major_kerina | Eagle Eye - Much Better Than I Expected (Reply)

I really rented this movie for mom and she wasn't that excited about it because it doesn't make sense, for the most part until around the ending.

How to sum up this movie....

Imagine if I wrote just the kind of action B-movie I've always wanted to. This is that movie.

It is great? Hmmm...It's fun. It's rather expected to me but then I have a really weird mind that figured out what was going on from the first few minutes (knowing nothing in advance). I felt like I had already written this movie. That earns it some kudos. If only it had zappy.

Here's the gist. We begin on a military operation which may wipe out this movie's Osama-type person or destroy a benign funeral. It doesn't go well as we find out over the course of the movie.

Then we jump to Shia LaBouf at still a kind of annoying level but he gets kinda less annoying as the movie going along because he doesn't do his usual shtick as much. Basically, Shia has an identical twin brother who has died. At this point, the shit starts to hit the fan as he gets tons of money in his bank account and lots of weaponry and explosives in his apartment.

Then come phonecalls from terse, female-sounding voices telling him precisely what to do like a gender-bent Morpheus.

The Voice is probably the most important and my favorite part of the movie (although I pretty well guessed what the Voice was). I loved how the Voice knew exactly that he needed to do at what time to escape. It was just like Morpheus' voice in the office building in the Matrix. It was like the Pre-Cog girl in Minority Report. But it didn't require quite as much sci-fi to get there.

I kinda geeked out because a lot of things the Voice is able to do remind me of ideas I've had for only planned stories like The Directors. How the Voice knows exactly where they need to be and when to escape from people chasing them is just amazing. A couple of the deaths feel right out some of my story ideas.

That said...there are enough plot holes to drive a plane through a tunnel. But it still works for me.

In short, the Voice is actually ARIA, an AI computer responsible for managing and prioritizing all the data coming in from all the US and Global data sources. It is GW (The Patriots of MGS) and HAL rolled into one. There's even a moment where it explains the "We" it always uses in a kinda creepy way.

ARIA though is out to preserve the future of America at any cost. Which leads us back to our SNAFUed attack at the beginning of the movie. ARIA decides 'she' needs to do something about it. And apparently her plot comes from her reading way too many books.

I had trouble buying the plot in the end as something a super-smart AI would cook up, after all the perfect moves she'd made before. This was one of those movies that would've been saved by a bad end :-p. But then I'm weird.

Aside from the kinda silly final plot, I really liked this movie. It was insanely fast-paced. There are only a few moments where it actually slows down. When ARIA is at her smartest, the movie is a thing of beauty.

But when she kinda dumbs down enough for people to thwart her for a happy ending, meh. Still, the really cool scene at Circuit City (someone paid their produce placement buck before going bankrupt...along with a couple of others like Pontiac). That scene definately reminded me of MGS2 in a pretty cool way...that and the scenes where commands by ARIA play out perfectly...are the main reasons I recommend this film. And it was fun ^^.