If the pitch for this paranoid thriller wasn't THE CONVERSATION meets HACKERS,
it should have been. Hotshot programmer Milo (Ryan Philippe) plans to launch a
start-up with his college pals, until he gets an offer from software
corporation NURV, owned by über-geek Gary Winston (Tim Robbins). NURV is
developing a digital convergence program, Synapse, that will wire the world
together; seduced by Winston's personal attention, Milo signs up. This
alienates Milo's best friend, Teddy (Yee Jee Tso), who truly believes that
information wants to be free and robber barons like Winston are hijacking the
Internet. Milo and girlfriend Alice (Claire Forlani) nevertheless settle
comfortably into their new life of pricey perks, until Milo begins to suspect
there's something sinister afoot at NURV. Winston keeps handing him pieces of
brilliant code, but won't reveal the programmer's name. Then Teddy is
murdered, ostensibly by racist skinheads, so Milo starts poking around and,
with a few well-placed keystrokes, uncovers a conspiracy. Ironically, the
filmmakers seem to think the audience for this movie about super-smart people is super-dumb. How else to explain flashbacks to things that just
happened, except that they think viewers won't remember the sinister
implications without prompting? And it's unfortunate that when our heroes
decide to expose NURV's secrets, they package the information like political
art by Barbara Kruger, which would probably lead the average image-saturated
consumer to dismiss it as flashy cyber-pranking. Frankly, the unusually
elaborate disclaimer buried in the credits is more interesting than most of
the film. It reads in part, "there are a number of... entities and persons
with names which may be the same as or similar to those used in this motion
picture. However, this motion picture is entirely fictional and (except for
minor incidental resemblances) is not intended to depict or refer to any other
existing entities or persons and any such references are purely incidental."
Who's afraid of big, bad Bill Gates? --Maitland McDonagh
