Stephen Ezard (Benedict Cumberbatch) returns to a near-future England in the wake of his brother’s death.
He meets his brother’s widow, and the seriously ill woman that the widow is treating.
Then the ill woman dies, the widow vanishes with the body, and Stephen gets chatted up for a job promoting TIA – Total Information Awareness, a unified government database.
Verdict
Well directed, produced, and acted, and yet it completely misses the point.
Okay, so, most of the rest of this column is going to get political. I suppose I should state here that these views are mine, and not necessarily the views of Forces of Geek or of anyone who contributes here.
The Last Enemy sets you up to think that it is going to deliver a tense, twisted, drama about the pros and cons of living in a surveillance state where anyone with a security clearance can look up everything about you – your purchasing history, your medical records, your employment history, your daily habits, driving record, arrest records, and your education, as well as your interactions with the government.
Then it turns into an indictment of Big Pharma’s willingness to experiment on isolated communities in far-away places.
Uhm, really? That’s what scares you? Because, you know, that movie hasn’t already been made. We don’t read about things like the explosion at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India in the news. No, really: Please make a TV miniseries about shit we already know, and when you do, don’t give us any new insights.
I’ve mentioned before that I have no problem with re-makes and re-boots if they are trying to say something new. I’d like you to do a good job, but I won’t heap abuse on you just for re-making something.
Similarly, if you think a filmmaker or writer missed some aspect of a story and you want to highlight that aspect, go for it. Don’t just tell me that big business has no problem poisoning people to improve the bottom line. I live in a country that purposely gave its citizens LSD to evaluate the drug as an interrogation tool, and infected African-American men with STDs so we could measure the progress of the illnesses.
What really rubbed me raw about The Last Enemy was that they clearly acknowledged the terrible threat to personal freedom posed by TIA itself. Several episodes of the miniseries had specific dialogue focusing on the danger.
In one scene, a proponent of TIA is selling the idea to an undisclosed group of people, but he’s clearly talking about the marketing potential of the database. He’s telling them that TIA will let them predict who is most likely to buy a particular brand of washing powder, or car.
You know what? You don’t need to know that about me, or anyone else.
In another scene, Ezard confronts a former girlfriend who is now a government minister over TIA. She is all in favor of TIA. He has begun to see how the government can use TIA to crack down on dissent. She insists that TIA will only be used for good, because they have a good government. Ezard (and Cumberbatch’s voice fairly drips with venom on this line) asks, what about when we have a bad one?
He’s right. That’s what scares me about warrantless wiretaps and airport scanner devices. If everyone is moral and ethical, then those things will always be used properly. Of course, if everyone were moral and ethical, we would have much less need for them to begin with.
The problem is that you have jackhole TSA workers who sell nude bodyscans on eBay.
The problem is that the FBI really did spy on US citizens for fifteen years (the program was called COINTELPRO, and it only stopped because Congress accidentally found out about it).
The problem is that, when you create a new system that affects thousands, if not millions, of people, you have to ask: What could this do in the worst hands?
Then you have to ask: Is it worth the risk?
I mean, have you learned nothing from recent events? Did IQs drop sharply while I was away? The CIA’s website has been hacked. Anonymous and WikiLeaks get access to supposedly secure data every week.
It’s not just about what government does with the data. It’s about creating the biggest, juiciest, target for identity theft in the history of identity theft…and then blindly believing that nothing bad will ever happen.
Yes, in fact, I will quote Benjamin Franklin here: They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Enough Politics!
Okay, you’re right. Let Crazy Uncle Rich give you a bit about writing.
Pay attention, writers, I am about to tell you the secret to great drama.
The secret to great drama is when two (or more) people who are both right (within their frames of reference) come into conflict.
Imagine, if you will, a drama about the rise of the Nazis as seen through the eyes of two men. One is a young Germany army officer who supports German nationalism – but not the extremes of the Nazi party. The other is a pacifist.
The young officer argues that the Treaty of Versailles, that ended WWI, was harsh and vindictive. Every other nation besides France thought so. Germany had just as much right to exist as any other country.
The pacifist agrees that the loss of WWI was devastating, but argues that Germany is no longer the world power that it once was, and needs to adjust to a lesser role on the world stage.
Throw in a couple of extremists on either side of the argument, set it in Duisburg (occupied by the French and Belgians, and make one of the anti-German clique French), in the late 1920s/early 1930s, and you have the makings of a great drama.
And no, I am not invoking Nazis randomly.
The medical experiments on The Last Enemy? They’re a precisely targeted bioweapon, one that can distinguish specific ethnicity It’s genocide in a test tube.
When Ezard and the government minister have their brief exchange, as mentioned above, you approach great drama in this movie. It’s a shame that it’s just an approach.
So the Movie Sucks?
From both a writing and a marketing standpoint, yes.
As a writer, I know how hard writing is. As a marketer, I know how hard it is to manage customer expectations. I hate saying anyone else’s work sucks.
I acknowledge that film making is a collaborative process in which any one contributor’s work can be diluted beyond recognition.
Let me give you some detail on what I mean.
There are very few genuine characters in the movie. Ezard has his foibles and mannerisms, and he obviously develops a desire for his brother’s widow, but we don’t know his greatest fear and we’re not always sure that he should get his greatest desire. Sometimes he comes off as a stalker.
The context is a bit unclear. There are references to things that have not happened, but might, so we can kind of assume that it’s near-future, but nothing actually says that.
The conflict is kind of all over the place. Ezard just wants to find his brother’s widow and build a life with her. She’s the one who wants to expose the government’s complicity in the medical experiments. David Russell (Robert Carlyle) wants revenge for the death of a loved one. God only knows what the nameless intelligence agencies want. The government wants TIA, rather than rely on that nasty, old-fashioned, police work.
You know. The kind that stopped every terrorist attack that could be stopped.
The climax feels deflated, as many movie climaxes do, when the screenplay does not clearly establish characters’ greatest fears, and have them oppose their greatest desires.
And yet…
All the actors are terrific, and my hat goes off especially to the character actors. Character actors play the secondary characters, and go a long way toward making a movie feel like it’s a real place and time. The Last Enemy does a terrific job with those folks.
It’s well-directed, and well paced. While I watched it, I enjoyed it. It wasn’t until afterward that it all fell apart.
Summary
If you can’t wait for the next Star Trek movie, or for Smaug to show up in The Hobbit (because Benedict Cumberbatch is in both), or for another season of Sherlock, feel free to watch this.
Otherwise, there are plenty of better paranoid thrillers out there.
