Anon: Minor Work from a Great Writer and Director

Andrew Niccol's Gattaca in 1997 remains one of the surprise all-time best science fiction movies, surprise because Gattaca was Niccol's first.  His follow-up, The Truman Show in 1998, was even more lionized by some, but I didn't like nearly as much as Gattaca, which was stunning in its mix Brave New World totalitarian life and the yearning for space travel.  I've seen some of Niccol's subsequent movies, but I honestly can't recall them.

Anon had all the right ingredients for another great movie - Clive Owen and Amanda Seyfried in the cast, and a kind of Philip K. Dick Minority Report story, with a police force that can scan people's minds and therein nab criminals (not before but after the act), and hackers who can cut up and out those images.  Add to that a serial-killer hacker suspect (Seyfried) hunted by Owen (a detective who can mind scan), and they're sexually attracted to one another, and you could've had another great Niccol movie.

There were lots of good scenes, savvy dialogue, wonderful locales (my favorite: Sal's apartment on Wadsworth Terrace in Manhattan), and a pretty good twist at the end (which I won't tell you), but Anon nonetheless lacked, I don't know, a certain depth and profundity, even though that's exactly what it was trying to convey.   Anyone, especially police detectives, having access via your brain to what you see and do is a pretty traumatic and revolutionary development in human life, and for all the characters' remonstrating about that in the movie - or, in some cases, celebrating it - the ambience fell short of kicking you in the cosmic gut.   Probably there was a little too much emphasis on the murders and the police work.  Perhaps seeing scanning in other contexts a little more would have given Anon a more universal grounding.

As it was, Anon is a good film, worth watching, but a minor work from a great director and writer.  Hey, it's good enough that I'll definitely watch Niccol's next movie.

 

Anon: A Good

Just saw Anon on Netflix, where it debuted just two days ago.  The movie's by Andrew Niccol, and I'd say it's better than The Truman Show but not as good as Gattica, for whatever that's worth to you.

The story's pure cyberpunk, or a mix of cyberpunk and police detective, though police are usually right in the middle of and never too far away from any cyberpunk story.  You could also say that Anon is part of the cyberpunk renaissance, along with the Blade Runner sequel and Altered Carbon, but that wouldn't be quite true, either, since cyberpunk never really went away.

What is true about Anon is that it's a well told and well played story, in near future New York (with scenes in places where I've actually spent time), about a homicide detective (Sal, well played by Clive Owen, who plays everything well) who is hunting an apparent serial killer (a nameless "girl," with one of Amanda Seyfried's best performances) who is hard to find, because she's created an algorithm that erases all of the digital records that police have of everyone, everything they do, and everything they see.   In that sense - police employing some kind advanced almost mental-telepathic system to eradicate crime, or at least keep it bay, Anon has a kinship with Minority Report, and indeed is as Dickian as it gets without actually being based on a Philip K. Dick story.

The plot is pretty tight, with some real surprises and twists.   There is one place in which the "girl" should have recognized Sal after he goes undercover to find her - given that he was just chasing her, in an excellent scene in which she eludes him by making him fall down a flight of stairs by distorting what they actually look like to him.  But, hey, that little glitch is ok with me, given that the stairs scene was so cool, as is the master hacker's power not only to erase records and thereby traces of herself, but also project false visions into any head she chooses to use as a screen.  It's a good thing Google pulled back from Google Glass a few years back, because seeing Anon would have done that product no good at all.

Though, I'd probably still go for Google Glass right now, and take my chances with Amanda Seyfried's character, since ... well, to tell you more would give away too much of the story.  Or maybe I can't relate that part of the story because the hacker removed it from my records ... though, in the narrative, biologically (naturally developed) memories are not affected by the hacking, so ...

Well, see the movie and see what you think.