Kai?
Yaaaaaaaayyyyyy!
John McClane is back and
A lot to be fearful of regarding this film. Willis hasn't been in a good action picture in awhile (either the last Die Hard or Pulp Fiction depending on your taste, both more than 10 years ago). Len Wiseman has directed those messy dumb Underworld pictures, and nothing else. Plus the writing credits also have sucktacular written all over them. Mark Bomback has the main screenplay credit along with partial story credit, but his last studio film, Godsend, was a mess. The other story credit is for Dean Marconi whose previous major studio film credit was for Enemy of the State. On top of that, the germ for this story came from this Wired article by John Carlin regarding US vulnerabilities to having our communications networks being attacked in a coordinated fashion.
The article was written in 1997, which might explain why the article focuses on 'cyberwar' between states, rather than 'cyberterror' being enacted by non-state actors. Something else from the article caught my eye
Spooks and cops may well be better suited to the task, at least for holding up the defensive end of I-war. But better is only relative. I-war trashes time-honored distinctions between law enforcement and intelligence, between Americans and foreigners, between the kinds of surveillance permitted at home and what starts at the water's edge.
Undaunted, the FBI has created a Computer Investigation and Infrastructure Threat Assessment Center, expanding the bureau's three existing computer crime squads to 56 nationwide - one in every major field office. More tellingly, an executive order signed by President Clinton last July created an interagency outfit called the Infrastructure Protection Task Force. Chaired by the FBI and including representatives from the DOD and the NSA, the task force is charged with developing a "threat model" and "countermeasures." To these ends it is mightily empowered to demand "assistance, information, and advice" from "all executive departments and agencies." Says John Pike of the watchdog Federation of American Scientists, "The IPTF reeks of what everyone always worries about: the nebulous control authority. There are people who were looking for a hunting license, and they seem to have gotten it."
One proposal quietly making the rounds on Capitol Hill is to let the NSA engage in domestic monitoring, partly on the theory that digital technology makes distinctions between "domestic" and "foreign" artificial. Where's the water's edge in cyberspace?
I guess that sort of thing wasn't a problem as long as a Clinton was President (and I'm assuming would be OK again should another Clinton assume office). The article's a good read, but it definitely reads as if it was written ten years ago without an inkling of what was already brewing in the world.
Back to the film, Since they cast the Mac guy as the unwilling sidekick this time around, I think they would have done better going with this guy as the villain, but I'm sure Timothy Olyphant does a bang up job. It would have taken guts to cast Hodgman as the villain against Willis, though.
The early reviews are all pretty positive. I'm a bit shocked, and dismayed. When the type of folks who write reviews like action pictures, usually that means either the picture gets everything right, or there's something really, really wrong with the movie and it's total crap. This is the only bad review of the 9 posted early.
I wasn't thinking about seeing this pic, the idea of a another Die Hard picture this many years after the last isn't particularly appealing, and the trailer just made it look like a blue screen cgi-fest with no real sense of danger involved in any of the over the top action sequences. But, the idea of seeing this film is growing on me. It's summer, and it's been a pretty crappy summer picture-wise, so between this and the excellent looking Ratatouille (will there be Basil in this Ratatouille?), and the truly dumb but spectacular Transformers, it ought to be a good next few weeks.
No comments:
Post a Comment