Jerry Shaw and Rachel Holloman are two strangers thrown together by a mysterious phone call from a woman they have never met. Threatening their lives and family, she pushes Jerry and Rachel into a series of increasingly dangerous situations--using the technology of everyday life to track and control their every move. As the situation escalates, these two ordinary people become the country's most wanted fugitives, who must work together to discover what is really happening. Fighting for their lives, they become pawns of a faceless enemy who seems to have limitless power to manipulate everything they do.
I’m fully prepared to get flamed for my negative opinions on Eagle Eye. I think it is going to be well received and rightfully so. It’s an excellent action movie with loads of excitement and a nice bit of acting and cinematography to boot. Unfortunately it’s also one of the dumbest films I’ve seen in recent memory.
There are a few things in film I have absolutely no tolerance for. The number one offender of all time is when your character is looking at a computer screen displaying a security tape of some kind. Like clockwork, he or she will inevitably say, “Pause that. Zoom in on that guys face… Ok now enhance it.” (Slapping forehead). Ok I’m sorry but you can’t “enhance” a pixilated image. There will be flying cars before that kind of technology exists. In fact zooming in will only make it worse. Can we please stop “enhancing” photos please? It doesn’t exist. This entire film is based on this kind of impossible premise.
Not only that but we’ve seen the entire story before when it was called Terminator. (SPOILER WARNING BELOW) In the movie Terminator, a company called Cyberdine Systems creates a program to run our entire countries defense. It eventually decides that man has becomes a threat to it and attacks man to defend its self. In the movie Eagle Eye, our government creates a program to monitor terrorist activities and it has access to any and all devices that are controlled on a network. It decides that we are not following protocol and starts running assassination missions to take out our government heads. So once again we have created an AI program that is attacking us instead of our enemies. (END SPOILER)
Last but not least is just the absurdity of it all. Our hero Shia LaBeouf can jump onto a train and instantly the phone on the man standing next to him will ring and display a message to him. He’ll jump off the train and then in the middle of time square a message will appear to him on the jumbo tron. In one case the computer actually used a cup of water in the room to pick up the vibrations in the water and translate what was being said. It just became so completely absurd and unbelievable that you had to laugh at it.
Was it all bad? Of course not. I thought the film was done incredibly well. I thought Shia was great in it. In particular he had a couple very dramatic scenes involving his brother and he really puts you on the floor with his heart felt performance.
Eagle Eye is a great film with some farfetched ideas based on a premise that we’ve seen before.
