Movie Details
Anon
Director-Andrew Niccol
Cast-Clive Owen,Afiya Bennett,Morgan Allen
Movie type- Sci fi Thriller
Producers-Oda Schaefer,Oliver Simon,Daniel Baur and Andrew Niccol
Andrew Niccol
Release date- 4 th May 2018
IMDB Rating-6.1
Languages-English and Bulgarian
Duration-1 Hour 40 Minutes
Trailer
Synopsis
Before the Black Mirror captured the public’s hearts on the topic of “technology development and the resulting threats and erosion of interpersonal contacts”,
…an important player in the sophisticated and painfully disturbing images of the tangible future was Andrew Niccol – dealing with the phenomenon of reality shows in The Truman Show (he was responsible for the script), eugenics and DNA improvement in Gattaca – future shock , artificial intelligence in S1mone and the conversion of human life into currency in Race Against Time .
His latest film, Anon , was commissioned by Netflix and unfortunately it is clearly audible that after many years Niccol’s voice on the subject of futurism is already quite hoarse . After several seasons of Black Mirror, it is difficult to come up with a fresh idea about combining technology with human everyday life, and the creator doesn’t do much here, completely losing momentum in the second half of the film and dragging on to the end on fumes.
Because the initial idea for Anon is quite neat and leaves a lot of room for imagination – we have a world of the future (but strongly reminiscent of our everyday life), where every person at birth is equipped with an electronic ring in their eyes that works like a smartphone (it allows you to call others, browse the Internet, order a pizza, identify people on the street and much, much more), and additionally records a person’s entire life in the form of a video and saves it in Ether (the equivalent of our Internet).
On the one hand, this technology means that citizens have no privacy, on the other – it means there are no crimes because law enforcement officers can view any image from a suspect’s eyes and solve problems on the spot. However, the life of one of the detectives, Sal Frieland (Clive Owen), changes dramatically when he starts chasing a hacker who has “erased” herself from this seemingly perfect system – the woman is also suspected of murders, which is why the friendship between the characters, based on lies, is not promising. happy ending.
And initially it works quite well – Niccol slowly introduces the viewer to the world of Anon , following Owen’s point of view and combining the presentation of technological curiosities with the convention of a black crime story and with scenographic minimalism, emphasizing the “transparency” of the future world. Unfortunately, quite quickly you notice that the plot only had the strength to get off to a good start and halfway through you’re already breathing heavily – a vivisection of the voyeurism of the future, where you can send your memories to a friend and change your digital sins (a meeting with a prostitute?
The right hacker will turn it into a boring evening with pizza ), it is tempting and terrifying, but the narrative cannot keep up with it; too slow, disjointed, as if aware that it had a plot for an intense episode of a series, not a full-length film . It doesn’t help that the conflict here is boring due to paper characters – yes, they are well played, because Owen was born with a talent for playing mannered detectives in trench coats, and Amanda Seyfried is a statuesque femme fatale, but their characters are not developed in any way , and the viewer has no reason to care about their fate. And the worst thing here is the finale, because Niccol tries to somehow summarize the rather bizarre and accelerated solutions, some threads are pulled out of a hat, technological elements are slightly sidelined, and the scene is taken over by a simple crime story. And suddenly the characters just throw out a few phrases like from fortune cookies, and the viewer wonders “is this the end already?”
Unfortunately, Anon is a tarnished film that has no idea how to be a crime story, too often forgets that it is science fiction, and as a film it is simply boring and does not allow a specific cast to spread its wings.
At times it is such a blasé production that, combined with Owen’s face, it gives the impression that it is about to collapse on itself. You can watch it if you have more time in the evening, especially since it’s available on Netflix, but it’s an intriguing idea made small – completely forgettable after the viewing, reminiscent of a not very successful episode of the above-mentioned Black Mirror . It’s a pity, because this is the second time – after Race Against Time – that Niccol uses an interesting concept. Unfortunately, the future seems to have already preceded him.
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