The
internet is not forever, as a recent New Yorker piece on digital archiving makes abundantly clear. Yes, there is
always the nefarious deleting, like the Russian-backed paramilitary commander,
who tried to memory hole a tweet bragging about shooting down what turned out
to be Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Yet, more often than not, it is a question
of hosts going out of business and links becoming corrupted. BL Reputation Management
can hasten the process with a little scrubbing and a bit of astro-turfing here
and there. Their latest recruit is particularly skillful at navigating the twilight
regions of the web, but one of the parties might be getting more than they
bargained for in Cyril Morin’s Hacker’s
Game (trailer
here),
which opens this Friday in Los Angeles.
Soyan
did not hack into BL’s system cleanly enough to escape discovery, but his work
was sufficiently skillful to convince the company to offer him a job in lieu of
prosecution. Company chairman Russel Belial and his right hand femme fatale,
Lena Leibovitz, will keep the hacker on a short leash, but it is not like he
had much of a personal life anyway. The one promising development is his
ambiguous friendship (and possibly romance), with fellow hacker Loise. They met
on a rooftop catching open wifi signals. She has skills too, which she utilizes
on behalf of human rights NGOs, but frankly she prefers ink-and-paper over
digital alternatives. Yet, the somewhat immature Soyan manages to woo her (to
an extent) with a virtual chess game.
There
is a ton of backstory in Game,
including the reported exploits of Angela King, a mysterious cyber activist who
sounds like a cross between Edward Snowden and Neo in the Matrix trilogy. Somehow Soyan, Loise, and BL are all somehow
involved in the wider intrigue, but Morin takes forever to close the loop—even though
we can largely guess the broad strokes from the get-go. It just seems like an
awful lot of the film consists of Loise and Soyan sitting next to each other,
wearing VR visors, thereby preventing any real intimate chemistry from
developing.
There
are a few intriguing elements sprinkled throughout, including the highly
ambiguous portrayal of Loise’s former do-gooder employer. Cinematographer
Romain Wilhelm fittingly evokes the dark, murky look of the classic 1970s conspiracy
thrillers. Strangely though, Morin’s screenplay never really taps into the
current zeitgeist, mostly just feeling like another warmed over serving of
anti-corporate paranoia.
Be
that as it may, there is something strangely compelling about Pom Klementieff’s
Loise. Even her halting delivery of the English dialogue seems to work in
context. On the other hand, she and Chris Schellenger (with his anemic mustache
and goat patch beard) never look like a believable couple. Prop specialist-turned
character actor King Orba has some nice moments as Belial, the villain who
maybe sort of believes his own rhetoric. However, the rest of the supporting
ensemble gets to be quite a source of adventure, producing some awkward line
readings and plenty of general dramatic clunkiness.
