2005

That was the worst Deus Ex Machina I've ever seen in a film. The hellish imagery, the inescapably pathological family, speaks wonderfully to the human condition. But with the conclusion to the story, the film in itself can be summed up by the statement: life is suffering, when chaos reigns and you're immersed in hell, there is no transcending it. Dumb luck and the ineptitude of the enemy is the only means by which your suffering can be ended.

For this plot resolution to work, it would require far more setup and a significant element of human agency. No, the opening shot doesn't cut it, because human agency did not deploy the microbes. The only thing that caused the (non-martian) invaders to fail was their hubris. This does not bode well for humanity; if the only thing protecting you from intelligent Monsters is their ineptitude, all you have to do is shelter in place.

Good stories require competent villains. The more competent, the better. A civilization that prepared to exterminate intelligent life millions of years before it became a threat, should have some damn penicillin. This is not a failure of the antagonist, this is a failure of the *writers* to make a realistically threatening antagonist. Deus Ex Machinas destroy the stakes and worldbuilding of your story. Avoid them like the plague that killed these aliens.

I'm disappointed in Spielberg. The canonical example of a Deus Ex Machina is "Imagine if Jaws ended by an act of God, where the Shark is struck by lightning and blown to smithereens." I know Spielberg knows better than to do this; his previous work demonstrates that. This is a case where modifying the source material is an absolute requirement for the story.

Character: remarkable presentation of the pathology within a broken family. Pretty fantastically acted and directed along these lines. It's Spielberg, after all!

Worldbuilding: Damaged slightly by the suicidally curious hominids near the opening of the film. For most people, just the ground shifting like that would have been far too much chaos to warrant sticking around to ogle. The filmmakers wanted to show a classic moment of human curiosity, which is biologically inevitable, but they overextended how long that stage realistically acts. By the time a massive hulking alien machine exits the ground, 99% of the onlookers would have retreated. That's some pretty archetypical nightmare fuel- almost chaos in itself. Most people don't have enough Openness to stick around that long.

I've already talked about the Deus Ex Machina, but let's elaborate. Stakes are a secondary consequence to the Storytelling Triangle; they're mostly between plot and worldbuilding, but character has a bearing on it, too. The worldbuilding is damaged as such: how advanced was the alien civilization, *really*, when they didn't consider the existence of pathogens and the necessity of individual immune systems? Did they not even take samples of the life on the planet and realize how fatal it could be? Why would these brutal creatures be so foolish as to exit their ships and explore the terrain unsuited, and drink the water? The film hardly attempts to justify this error, and the speculation by readers of H.G. Wells' original story just kicks the can down the road, or contrives the worldbuilding even further. As far as biologists can see, it is not possible for a multicellular organism, an intelligent one to boot, to exist, without a bustling microbiome. As intelligent creatures, we are effectively an entire ecosystem. Ecosystems are inevitably invaded by pathogens. These creatures could not have existed without immune systems. While it stands to reason that if they'd snuff out other intelligent races, they'd probably have snuffed out most pathogens as well, that doesn't explain why they wouldn't have taken more precautions. Yes, you should eradicate that which exists to end life within your civilization, but you also take up fortifications against any future external or internal threats. And if you are to take the land of others by conquest, you should be especially vigilant. This lack of foresight would have wiped them out far earlier. 

The lack of information on the alien species, their history, their motives, and their technology, is a literary tool -no, a literary *excuse*- for the writers to leave crucial worldbuilding details up to the imagination of the audience. Defenders of this decision are forced to write the story *for the writers*, which is part and parcel of poor writing. Conversely, why would the intense bacterial infection cause the alien crafts to lose their shields? Did the infected pilot just fumble the shield button? Why would such an infection cause the machines themselves to appear drunk, weak, and disoriented? The real reason is because the writers were treating the machines as Monsters, and when Monsters wobble, it's time to strike. The lack of information on their technology does not justify sweeping these flaws under the rug.

