Cyber-Cinema

Note: This is a movie-review like blog to be part of a popular films review website like Rotten Tomatoes. This is to be viewed as one in a series of compilation-reviews: reviews that look at more than one film in a review, all of which have something in common, like the “Best Of”, “Worst Of” series.

One of the most interesting repercussions of the whole world wide web and the internet revolution is the way it has infiltrated and been used in popular films. Hollywood is never too late in cashing in on any new trend or phenomena that hits the world. But what’s most peculiar is to see how the internet’s role in popular cinema varies so drastically from one film to another. It seems like filmmakers are still negotiating with the technology, its protocol, common usage and loop holes in order to use it almost like a protagonist, paramount to the central plot! What’s crucial to note that the films are not “about” the internet or telecommunication devices or technology.

Nora Ephron's You’ve Got Mail was really a re-make of Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 movie, The Shop Around the Corner, but with a modern twist. The “destiny” element that Ephron added to this routine “rivals-who-fall-for-each-other” was e-mail and chat romance: a view of "cyberManhattan". It effectively explored, rather early in the day (standard Hollywood anachronism), the estrangement factor of modern telecommunication: the idea that two people who exchange intimate e-mail, or who chat in a virtual chat-room, could pass each other unknowingly on the street, or worse still be arch business rivals! With all of the cyber affairs begun in chat rooms across the world, it was only a matter of time before a mainstream movie used on-line romance as a plot device. But like a blogger to an article, The Best and Worst Movies About the Internet, aptly put it, “To call You’ve Got Mail, a movie about the internet, is like saying Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid is a movie about horses!”

The Net was a 180 degrees the opposite of You’ve Got Mail. A Cyber-thriller, Cyber-crime, Cyber-terror story, if you’d like. What I found most fascinating about this film was how much it relied on assumed technical knowledge of its audience. The central idea in the film is about cyber security and encryption, the ramifications of which are not even completely explored and understood by IT professionals. The Mainframe computer is supposed to be the most robust, secure platform and hence is used to store highly confidential data. (The Green text on the screen that you see in this trailer of The Net is the Mainframe. It’s aptly called a Green Screen!)



Usually government, defence, immigration departments rely on the Mainframe. But is this something everyone who watches a film knows? It’s not like e-mailing or social networking!

I think Perfect Stranger was probably takes the cake when it comes to employing multiple strategies. It had everything: undercover investigative journalism, rivalry, child sexual abuse, virtual chat room, cyber sex.

Who I feel bad for? The archetypical lovelorn hacker and stalker tech-geek! What I find also very amusing while watching films like these is how the camera has to focus and show the actual screens of the various devices being used, the typing, and the screen-time that all this takes to advance the plot, like in this clip of Perfect Stranger at 1:20 minutes!



I’m still trying to give this new genre a name. Cyber-flicks, Compu-flicks, Web-centric films? Incidentally, I can’t seem to find an equivalent term definition or description in Wikipedia! I’m waiting to see James Bond grapple with it.