Spy Games

Eagle Eye Someone is watching you. That’s the message coming over loud and clear in this year’s batch of high tech paranoia thrillers.

In The Dark Knight, Batman decides the Joker’s threat to Gotham City is real enough to justify spying on every citizen’s mobile phone. It’s a stage too far for Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), who reluctantly helps set up this super-spy network but walks out shortly afterwards.

In this week’s rather preposterous conspiracy thriller Eagle Eye Shia Labeouf’s mysterious adversary – a disembodied voice on the other end of the phone – is so plugged in she seems to know every move he makes. Not only that, she can control traffic flow by switching the signals – seriously rigging the movie’s set-piece car chase – and flash instructions through electronic billboards.

That might seem far-fetched, but in Ridley Scott’s Middle East thriller Body Of Lies (opening Nov. 21) Russell Crowe’s CIA bigwig is able to put his feet up in Langley, Virginia and keep a close eye on agent Leonardo DiCaprio thousand of miles away out in the deserts of Jordan and Syria through spy satellite cameras. He even eavesdrops on his conversations with his divorce lawyer. As for Leo’s relationship with an Arab nurse, forget it, it seems like the entire worldwide Intelligence community is on top of it.

Body of Lies Michael Winterbottom showed how Pakistani Intelligence services linked up the group who murdered Daniel Pearl by tracing phone records in A Mighty Heart. No one with a mobile or an internet presence is safe – which might make you wonder how Osama Bin Laden still evades capture. Perhaps, like the savvy terrorist in Body of Lies, he’s gone back to pen and paper or word of mouth communications. Even then he should be wary. DiCaprio uses the net to frame a perfectly oblivious architect in a faux bomb attack, then waits until the real terrorists reach out to this new ally. (Don Cheadle adopts a similar strategy in the forthcoming thriller Traitor, except that he uses himself as bait.)

Not that this weapon only works one way. Last year’s Die Hard 4.0 showed how a smarter terrorist might strike at the heart of the US by hacking into cyberspace. Add a few zeroes here and there; you could bring Wall Street to its knees.

There’s no mystery why these films are highlighting this brand of techno-phobia now. It’s a reflection of widespread and legitimate privacy fears that inevitably follow from the massive, rapid expansion of wireless communications around the world. This technology has undoubtedly been a boon to international criminals – as anyone who has ever been spammed by fraudsters and pornographers will know – but also to some extent to the police and Intelligence services, who have exploited online networks to expose pedophile rings and keep tabs on extremist groups.

Burn After Reading In addition to the mushrooming technology governments everywhere have assumed increased powers of surveillance in the name of the War on Terror. Phone conversations, emails, financial and medical records are no longer as confidential as they were before 9/11. The internet may not feel like a dangerous place, but we’re careless with our particulars. According to some conspiracy theories, the CIA bankrolled Facebook.

Is the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading a spy movie? The title seems to hint as much, though it’s obviously old school (you can’t burn an email). It’s set in Washington DC and John Malkovich plays a recently axed CIA operative, so I guess it qualifies. There’s even a sequence when Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt try to sell state secrets to the Russians. Refreshingly, though, the CIA spends the entire movie trying to figure out what on earth is going on – and in true Coen brothers’ style, never really get to the bottom of it. In this film, intelligence is in short supply, and no one has much of a handle on anyone else’s motives or desires. When they invent a technology that can shed light on that, then we all better watch out.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com