That being said, the worldbuilding is far from flimsy. The human response to the chaos is largely realistic. I'd point to the scene where the car gets mobbed. The EMP destroyed all technology, and many people's homes are destroyed. They're in utter chaos, wandering about, dazed, the only thing to be certain of is that they ought to go where everyone else is going, where the food, shelter, and Order is. The moment they see an operating vehicle, it quickly becomes the means by which they can transcend the chaos, so things get instantly violent. Just as Ray prophesied. The only thing that prevented him from gassing it was the concern for a mother and child, which is an excellent moment to speak volumes of his character. The only weak aspect of this scenario, is that I'm pretty sure that's in rural New York, and there was only one other individual willing to use a firearm in the face of the catastrophe. The crowd reacts as though they've never seen a weapon fired before. What would actually have happened is rapid formation of armed groups for protection, resource coordination, and deterrence. So this film appears to suffer from believing that even rural areas on the East Coast view firearms in the same way that the Urban areas do, which is not the case. So it's only natural that Ray, an Urbanite, carries his weapon, a handgun, in the manner that he does, and that the only other person to carry a weapon is also carrying a handgun in the exact same way. Damn it, I wanted to say something good about the worldbuilding beyond act 1, but I stumbled upon another flaw anyway. Psychologically accurate worldbuilding in that case, but not situationally accurate.

Plot: while damaged by the worldbuilding flaws, the plot is quite strong. The military response, the aftermath of an EMP, individual speculation about it being a Solar Flare... Those actually do cause massive EMPs, fun fact. If a solar storm like the Carrington Event of 1859 were to ever occur again, practically every single electronic device would be instantly destroyed. The film could have been about nothing BUT this, and this was only in 2005! So it's extremely ripe for exploration and they did it quite well.

Production: Excellent use of film grain and lighting, as we can expect from Spielberg. Pretty incredible VFX and compositing for the time. Given my profession, I could tell that at least one shot's background was one big composite. But it's certainly not obvious for the most part, so it's quite well done.

Fix up the plot resolution and the worldbuilding and you've got a pretty stellar film. I sure hope they do it justice when they try to remake it in 20 years............

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TL;DR: Person of Interest did it better.

Terribly written. Horrendously directed. Production quality leaves much to be desired. Disastrous along nearly every dimension of analysis. If I was disappointed by the previous retelling of the story, I had no idea what I was up against. The viewing experience was a feedback loop of constant whiplash, like this video: https://youtu.be/VXU6u5_HsQM?si=hvqmbxE92i_9H7VV

The decision to use the burgeoning 'screenlife' format was clearly catastrophic to every aspect of the craft. This is possibly the worst source material to write into this format. I could see a screenlife film working well in some very limited cases, but the writers especially would have to be an absolute expert in operating systems and software in order to make it believable. The choice to zoom in on everything Radford is doing was a huge mistake. It's the equivalent to camera overoperation in this format. Don't hold the hand of your audience by grabbing their face and physically directing their attention. I daresay you could make a downright fascinating, detail-rich film in this format, if you could squeeze enough talent and care into it. But no amount of talent and care on the part of the director and crew could have fixed this travesty of writing.

Production: I could have singlehandedly done better VFX with free and open source software over a couple months of work. It's been TWENTY YEARS since the 2005 film. They could have blew the previous film out of the water, with a fraction of the budget. That being said, at least the graphics were well-polished and resembling a somewhat believable operating system. Other screenlife films suffer from trying too hard not to use any identifiable, real operating systems, whereas this one is a decently accurate amalgamation/facsimile of Windows 10 version ~2004 to something like Windows 11 24H2. Their software is complete wizard magic bullshit, but I'll talk about that later.

Character: heavily damaged by poor direction and worldbuilding. Given this is Rich Lee's feature-length directorial debut, we can suspect that his direction of music videos required less involvement with actors than is required in any feature-length, character-centric film. The actors had very little to work with. I would lay this at the feet of the writers before the director, but it's difficult to assess how to distribute the blame fairly. The main character is literally staring at a screen for the entire duration. This causes the director and the actor to flail about trying to find things for him to do, overacting, underacting, standing up and yelling, the whole nine yards. It destroys the stakes and turns serious moments into accidentally hilarious ones. In terms of Radford's character, any man of integrity would have tried much harder to exit the facility and intervene physically with the wellbeing of his family. You could say that his actions are overall admirable, given that he labors to save his family and humanity the entire time, but the format makes it come off as quite pathetic. The character arc(s) are at a very low conceptual resolution; Government bureaucrat whose job it is to literally be Big Brother, slowly realizes that his position is corrupt as he tries to do what's right, ultimately deciding to use his talents for the protection of the Sovereign Individual, and against the power of foreign adversaries and the State. The sacrifice of privacy for security is an extremely relevant concern at this moment in history, and especially after the rise of the Surveillance State post-60s and post-9/11. But it's extremely on the nose here, and explores it with little nuance. Agent Coulson (that's his eternal name, I don't make the rules) is a joke of an antagonist. His cartoonish position is one of the definine characteristics that solidifies this film as a propaganda film.

