Enemy of the State
Rating: 80 % Starring: Will Smith Gene Hackman Jon Voight Director: Tony Scott We in Cape Town have had our own experience of the type of surveillance as portrayed in Enemy of the State. Six alleged Pagad G-Force members were recently arrested following the monitoring of their movements by the Business Against Crime surveillance cameras. Big Brother is definitely alive and watching our every movement here in sunny South Africa.
In the director Tony Scott's movie Enemy of the State, the central question is how much invasion of privacy the state can be allowed to do. Is it right for the state to monitor every nook and cranny of its citizen's lives in the pursuit of protecting the country against those who seek to harm her. The movie kicks off when a prominent government official is assassinated because he is preparing to oppose Jon Voight character, who is seeking more leeway into prying in the daily lives of the ordinary citizens of the United States. Will Smith, portrays a lawyer who also uses illegally obtained surveillance footage to leverage himself and his clients into a position of strength against some shady Mafia figures.
When through a chain of events Will Smith comes in possession of the evidence of the government officials murder, his life is thrown into turmoil as the corrupt NSA agency head uses all the means of the modern spy apparatus to regain the evidence from him.
What really makes Enemy of the State such an engrossing movie is not the slick editing and well staged action scenes which makes the Jerry Bruckheimer production move at a cracking pace. The real success of the movie is to show how computer geeks locked away in dark rooms surrounded by the most expensive digital toys their governments can buy, can systematically destroy the illusion of ordinary day to day life that we take for granted.
The irony of Enemy of the State is that for Will Smith's character to retrieve himself out of the predicament he is in, he has to fight fire with fire. With the help of Gene Hackman's character he gains the necessary know how to defeat the enemy. The message one can get from this, is heaven help the poor souls who become the target of the government's focus to destroy them. If you can't hack a computer or call up spy satellite to aid your fight, you might as well give up.
I really enjoyed Enemy of the State. If only half of the things shown in the movie are true, you better hope you don't stay in a country with a government too keen in using the latest hi tech gadgets against their citizens.
Neil Smith Review courtesy of www.megavideo.co.za as well as www.dvdsa.co.za
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