Movies - Eagle Eye

Here’s my review of the movie Eagle Eye, which I’m giving a rating of 4/10. That rating actually decreased as I was writing this.

If you haven’t seen the trailers, the basic premise is that an omniscient “someone” takes over the lives of two unrelated people, blackmailing them and controlling their lives via technology (particularly cel phones and security cameras), and leading them around for some unknown reason – probably related to terrorism. Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan are the leads, with Rosario Dawson and Billy Bob Thornton as the confused FBI and DoD agents trying to figure out what’s going on.

From the trailer the premise looked interesting, it seems to be trying to be a post-9/11 and Web 2.0 version of Enemy of the State (which I really liked). The effects are quite good, and the pacing is good. I can’t remember anything about the soundtrack, so at least it wasn’t bad. The acting is pretty much what I’d expect from this cast, adequate but not exceptional. The characters are not interesting, but on par for an action movie.

The problem I have is that this is supposed to be an action movie about the dangers of today’s technology, but most of the core technology is straight out of bad science fiction. About 1/3 of the tech seen in this movie is plausible now, 1/3 is possibly plausible within the next 5-10 years, and 1/3 is totally wrong. The totally wrong bits seem to be specifically added in to induce FUD in the minds of non-technical folks in order to increase tension. I’m obviously not the target market – the wrong bits just annoyed me.

I’d go into more details about the bits that are wrong and annoyed me, but I’m very sensitive to spoilers, even for bad movies. Perhaps I’ll get into this in a post later in the year, once everyone who actually wants to see this one has had a chance to do so.

In summary, Eagle Eye is a pretty average 2008 studio action movie, wrapped around a stinky core of bad science fiction, which for me dragged things down. If you have some spare time and happen to have the movie sitting around, it’s not a total waste of a couple of hours, but I wouldn’t recommend going out of your way to get it.