Z/Web

I’ll begin by warning you that I am about to reveal spoilers from the plot, so if you don’t want to know the specifics, don’t read this post. I must reveal things because the most significant aspect of the movie for me involves that, and I can’t discuss it without revealing the details. The plot, in short, involves two regular people (a guy and a girl) getting strange phone calls with a woman’s voice ordering them to obey and threatening dire conseqences if she is not obeyed. For instance, the girl’s son will be killed if she doesn’t obey. The guy they have set up with money in his bank account and bomb equipment in his house, so he’s suddenly wanted by the FBI as a terrorist. Realizing that the two are being framed and set up by the mysterious voice, I went along with that: it made sense. However, there were two things that bothered me. One, the caller, who seems almost omniscient, is able to remotely control just about any kind of electronic or mechanical device in the area, from digital signage to robotic cranes. The action is so fast-paced and non-stop, I was sceptical that any group of hackers would have the ability to keep up with the spontaneous action. The second thing that bothered me was there was a ruthless impersonability from the caller: she does things like tell the boy he has ten seconds to obey her radical instructions and of course he does not, causing all hell to break loose and he almost getting killed. I was like, “Does she not care if he succeeds? Why not call him a minute earlier and give him more time to absorb the concept?” But later in the film the movie’s big “secret” is revealed: that the caller isn’t a woman but a machine, a new government supercomputer who plotting her own agenda. Now granted that’s an old saw and utterly unrealistic, a myth propogated by people who are afraid of technology, but I did like that now the woman’s unrealistic expectations of obedience made sense. As an artificial intelligence, she cannot understand that humans sometimes make the illogical choice. So in the end I actually liked this gimmick, which surprises me, as usually I would think of it as a cop-out. Part of the reason this works is that the plot to control all these various people is quite ingenious, as basically you have different people each doing an innocuous task that somehow contributes to the main scheme. That’s very cool and interesting. The action isn’t bad, and the film definitely moves non-stop, and overall I liked it. It’s nothing too profound and the AI gimmick is ridiculous, but at the same time, it’s done well enough that you can suspend your disbelief and go along with it for the ride. Fun.

This is a classic French film I first saw in a film class back in the 1980s. It’s wonderful, one of my favorite films of all time. It’s set at the end of WWI (I, not II), in a small town where the Germans have left leaving behind a bomb that will destroy the entire town. But their plot has been leaked to the British and so they send in a soldier to disarm the bomb. He’s selected because he speaks French, not because he knows anything about explosives. But meanwhile the town has been evacuated, except for the residents of the looney bin, who escape and take over the town. Thus when the soldier arrives he thinks the crazies are the regular townspeople and when he uses obtuse code words the gibberish he gets back drives him batty. No one can understand anyone! That’s just the beginning of the chaos, of course, as the film mocks the “rationality” that brings people to shoot each other and in the end, insanity seems the much saner choice. Extremely witty, clever, and wonderful. A must see film.