Some rapid-fire character mistakes: Radford's daughter, the genius biologist, thought she could stop the bleeding by removing the foreign object in her leg without a tourniquet. 

This Worldbuilding is made of Papier-mâché. He needs to help his daughter! Oh no, they're on lockdown! The State is smoking out an entire apartment building because Anonymous McHackerman is spouting conspiracy theories (that are entirely factual within the story)! The Alien Invaders are biomechanical threats that... literally feed off of... data...? Oh no, they ate the servers that house the NASDAQ and everyone's banking information, whatever will we do?! While the aliens in the 2005 film were rendered pathetic by their ineptitude, these versions aren't even threatening in the first place. They don't even use an EMP! The previous aliens intentionally crippled their victims before setting about their destruction. The screenlife format necessitates that technology can only *appear* to be threatened, so even though these aliens explicitly exist to target devices containing data, none of them ever come close to destroying the data of the DHS, because otherwise our protagonist would be in the dark. The worldbuilding is warped so heavily that they had to castrate the enemy. They went from sucking blood and sinew through a giant straw and spreading it as blood vessels corrupting the entire earth, to sucking up data and deleting your facebook memories. Even then, God forbid they hit the MS Teams or Amazon servers... The entire hellish landscape is immensely sanitized, because this film isn't about the horrors of the unknown, it's about the corruption of the State. Fair enough, but the execution is sorely lacking. There is an extreme lack of bloodshed that would have inevitably taken place. I'm not advocating for gratuitousness, but it kills the stakes when the worst you see is Radford's pregnant daughter getting a metal object lodged in her leg.

On the tech conventions front, this is better and worse than other screenlife films on multiple dimensions. Overall, the big thing to keep in mind is that technology NEVER works this seamlessly. Particularly under threat by a data-eating horde of alien invaders, every single point of connection between each phone, computer, peripheral, and database, across ethernet, satellite, and radio (wifi & bluetooth, primarily) would encounter immense complications connecting with each other. The "hacking" is actually decently crafted sleight of hand. It's not *just* numbers on a screen doing hackerman stuff. In many ways, it surpasses the way the story and visuals handle the tech in Mr. Robot, and that's the point of that show... But the fictional spyware the State utilizes, named Guardian, is just that; fictitious. There are next to no loading bars or connection errors apart from the ones caused by alien interference and damaged technology. In the real world, you can't get practically ANYTHING to connect properly without power cycling or respringing multiple devices in the logical chain. There are tens of thousands of points of failure, and that compounds the more devices you add to the equation. Every time technology and user error are NOT getting in the way of your goals, you should consider it an absolute miracle. Hacking a Tesla is not that easy. Now, you could say that Guardian has a wide toolset of digital lockpicks, but beyond the "master keygen" he uses about 3 times, he seems to just be able to right click on a map and instantly hack anything. All that, without ever having to flush his DNS, restart his device, install new software or firmware on ANY device, or even check that the network routing between his system and his victim's devices are clean (network subnets, DNS servers, and port forwarding are NOTORIOUS culprits that prevent device connectivity). This would require far too much collusion between State and Private actors for it to be a secret. If our technology sends the end user into troubleshooting hell on a consistent basis, what makes you think the State could somehow do it secretly? This destroys the central premise of the film. They could have sealed this crack a little by establishing that the State enacted and enforced Surveillance laws requiring private entities to give DHS, NSA, CIA, and/or FBI universal access to all their electronic devices, but even then, that would have been immensely public. People wouldn't even *have* to reverse-engineer the tech to block the backdoor; the backdoor would likely fail of its own accord due to the infinite complexity of use cases in the technological landscape. So the Surveillance State could only function properly if private actors and all their employees explicitly designed backdoors and data collection into every single networked device, which would never be a secret. Even if they legislated it, the legislation would be dead on arrival, not only due to public outcry from secret cyber-activist groups like the Disruptors, but due to the immense budget required to upkeep the backdoor on every single device. It's a completely broken premise. The reality, in my estimation is this: private actors collect data from their customers, often quietly, which they analyze for the purposes of advertisement. They then sell this data to other corporations, foreign and domestic, to the State, and to the Political Class. Obviously this data is valuable for many reasons. PACs, activist groups, individual politicians, and party leaders benefit greatly with narrowing voters to target. This is decently documented to be a considerable factor for all campaigners, Democrat or Republican. Arguably, it's why Trump won his first and third presidential runs. Arguably his loss in 2020 was due to a lack of understanding the messaging. Point being, while the threat of data collection is real, the Surveillance State is only a real threat under the condition that everyone is more motivated by fear than they are by freedom. Right-wingers are motivated to regulate technology out of a disgust response to internet pornography, and concerns of the exposure of minors to illicit, or (non-Christian) indoctrinatory material. Left-wingers are motivated to regulate technology out of concern for the impacts of dialogue on controversial topics, particularly when said impacts compound on marginalized groups. In this tug-of-war, the only winner is the State. Power siezed by one political entity will be exploited by their enemies, universally. So it is encumbent on each rational individual of ANY persuasion to disallow their policies to be dictated by their tempermental proclivities. This is an explicitly non-partisan, univeral ethic that I hold to be true.

