By making Big Tech the hero in a movie about government surveillance, the dismally rated remake feels more like an ad for Amazon than anything else.
By making Big Tech the hero in a movie about government surveillance, the dismally rated remake feels more like an ad for Amazon than anything else.
I mean… Hollywood has been turning out cheap propaganda flicks for over a century. Not to say some dipshit c-level in 2025 won’t take credit for the idea, but this isn’t even the first time this book has been turned into a bit of war-time propaganda (not unlike the why-won’t-it-die-already? Superhero Movie epidemic).
There’s actually a book Area 51: An Uncensored History whose first chapters detail how the 1938 radio play spawned a host of plots - both foreign and domestic - to use the fear of an alien invasion to manufacture consent for the Cold War.
They figured out a model to rent-seek off the distribution of movie festival hits and underdog directors. And I won’t complain too loudly, because it means getting access to more than just the Disney/Universal slop bucket.
But one of the easiest and most popular ways to budget a war movie is to turn to the Pentagon and say “You get X minutes and some amount of directorial control for a percentage of the budget and rights to shoot some of your cool surplus military equipment”. Michael Bay owes his personal fortune to the US Navy.