ENEMY OF THE STATE

How have I not seen this 1998 flick before? Anyway, I caught it tonight for the first time and pretty much enjoyed this tense action thriller. And how can you go wrong when it has a Gene Hackman car chase? Will Smith is his usual, back then, entertaining self, and Hackman is almost always riveting to watch.

The big surprise was not that this is a thriller about how NSA spying was already destroying our privacy, a very timely subject in 2014, let alone 1998, but how the outrage it is obviously meant to generate over losing our privacy in our homes due to that spying has become almost irrelevant with our smart phones and laptops tracking us so intimately the NSA of 1998 is more like one of those giant computers that filled a room back in the 1950s compared to the easy access we are voluntary giving not just spying agencies but corporate overlords every minute we use a digital device.

It'd be like watching a movie today based on an idea I tried to pitch to studios before the end of the Soviet Union about them being able to create destructive weather as a weapon but it getting out of hand, when we already know that it didn't take some traditional nemesis to create that kind of weather havoc, we did it ourselves.

What we need now is a movie about how we cleverly turn all these spying devices against the spy agencies and corporate overlords. Wait, did they just see me write that?