Eagle Eye
Before I begin, let me identify the major elements of Eagle Eye here. Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf) has just returned from his twin brother’s funeral to find a large sum of money in his bank account and his apartment full of weapons and fertilizer. He receives a mysterious phone call warning him to leave. The FBI immediately seizes him. Elsewhere, Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan) sends her son on a train to Washington DC where he is to perform with classmates at the Lincoln Center. She soon receives a phone call detailing a threat to her son unless she does as commands. Soon enough both characters are teamed up and compelled to do what the mystery caller requests or face ruin. The caller turns out to be Aria, a computerized persona of the Eagle Eye system, which is an operation being carried out in the 36th floor of the Pentagon designed to catalogue and sort virtually all information available through government records, consumer histories and all manner of surveillance. For some reason it also gives recommendations on counter-terrorism operations, and in the pre-title segment one such recommendation is ignored leading to an American bombing of a funeral procession in the Middle East that some false intel had possibly identified as involving wanted terrorists. As a result of this wrongful attack and the ensuing anti-American protests and attacks in the Middle East, Aria goes rogue and decides to eliminate the president and nearly everyone in the chain of succession in order to protect the nation from further bad decisions and consequently further anti-American action. That’s where Jerry and Rachel come into play. Get it? Now then…
This is a film with a plot so easy to destroy that it’s not even fun to do so. The holes are massive and staggeringly frequent. Perhaps the most egregious ones, if only because it happens so often, involve the Pentagon’s supercomputer hacking things that have nothing to do with the Internet in order to aid the mission of the two lead characters. Really, those junkyard cranes in Chicago were connected to a network accessible from Washington DC? The Eagle Eye system can pretty much control anything with a microchip, except of course for when it’s convenient for the screenplay to make the system fail or overlook something. Everything from the television sets in a Circuit City to uh, power lines. But these are all problems with the plotting, although they are so pervasive as to be seriously problematic. Plot holes can be overlooked if the story being told and its themes are strong enough.
Unfortunately for Eagle Eye this is not the case. The film simply does not know what it wants to be about. Throughout the film we see POV shots through surveillance cameras and hear scary news reports about domestic spying, which would be discomforting if it had anything to do with the Eagle Eye plot. Heck, Aria even tells our heroes about how it’s accumulated all kinds of personal information, purchasing patterns, etc. about these two, but none of that data is used in their selection to aid its evil purpose. Rather, Jerry is picked because it requires a voicematch for his deceased twin, and Rachel is chosen because her son can be arranged to play a musical instrument near the president and cabinet. Their identities are not difficult to determine, and don’t at all require combing through their lives. The domestic spying angle – and it does indeed have disturbing ramifications in real life – is used here as window dressing to make the actual story seem timely. In truth Eagle Eye is another Frankenstein’s monster tale where a technological creation disobeys its master and runs amok.
Regrettably, the movie kinda fails in this regard as well, since Aria was apparently given powers that are only used once it goes rogue. When we see the military using it as intended, and as expository dialogue explains its purpose, the system is only meant to collect and sort data and aid humans in analyzing it. All the actions we see are made by humans and don’t involve Eagle Eye’s use at all. It’s completely separated from the attack that indirectly sets off the plot. Once that happens though, the Aria and the Eagle Eye have the capability to digitally reach out into the world and command electronics, make phone calls, etc. Why would a data collection system even be given the capability to do these things? It’s like the engineers were asking for their monster to go berserk. And why, in an influence from Asimov’s I, Robot, does Aria have a hardwired respect for the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution? As we’re told, it’s not designed to control the government. It collects data, analyzes it, makes recommendations and recognizes threats. It’s stated design has nothing to do with taking action based on any of that. But suddenly it wants to overthrow the government because Aria has deemed the government to fall under the reasons the Founding Fathers used in justifying a violent break from Britain by citing from the following:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
The anti-American actions following the wrongful bombing proves to Aria that the government needs to be dismantled. That it never considers how detonating a bomb near the president during his State of the Union address might cause more American deaths than protests and violent reactions in the Middle East is baffling. Aria should have read one line further into the Declaration to see that “prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” In the grand scheme of things, I don’t see a single wrongful bombing and its aftermath as necessitating the government’s abolition. If only Aria had taken offense at the Declaration’s line “for imposing Taxes on us without our Consent” and punished politicians for not giving Washington DC a voting presence in Congress. That would have made up for every one of the film’s problems through sheer hilarity.
So ultimately the Frankenstein’s monster and I, Robot angles prove disappointing since Aria was apparently designed by college dropouts. Humanity was just asking for it in the way Aria could do virtually anything it wanted without legitimate reason or for being given a hardwired devotion to the Declaration of Independence. Who thought any of that was a good idea, or even relevant to data collection and analysis? Neither does this say anything of real value about the dangers of domestic spying. A machine with that kind of programming wouldn’t require any kind of surveillance at all to be of great danger to the nation. I guess the movie is a warning against hiring incompetent engineers for top-secret Pentagon projects.
