Anon is a 2018 thriller about set in a world without anonymity or crime, and a detective who meets a woman who threatens their security.
There is an intriguing start to Andrew Niccol‘s latest thriller Anon, one that for fans of Ubisoft’s Watch_Dogs video game series will immediately feel familiar, where just looking at a person reveals personal information via tiny floating boxes broadcast in the viewer’s eyes. It creates a smart setup to a sci-fi mystery, with good performances and decent visual effects but is unfortunately wasted in a story that simply can’t get any momentum beyond it’s clever premise.
In the future, from birth, humans are implanted with devices in their brains that not only record everything they do, they also visually enhance the world around them, constantly supplying pertinent information about what is being seen. Like that watch in the window? Not only can you learn about it, ‘see’ it on your wrist, and know how much it costs, a voice in your ear tells you more. As a detective, Sal Frieland (Clive Owen), gets full access to everyone’s record, as essentially, we all have personal black boxes that basically solve every crime. One day though, he spots what he thinks is an anomaly, a woman (Amanda Seyfried) with no record, and later that day, comes upon a murder scene where the victim’s record displays a point of view of the killer, meaning whomever killed him hacked his record, something never done before. An unsolvable crime. And whomever’s doing it is on a murder spree.
Certainly, the tech on display here is fascinating, if not entirely improbable. It’s be hard to believe anyone would want to live in a world so heavily saturated by extemporaneous information, let alone be so readily vulnerable to anyone and everyone. The film basically skips over this though, even if the story as a whole sort of makes this clear. What it’s more interested in is how involuntarily recording every moment of one’s life – let alone a memory trail of all your actions as seen by anyone you spend time with or are seen by – can lead to all kinds of things you might not what others to know. You would think this would render civilization crime free (and incredibly paranoid), but that’s not the case because, as we learned in Steven Spielberg‘s superior Minority Report, we are a reactionary species and will act spontaneously to satisfy more immediate needs, even if we know it could incriminate.
This all sounds like it could make for a compelling story, and there’s no doubt there are plenty of moments that stir some questions. However, Niccol approaches this with all the pizazz of warm tap water, the film mostly a collection of people sitting around a table ‘viewing’ other people’s records, the screen awash in buzzing white text boxes flashing over and describing everything on screen. It gets numbing fast even if it is loaded with ideas that are surely on the horizon.
Niccol’s style is a contentious one, and many are going to tune out fast, the lethargic pace and action-less narrative testing even the most resolute of sci-fi fans. Themes of hacking and unchecked crime are bantered about but it’s all handled with very little enthusiasm, despite a good turn by Owen. Seyfried, and most all the women featured, are not given much to do, aside from strip naked, with most of these repeated as the detectives replay files for ‘clues.’ That’s not necessarily a fault, but it feels a bit forced.
In desperate need of some pep, Anon is not without some sharp commentary and for those who like their sci-fi more talky and less bombastic, this could make for a satisfying pick. I suspect though that most will tune out before it even ends. Anon is now streaming on Netflix.