MovieChat Forums > Cypher (2002) Discussion > I was not a fan. (spoilers)

I was not a fan. (spoilers)


I love sci-fi and this genre of movies but having just finished watching Cypher, there were a few things about the film I just wasn't a fan of.

First and foremost, the corporations, Digicorp and Sunway, apparently do nothing other than try and steal each others' "data," an evidently lucrative business that is able to support the high tech, elaborate brainwashing and espionage tactics they employ on a large scale. Despite the obvious fact that what the two companies actually do basically amounts to nothing, they spy on each other in the most roundabout, over-complicated manner possible.

The twist felt forced to me, almost like "a twist for the sake of a twist," if that makes any sense. The acting was OK, but it had all of the Neo dialogue and none of the Morpheus (forgive the Matrix analogy).

I liked the style, it was reminiscent of Primer and Cube, the latter of which being by the same guy.

Anyway, I didn't hate the movie by any means, but I was frustrated by the lack of explaining what exactly the corporations do (and by extension why everything in the movie was happening). That could have added a great layer of depth to the film and made it more engaging. Leaving it ambiguous felt less "intentional" and more "lazy."

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The fact that they left out explanations and left in the mystery is part of what makes this movie so special. It's more fun to imagine the reasons, like for instance, suppose they are the two main corps who are competing to be the primary software companies of the New World Order. Behind them are entire nations and powerful political and financial interests, etc. So it's not just two corps competing for business , it's about the shape of the world to come.


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The lack of motivation on anyone's part in this movie made for a quite boring watch.



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maxgood512 wrote:

I love sci-fi and this genre of movies but having just finished watching Cypher, there were a few things about the film I just wasn't a fan of.
First and foremost, the corporations, Digicorp and Sunway, apparently do nothing other than try and steal each others' "data," an evidently lucrative business that is able to support the high tech, elaborate brainwashing and espionage tactics they employ on a large scale. Despite the obvious fact that what the two companies actually do basically amounts to nothing, they spy on each other in the most roundabout, over-complicated manner possible.
The twist felt forced to me, almost like "a twist for the sake of a twist," if that makes any sense. The acting was OK, but it had all of the Neo dialogue and none of the Morpheus (forgive the Matrix analogy).
I liked the style, it was reminiscent of Primer and Cube, the latter of which being by the same guy.
Anyway, I didn't hate the movie by any means, but I was frustrated by the lack of explaining what exactly the corporations do (and by extension why everything in the movie was happening). That could have added a great layer of depth to the film and made it more engaging. Leaving it ambiguous felt less "intentional" and more "lazy."


I agree with all this. I, too, tend to enjoy movies of this type, but this one is unsatisfying.

If the filmmakers wanted to leave so much unexplained (what the corporations do; why so successful a man would take such huge risks with his life; etc.) then perhaps a more stylized approach would have served them better. As it was, the film was presented in a very realistic style that left this viewer wondering why so many of the plot points were so unrealistic.


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You've hit on some of the reasons why I'm rating this just a 3 at Netflix rather than a 4, despite some significant strengths.

I don't have a problem per se with not explaining what Digicorp and Sunway do. I never got the sense that they did nothing but spy on each other; I assumed they were the top two Big Data companies in the near future. So, to me (and I think this is what you ultimately say), not explaining what they did was a missed opportunity to make the film better. Because it is a somewhat thin story.

This movie needed two things:

1) A layer that explains what Digicorp and Sunway do, and what Rooks does, and why he keeps himself unknown to them, and some clues as to what Rita does besides boinking Rooks, so that the final revelation about the purpose of the trip to the Vault has much more force. Not to mention the whole movie being more interesting.

IOW, they needed to create the future in which Digicorp, Sunway, and Rooks and Rita credibly exist and interact. But in the movie, they are all arbitrary placeholders to support the plot.

2) As part of that, a credible explanation for why Rooks himself had to be the infiltrator.

