Enemy Of The State

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You don't have to watch much of "Enemy of the State" before you're thinking it's all a bunch of post-9/11 hooey, with those left-wing Hollywood radicals making the Patriot Act look like such a gargantuan intrusion on citizens' private lives that even George Orwell would be shocked. But the funny thing is, this movie came out in 1998, and Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson began developing the story a full decade before the Bush administration pushed through a bill that's made the ACLU hopping mad.

So you'll have to excuse director Tony Scott if this film is stuffed fuller than a holiday turkey with paranoia and over-the-top scenarios. They weren't making a critique of the Patriot Act. It was a conspiracy thriller in the tradition of John Grisham novels like "The Pelican Brief" that they were after. And the U.S. Government makes it so easy for filmmakers to let their imaginations run wild, because cover-ups and behind-the-scenes power plays seem to be the norm in Washington. After all, even one of the first major terrorist attacks--the bombing of the USS Cole--was claimed to be an accident caused by equipment malfunction before an enterprising reporter from the Navy Times dug up the truth.

But "Enemy of the State" also falls into another tradition. Like "Dr. Strangelove" or "Fail Safe," it exposes a government that's vulnerable to a frightening abuse of power by people in high places.

Here, the villain is Thomas Reynolds (Jon Voight), a big shot at the National Security Administration who leans on an aging senator (Jason Robards) to stop trying to block passage of the new Telecommunications Security & Privacy Act--as euphemistically named as the real one we've got now. At a public park, Voight and his NSA henchmen have the audacity to kill the senator and dump his car into the lake. Everything would have been fine, in a matter of speaking, if it weren't for the inconvenient truth that was recorded by a motion-activated camera placed near the murder spot by a biologist who was researching the patterns of migratory birds. All it takes is a glimpse of his license plate as he drives away with the tape for the NSA thugs to tap into his phone and use computers to track his every movement. As a matter of fact, these NSA people have the power to type anyone's name into their computer and have just about everything about them pop onto the screen--payments they've made, associations they belong to, alma mater, shoe size . . . you name it.

Sounds far-fetched, doesn't it? Well, not if you think about the cookies your computer has been eating, or remember being asked by clerks at stores where you shop to give them your phone number. There's all kinds of information that's been gathered about us. If anyone can type in your address on Mapblast and get detailed directions to your house, why not more? When I lived in Milwaukee, Pres. Reagan was scheduled to visit. Just two days before his arrival, I received a mysterious phone call. I'm in public relations, so I was able to spot this phony "telephone survey" in a minute. The caller, who sounded like a man in black, asked me in a stiff and official voice what my feelings were about the president. After a few more questions, I finally just said, "Look, I think he's doing a terrible job, and I've said so more than a few times in letters to newspapers and to the president himself. But if you're wondering if I'm going to go out and buy a high-powered rifle, the answer is no. I use words to make my statements." Now, the average telemarketer would have been thrown way off their game by that, or hung up on me. But this fellow calmly thanked me, hung up, and, I imagined, crossed me off his list. Later, I read that the precautions for the president's visit were so extensive that even all the manhole covers were welded shut on his motorcade route.

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