorded, stored, and accessed later. Everyone, from the youngest baby to the oldest grandfather, from the richest CEO to the poorest maid, has these implants. Little pop-ups in their vision deliver helpful and 100% accurate information about the people they pass on the street, about the model of car parked outside their building, about music that’s playing in the background. Access to these memories is available at any time, for both private recall and for sharing with others. You see where this is going? Crime is theoretically impossible in this world, because crystal clear recordings of what a person sees and experiences can only ever show the truth of what happened. There are no cases of mistaken identity, no hearsay, no lying. Unless someone were to figure out how to “hack” that technology…
The basic conceit of the film is one that’s gotten a lot of buzz in the new millennium: in a world where your average citizen is a totally complicit cog in the surveillance state machinery and privacy has been utterly erased, a person’s identity is never in question. In this world, memory is unimpeachable and anonymity is an unthinkable threat. I don’t fault the producers for choosing to explore this topic. This is toothy stuff! There’s a lot to dig into! There are valid reasons why audiences want to consume stories that mirror our hyper-connected, hyper-scrutinized modern world! Done well, it can be a terrifying reflection of our society, or a prediction about how certain technologies can evolve! But there was no nuance or care taken with the subject matter. No aspect of the film’s take on the subject felt unique. The way the surveillance technology (the crux of the film! the driving tension!) was dreamed up deployed didn’t have any sense of depth or humanity to it.
Take, for example, the constant deluge of information our main character is subjected to. The visual clutter is totally bland and impersonal. Even the advertising in this future (all carried out in augmented reality) was soulless and boring, rendered as colorless company logos pulsing gently against the facades of featureless glass buildings and digital mannequins rotating unobtrusively outside boutiques. If you’ve ever driven down an interstate and seen the miles of billboards crowding for your attention, or seen Times Square on a normal day, you know how unbelievable a future like that is. The world building for the whole film felt like that, as the protagonist goes to work in a converted angular-concrete-shapes-and-useless-architectural-dead-space factory that now serves as law enforcement headquarters, before commuting through empty, dreary streets and going home to his sparse, impersonal apartment.
But it wasn’t just the story and the mise-en-scene that left me wanting. The dialogue in particular feels like it was written so that any line uttered throughout the runtime could end up in the 2-and-a-half minutes of trailer. The script aims for "snappy" and "cutting," overshooting that by a mile and ending up with a result that reads like a series of CSI Miami pre-opening-credit crime-puns strung together.
The delivery of said lines isn’t at all helped by the actors. The only thing the actors deliver are stiff, uncomfortable performances, as if the subtleties of human emotion are somehow rendered beyond their grasp the moment the camera turns to them. In scene after scene after scene Clive Owen recites his lines in the same growling monotone. Whether he’s discussing impossible murders with his colleagues, ruining intimate moments with a hookup, or calling his ex-wife to remind her that today would have been their son’s tenth birthday (if only their son hadn’t died tragically, causing an irreparable riff in their marriage!) – the tenor remains unchanged. His character, “Sal,” is supposed to carry the emotional heartbeat of the film, and it’s a heartbeat that viewers can feel flatlining the longer the film goes on (if there even was a pulse to begin with).
I was also very disappointed with Amanda Seyfried’s performance. I’m sure her character was meant to evoke Lisbeth Salander, or perhaps Trinity from the Matrix films, both badass ladies with clearly demonstrated skills to back up their cool reputations. But I was unconvinced that “The Girl” (her character doesn’t get a name, she’s not even “The Woman,” only ever “The Girl”) had anything to offer besides a pouty face and some limp one-liners. She runs around "hacking" the implants and enabling others to commit crimes, and for what? To live in a modernist nightmare of a penthouse? To escape from the prying eyes of the public? There’s no convincing motivation for her actions, nothing in the sliver of backstory revealed in a few seconds of footage and voiceover the audience is treated to (something something trailer park, something something bonfire), no real reasoning behind her most memorable exchange with Sal: “It’s not that I have something to hide,” she tells him. “I have nothing I want you to see.”
…aaand then there’s the softcore pornography. Sprinkled liberally throughout the film, perhaps every twenty minutes or so, viewers are presented with about thirty seconds or so of bare female breasts; mostly in conjunction with tepid, stultifyingly choreographed sex scenes. These encounters run the gamut from disappointing love scenes for main character “Sal”, to a transparently “titillating” lesbian encounter that ends in a double homicide, to a scene wherein Amanda Seyfreid’s “The Girl” undresses in front of a mirror and scrutinizes her nude body (while unbeknownst to “The Girl,” a team of detectives observes her personal strip show through her implants, having surreptitiously hijacked her visual feed in an attempt to deduce her location). The nudity contributed a grand total of nothing to the film’s plot. It felt like an awkward grasp at a higher rating on the Motion Picture Content Rating scale.
The nude scenes also served the purpose of making me deeply regret choosing to watch this film… with my father, who is a fan of the sorts of sci-fi thrillers this movie advertised itself to be. As the film chugged along and the inevitable next scene of breasts would arrive, I felt compelled to announce them, as if this could make things any less awkward. “Look,” I said, “here comes another uninspired sex scene.” This did not, in fact, make things less awkward, but I couldn’t stop myself once I’d begun. “Ah,” I announced through gritted teeth. “There are those breasts again. It’s been almost fifteen minutes since they’ve been gratuitously featured.” If I had hoped that I could skip even a single, mortifyingly awkward nude scene by ducking out of the room at an opportune moment, I was wrong again. Every one of those scenes was, without fail, played back by the squadron of sour-faced detectives investigating the various crimes committed throughout the film, or by the hackers who erased and distorted the supposedly un-hackable memories of the populace. Back and forth, rewind and press play, no escape from the gyrating hips of a fully clothed Clive Owen, nor from the jiggling flesh of whichever female character his dour little lawman was sleeping with at any given moment of the movie’s runtime (there are several). How ironic, I mused, that the film featured scenes of gratuitous and uninspired sex being erased from the memory of the protagonist, when I myself could never forget (nor forgive!) that I’d been forced to sit through it twice.
I walked away from viewing the film feeling enormously disappointed, for a variety of reasons. Across the board, “Anon” failed to deliver on storytelling, on acting, on worldbuilding, and on entertainment value.
“Nothing I want you to see,” indeed.