Enough politics. The point is, while the film takes an anti-Statist stance, it does so propagandistically by trying extremely hard to take that stance overtly. The difference between Propaganda and Art is the same as the difference between Ideology and Religion; one is driven by devotion to a fundamental principle (Dogmatic Religion, Ideology), while the other is desperately pouring the essence of its being into figuring something out (Trancendental Religion, Art). It's difficult to get any nuanced view of what this film is attempting to explore, when the irony of Amazon is lurking in the background. Amazon is immensely guilty of actively benefitting from data collection, what with Alexa and how aggressive and intrusive their targeted advertisement systems are. The film is propaganda because it is only focused on the bad actors within the State. It's consistently ambivalent, neutral to positive, on all other actors who are culpable with the increasing erosion of personal privacy, particularly Amazon, who funded the entire piece.

The videos are too high-fidelity with incredibly consistent bitrates, for the most part. The framerate drops are a good detail. But the datamoshing is a flaw. It's a motion graphics preset, which is clear to anyone with any significant knowledge on codecs, particularly the h264 b-frame corruptions that this effect is trying to emulate. I'll forgive the preset; it's not easy to consistently cause b-frame corruptions that will be consistent with any nonlinear editor. But they should't have even used it in the first place, or they should have used it much more sparsely; microwave interference tends to cause buffering and massive bitrate drops. Datamoshing does not happen anywhere near as often unless it's being streamed in MPEG-TS, which neither MS Teams, nor Whatsapp, use! If you've ever used these services for any extended period of time, you would know that they don't behave this way. There is a separate datamosh/static effect that occurs whenever they're in the presence of an alien threat. This is similarly unrealistic, but it's at least a neat detail that differentiates the causes of the poor connection.

Some rapid fire worldbuilding mistakes: Radford really sounds like he's slowly reading aloud when he's explaining his assessment of the alien aggressors, their tactics, and their tech. This is the only scene of him doing anything remotely useful to the high-level State officials he's supposedly subordinate to. They never ask questions, they never seem to try to hold him accountable for being unavailable. The constant messaging is not realistic for how dire the situations are. The calls, while somewhat constant, would hardly ever be interrupted with messages. Characters seem to message each other constantly, when several of them would inevitably be in life-threatening situations that would make hands-free communication the requirement. The Tesla and the Drone arbitrarily encounter low batteries in order to increase stakes, but the narrative introduces these limitations extremely weakly; the Tesla has its range multiplied by a factor of TEN by deactivating unnecessary devices and initiating a low power mode, and the drone conveniently never disconnects despite interference, and never dies despite the low battery warnings. Rodrick Heffley claims that he's "flying blind" despite the fact that he never loses connection with the drone, it only buffers slightly. I don't much like the idea that Government drones armed with missiles can be commandeered by rogue State actors in DC, the narrative regards this as a tool for the protagonists but it has disastrous implications, especially given that the drone was handed off to someone that the State would regard as a cyber-terrorist. While I have more knowledge than most about Amazon's operations, I wasn't aware that they had 6-8 cameras on each of their AMZL Vans... and that those can be hacked as easily as all the other devices... Perhaps Amazon is saying, "in the film, the State coerces us to give them a universal backdoor. Citizens shouldn't permit that!" And on that note, for some reason, to activate the drone, Radford had to order a thumb drive on Amazon, when his daughter was remoted directly into his Guardian client. Does the backdoor arbitrarily not work on Amazon's drones, because Amazon wanted the protagonist to be explicitly seen ordering something on Amazon as a central plot element? Surely Amazon wouldn't be *that* brazen...