Imbed the twisty identity plot within a legitimate sf movie about the future of Big Data, with really high stakes for everyone, and you've got a great movie. You don't even have to be terribly original. For instance, both Digicorp and Sunway have equally evil designs on the world (which allows you to say some serious things about Big Data and the way it can be used to control populations). Rooks is an Elon Musk-style benevolent genius billionaire, but having grown up in the age of Big Data, he's kept all details about himself secret -- he's essentially Musk plus Banksy. He's gone to the government with his concerns about Digicorp and Sunway, and been ignored, and he realizes that the government has already been co-opted.

This would change the reason why he wants to infiltrate the vault. (That Digicorp does not also want to terminate Rita is unexplained and somewhat of a plot hole. As is the fact that there aren't any human beings at Sunway in possession of hard copies of the vault file on her.) Hmm, in fact, why not make the two sides the government (NSA) and one Big Data corporation? So, there's a big reveal that they are actually working together and that the whole bit of infiltrating one another with double agents is a charade!

The files Rooks is stealing from the Vault are reams of evidence that the government and the Big Data corp. are conspiring to create something that goes beyond the surveillance state right in the direction of 1984. (Note that this also makes the brainwashing technology that they use infinitely more sinister.) So he's Elon Musk, Banksy, and Edward Snowden!

Such a movie would start as seemingly small as this one, but it would open up continually to bigger vistas and deeper issues.

Granted, I'm good at that sort of plotting, but if I could come up with that in fifteen minutes, there's no excuse for the movie being as thin as it is.

Postscript: following through this logic ... Sullivan now has a reason why he wants to work for Digicorp. He does not believe that Big Data is a threat, he thinks it's a potential great boon to humanity, he doesn't buy the cynical notion that the data will be inevitably abused, and he doesn't support the laws that have been passed that force Digicorp to essentially spy to get data that used to be free. (And he passes the neurograph, so these beliefs are sincere!) Digicorp sends "Thursby" to infiltrate Sunway (one of hundreds of such agents), which is secretly an NSA front organization -- something they know but don't tell him. He fails the neurograph and is outed as an infiltrator. A mid-level Sunway guy who is working for Rooks intervenes and wipes the record of his failure. Sullivan somehow discovers that Sunway is an NSA front (tie that in with the fact that he has memories of his pre-brainwashing life, while his superiors believe he doesn't.)

Sullivan is now unsure who to believe. Especially when he learns that the NSA has its own Vault of Big Data (you would already have established that Digicorp has one). We'll need a reason why the Rooks double-agent is able to send him to the Vault to retrieve a specific file ... where he discovers that the NSA Vault and the Digicorp Vault are one and the same. And that would explain a lot of strange things about the way the Sunway / NSA agents other than his handler have been behaving. In this version, the other guy who dies at the end is not his NSA handler, but his boss.

Oh, and the reason Rooks needs to do this himself is that he's the only living person whose photo is not in the Vault attached to his name. When he was 15, long before Big Data grew out of control, he hacked into every Big Data depository and wiped himself from their records. He used his hacking skills to become a billionaire and the world's leading opponent of Big Data. That no one has ever seen his face now has a huge point. He has found it easy to insert Sullivan into the Vault, but the files incriminating the NSA and Digicorp in a massive brainwashing plot are so well encrypted that he needs to extract them in person. A rationale for that could be devised easily.

That's just a quick version; some of the twists that have dropped out of the story could easily be re-inserted, but some of those were ones that made the twist too easy to figure out. And of course you need to work out the rationale of Digicorp spying on "Sunway" / the NSA when they're working together -- but that's easy: they don't trust one another at all.

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I kind of liked the fact that Digicorp and Sunways actual purposes weren't revealed. Gave it a bit of a "Brazil" Terry Gilliam vibe. All these people taking their meaningless, futile lives VERY seriously.

Great movie.

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