Robert Clayton Dean (Will Smith) is a mild-mannered lawyer who works in Washington, D.C. He is on the trail of a kingpin named Paulie Pintero (Tom Sizemore). Meanwhile, a politician named Thomas Brian Reynolds (Jon Voight) is negotiating with Representative Phillip Hammersley (Jason Robards, Jr.) about a new surveillance system with satellites. But, Hammersley declines; Reynolds has Hammersley killed, but the murder is caught on tape, and the taper is chased by Reynolds' team of N.S.A. Agents. The guy must ditch the tape, so he plants it on Dean (unbeknownst to Dean). Then, the N.S.A. decides to get into Dean's life. That is when Dean's life began to fall apart all around him, with his wife and job both gone. Dean wants to find out what is going on. Then, he meets a man named "Brill" (Gene Hackman), who tells him that Dean has something that the government wants. Dean and Brill formulate a plan to get Dean's life back and turn the tables on Reynolds.Written by
John Wiggins
The picture of a younger Gene Hackman shown in a white shirt and tie, supposedly from his N.S.A. file, was taken from The Conversation (1974). Hackman's character Edward "Brill" Lyle, closely resembles his "Conversation" character, Harry Caul. In The Conversation (1974), Harry Caul, like Brill, is a paranoid surveillance expert who has his workplace in an industrial warehouse. Also, Brill wears the same translucent raincoat worn by Harry Caul in the previous movie. In the movie Harry Caul (like Robert Clayton Dean in this movie) is pressured to hand over a tape that has evidence of a murder conspiracy. At the end of The Conversation (1974), Caul demolishes his apartment when he thinks people who have been observing him might be coming for him. It's been suggested by more than one movie critic that Brill could actually be an older Harry Caul, living under a pseudonym. See more »
Goofs
Brill tells Dean about his experiences with the Iranian secret police aid the Afghan rebels against the Russians, then mentions the U.S. Embassy seizure in Iran. But the Embassy was seized in November 1979, one month before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (December). See more »
Well, I like this one. I like the cast, the visuals are well done, but what is more important is the plot that I like really much. It's not the most sophisticated plot of all times, but I think it's quite good, and to some degree, realistic. Of course it's not possible to move sattelites that quickly, or zoom in on a videotape that much and still have crystal-clear visual, but quite some technology seen is realistic today, or in the near future. This is an hollywood flick, all right, so they have quite much action and everything looks very easy, steering a sattelite seems to be no harder than playing a video game, what makes it all seem a bit unrealistic/sci-fi-like, but today's technical posibilities are quite large, and continue to grow, so informing oneself about the issue (I mean the real world issue) is not a bad idea.
To give you some points to think:
It's routine for the credid card companies to document every transaction made with the cards, go figure who gets the docs if police is investigating.
Every call / fax done is documented for billing, go figure, who...
At least for your ISP it's possible to read every unencrypted email you send or receive, go figure ...
Today there are MANY cameras in public areas in Great Britain, with numbers still growing.
Face recognition software is already being used in combination with some surveillance cameras.
Dictation software that can interpret your spoken word and convert it into written text is being sold to you today, maybe some organisations have much better versions at their hands ...
The list could go on, but what I want to say is that one should think about the posibilities and listen to what the politicians say, and what they want to allow the federal organisations.
You want to be able to still _enjoy_ the movie in some years time, not thinking of it as being somewhat normal just as everyday life, all right?
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Well, I like this one. I like the cast, the visuals are well done, but what is more important is the plot that I like really much. It's not the most sophisticated plot of all times, but I think it's quite good, and to some degree, realistic. Of course it's not possible to move sattelites that quickly, or zoom in on a videotape that much and still have crystal-clear visual, but quite some technology seen is realistic today, or in the near future. This is an hollywood flick, all right, so they have quite much action and everything looks very easy, steering a sattelite seems to be no harder than playing a video game, what makes it all seem a bit unrealistic/sci-fi-like, but today's technical posibilities are quite large, and continue to grow, so informing oneself about the issue (I mean the real world issue) is not a bad idea.
To give you some points to think:
The list could go on, but what I want to say is that one should think about the posibilities and listen to what the politicians say, and what they want to allow the federal organisations.
You want to be able to still _enjoy_ the movie in some years time, not thinking of it as being somewhat normal just as everyday life, all right?