The EMP was the strongest plot element of the 2005 film. It drove the character choices and interactions, it drove the action, it drove the stakes, it collaborated fantastically with the stable underlying structure of the worldbuilding. Plotwise, this film collapses under the rot of the worldbuilding and the format they chose.

One last foray into some of the details I find peculiar. As I say, it portrays many real-life things in a neutral sense. Fox News and CNN make appearances that do not poison the well against either news entity; CNN gets more screen time, but the viewer is not prodded into taking a stance as to which is an acceptable moral actor. If this were partisan propaganda, the partisan news source would expose the bias of the writer. The film is nonpartisan in this sense. Conversely, the President is presented as a non-specific, more archetypical figure befitting the Head of State. He's presented quite ambiguously as well; a white man somewhere in his 50s, making decisions with State intelligence officials. He's responsible for one of the pathetic Title Drops, which is torturous, but not in a way that casts him positively or negatively. He just seems... ambivalently pragmatic. Not an imitation of any particular President in recent history. Interestingly, the narrative leans a little neutral to negative on Meta, whose only contributions are a memorialized Facebook account, and some viral videos of the worldwide catastrophe. Facebook's data centers seem to be the only privately owned centers that experience data loss at the tentacles of the invaders. Instagram makes no appearance, and Meta's (formerly Oculus) Quest makes no appearance (the drone VR goggles are likely Amazon's property). So the narrative is oddly neutral to negative. For all we know, it's possibly a mistake. Steam seems to make a neutral appearance as David's (Disruptor's) gaming platform of choice, though it is not branded as Steam, possibly due to Amazon's Prime Gaming being a competitor. At least, it doesn't LOOK like Prime Gaming, it looks like Steam. X (formerly Twitter) makes a neutral to positive appearance, acting as another digital source of news. Though I suppose all of these notifications could be interpreted with negative valence, given they reflect the human propensity to feed disaster with the neurotic consumption thereof... Tesla is presented neutrally, in the sense that it's clearly a useful tool, but arguably, it does Tesla a disservice by contriving their product to be so easily hacked, commandeered, and operated by a State hacker. Though the autopilot does a remarkable job at operating the vehicle through such destruction and debris. This is a strange decision for multiple reasons.

Other critics have righteously noticed the painfully obvious product placement for Amazon throughout the film. The most prevalent in-dialogue Plantings and Payoffs are the repeated accusation that the State is guilty of "spying on what's in people's Amazon carts" which properly encapsulates the explicit purpose of the film. This is why it was said three times in the film while presenting the speaker as righteous in their accusation. Nobody who isn't terrified of some threat wants the State to know their personal habits and lifestyles. But the trouble is, Amazon knows what's in your Amazon cart, and Amazon is heavily motivated to act in a way that ensures your Amazon cart is as full as it can get. That doesn't make them inherently evil; God knows I love a full Amazon cart as much as the average shopper. The narrative just fails to acknowledge the potential pitfalls of Amazon being so entangled in the private lives of their customers. I don't judge them harshly for using "bureaucrat" as a dirty word. The sin is in their failure to acknowledge that corporations like themselves are ALSO bureaucracies, they just have less perverse incentive structures than State bureaucracies given they have no monopoly on lethal force. State bureaucracies will tell you that they have your best interests at heart without acknowledging that they're literally incapable of knowing what your interests are on a personal level. Corporate bureaucracies like Amazon suffer the same issue, only in a commercial sense. The State says "I can solve all your problems if you give me power" while the Corporation says "I can give you lots of great products if you let me in on EXACTLY the types of things you're interested in". Both of them are correct in that that they hold a certain amount of power to direct at accomplishing goals. Both of them are gulity of the lie that they're capable of concern for your personal wellbeing, and worse, that they should be regarded as your family. I can't believe I'm saying this, but the film somehow managed to lay too much blame at the feet of the State. And that's seriously impressive.