Digitalized special effects are not that good

Rating: 8/10 (19 February 2015)

We finally had to come to the modern world and computers. This film is so frightening for simple people that it should create a real panic among them. It deals with all the central networks created by our modern society to control govern and command absolutely everything that can be set in some kind of network. The big fear is that when all networks are synchronized and connected one person from one keyboard and central computer will be able to control absolutely everything in life and society. Everyone knows about it. Check Terminator for that.
In Paris they even have some higher education professor, Marcel Gauchet, who explains that in such a society we just need to blow up or paralyze the nodal points of these systems to bring a society to a stand still and thus impose a revolution. No one has been able to find out if that man is using this idea as a menace against society or as a warning to society. Some of his students were even investigated some years ago as having played a role in such an attack on the fast train network in France
But this fear is also lined with another which is a lot older: the fear of machines per se. People are afraid of machines though they use machines everyday, like cars and other means of transportation. Computers are even more frightening than a crashing airplane because all we see on the screen is a whole lot of figures, in fact digits, and we cannot understand what the machine is saying, and it is always saying a lot. We have always been afraid of foreign languages, and computers speak a foreign language.
The third level of fear you can find in our world is the fact that after 9/11 we have put all our valuable data on central computers that are supposed to be hyper protected and they are. The film demonstrates that they cannot be reached from the outside by hackers but can only be reached from the inside that is to say from these giant central computers themselves because they are absolutely isolated from the outside world and their connection with this outside world is absolutely under digitalized secure surveillance. So the hackers who want to prove the vulnerability of that central computer has to penetrate the fort in which it is located. Only a military operation can do that, but that operation is just plainly unimaginable. The human guards can be killed but they can be so connected to the central security that the alert is given as soon as some sensor senses the attack on the body or mind of the guard and then instead of sending two guards as reinforcement a security wall can fall down that can only be opened from the inside.
The system that is shown here, for our entertainment for sure, is super fragile and super UN-protected. It is less protected than a henhouse against foxes. It is as little protected against the infiltration of terrorists as a sieve is ready to retain water. So that makes the fear ludicrous and the entertainment loses all suspense value and all frightening effect.
Of course John McClane has to have a partner and this time it is a young hacker that the terrorists want to kill and that the FBI wants to interrogate. He becomes the digital mind of McClane and McClane is nothing but the brute force, the basic muscle of the operation. The two together are funny in a way since they are so different and one could be the father of the other.
But the film is funny though the digital special effects are so visibly artificial, not even analogue, that they become cinematographic anecdotes. I think these action films have lost something g with the massive shift to digital special effects. They just look unreal and what's more we recognize the special effect maker and then we recognize a special effect we have already seen in some other films. We may even wonder if they are after all not plainly the same.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU