Anon takes place in a world where everyone has Augmented Reality vision. Looking at someone will tell you their name and occupation. And everything everyone sees is uploaded to government servers. In this world, a hacker (Amanda Seyfried) is able to hack this system and inject whatever she wants into your vision and also edit the stream going to government servers. So she makes a living covering up the crimes of others.
AR vision, hackers, oppressive government, it all sounds cyberpunk. But there are no neon lights here, only brutalist grey concrete everywhere. And rather than the hacker being the Robin Hood-type fighting against oppression, the story follows a detective (Clive Owen) who’s trying to hunt down this hacker, mostly because she’s creating blind spots in their all-seeing eye of surveillance. The movie treats the detective as the sympathetic “good guy” and the hacker as the “bad guy” who needs to be stopped. So the movie is more about data privacy than cyberpunk, but I still enjoyed it.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJOoYhQcQBI
And it’s on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/80195964
You know, I’m pretty sure that I watched this movie, forgot all about it, watched it a second time, turned to my wife halfway through and asked, “Have we seen this before?”, and we eventually decided we had, but finished watching it again anyway.
And right now, I can’t tell you a GD thing about it other than Clive Owen was in it.
