Issue Date: April 12, 2009
"Eagle Eye"
A surveillance scholar evaluates the taut thriller featuring a female-voiced Big Brother.
Eagle Eye, out now, stars Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan.
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The Plot
Shia LaBeouf plays a college dropout arrested by the FBI in what seems to be a bizarre frame-up. He suddenly finds himself on the run with a threatened mom (Michelle Monaghan). Under the control of an unseen but omniscient woman, they flee authorities and eventually realize they have become tools in a nefarious scheme.
Our Insider
David Lyon is a professor of sociology at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and director of the Surveillance Project and the New Transparency Project, groups that study the effect of technology on privacy. The latest of Lyon's extensive writings, a book titled "Identifying Citizens: ID Cards as Surveillance," will be published this year.
OVERVIEW
"As fast-paced entertainment, it was pretty darn good, but the connection between the characters and ideas about surveillance and national security made it particularly enjoyable to me. The choice of title showed the moviemakers knew what they were doing: Like an eagle, surveillance technologies can be remote, and like an eagle's vision, extremely precise.''
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACT
"The film is very good about showing you how the characters feel about their predicament. They come to see themselves as prey. Look at Shia's stuttering responses when he's confronted with his situation. It's like when perfectly innocent people end up on no-fly lists and find themselves dealing with a bureaucracy more reliant on software than common sense. It reminded me of a recent case where an innocent man ended up on a no-fly list. In the end, he came to the decision that the best solution was for him to change his name.''
THE MISSING LINK
"The film shows us the surveillance capabilities of the Pentagon, the Air Force, the FBI -- but one giant player is missing. Corporations have a massive information infrastructure that contains tons of data about us, which they use for marketing. We used to think of ourselves as living within a military-industrial complex. Now it's something very different, a military-information-entertainment complex. I don't think [at this time] we fully understand its impact."
-- Jamie Malanowski
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