What would it take to be truly anonymous? In the 21st century, there’s not only a camera on every corner, there’s practically one in every pocket. With just the push of a button you can find that old college buddy you haven’t talked to in years. Want to know what he had for breakfast? It’s probably on FaceBook or Twitter. If you want to buy something online (and there’ll be a permanent record of that) you’ll have the option of telling everybody you know about it on any number of social media platforms. If one truly wanted to disappear from the world, is it even possible now? How much of our privacy are we willing to sacrifice in the name of technology and safety?
Anon presents a world in the not-too-distant future in which privacy is nonexistent. Humans now walk around with a computer in their heads, providing all the information they could want about their surroundings, popping up directly in their line of sight. That stranger passing by on the street not only has a name but a bio to go with it. Financial transactions are literally exchanged in the blink of an eye. Don’t pay too much attention to how many calories are in that hot dog you just bought. One person’s memories can even be downloaded into another person’s head. No one in this world is anonymous.
A string of murders pulls in Detective Sal Frieland (Clive Owen). The killer has the ability to hack minds and cover tracks. Suspicion falls on a hacker who goes by Anon, credited only as The Girl. (Amanda Seyfried plays The Girl, which I’m still trying to make sense of. Seyfried is 32 years old, and as this movie demonstrates, she is very much a Woman.) But this is a world in which seeing isn’t always believing, and nobody can see the killer, even when they’re directly facing each other.
It’s a fascinating idea. Unfortunately, the end result left me feeling almost as empty as some of those hacked and deleted minds. Writer/Director Andrew Niccol relies heavily on his film noir influences because every science-fiction story with a detective has to be noir these days. Naturally, this means muted colors, terse dialogue, and Clive Owen brooding in every scene. The only thing missing is a lonely saxophone playing over shots of the wet streets. The story itself, though, felt like it wanted to break out of the noir rut. The story exists to support the style, which is rarely the correct way to go about things.
The performances are fine. Seyfried stands out, giving The Girl a menacing presence that may or may not be an actual threat. Niccol never really gets around to explaining the rules of this world, so the technobabble spewed out by the cast often sounds like they don’t even know what they’re talking about. I do have to give them credit for their convictions, though.
What Niccol really needed to do was cut this down to an hour or less. This would’ve made a much better story on an anthology series. The 100-minute run time gives us too much time to ponder the things that seemingly do work. The line-of-sight computer information looks cool, but gets a bit monotonous as the story moves along. I imagine that would be the case with the actual technology. And for some reason, all of those POV shots have the first-person characters moving as though they’re under water. Nobody walks anywhere; they slowly glide.
The worst mistake the movie makes is glossing over the moral implications of this kind of technology. We’re told, “Anonymity is the enemy,” but we’re never told why. And nobody ever thinks to argue. I get why The Girl wants to make herself anonymous, but I wanted to know why anybody would agree to this kind of invasion of privacy in the first place. There are some rich thematic avenues to explore here. Unfortunately, Niccol merely suggests those avenues to us. We never get to go down them.
Anon is worth watching once as a time-filler. Its central idea is interesting enough that I was never bored. However, I also wanted it to go so much further than it did. The world just didn’t feel real to me. My entire attitude toward the film can be summed up in one scene. A group of detectives chase a killer . . . by sitting in a dark room and staring into space. It got the job done, but it would have been so much more satisfying if I had felt like I was a part of it.
