Protocols of Dr. Mabuse

Rating: Null/10 (1 April 2012)

This will be a very fruitful viewing experience, should you choose to accept it. Your mission, per the noir model, will be to transcribe protocols from chaotic fate.
What does this mean? Film noir posited a detective or ordinary schmuck riding the waves of an insensitive world and looking to see where the whole is rippling from. The spy film appropriated this as far back as Lang's silent Spione. Our current generation of spy film is a Cold War product, and this is to our benefit as Tinker, Tailor showcased last year. The War over, we understand now that it was not some noble battle for national destiny, but a bureaucratic stack of papers, a fight for the sake of control.
In '33, Lang made The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, a continuation of an earlier silent. It was about a criminal mastermind plotting for control of what characters inside the film experienced as reality. His aim was the Cold War nightmare, and incidentally the aim of the villain in this; renewal from world destruction.
Fast-forward to the present, the point as illustrated here in this film remains; reality is something you control and direct.
Kremlin sequence:
our super-spies infiltrate a high-security vault to retrieve some meaningless info. They achieve the impossible by actually replicating reality, of course costumes and proshetic masks, but much more keenly a canvas screen that projects an illusion of space. I do not know of a more cinematic device used last year. The camera scrolls on the X axis.
Burj Halifa sequence:
our team is only in possession of the time and place of the important meeting where nuclear codes are exchanged for diamonds and lead back to the villainous mastermind. Except they have neither codes nor diamonds to exchange. Once more they control reality, but now pure theater; they appear as who the other expects to meet, the important documents are copied by a cinematic eye, the diamonds by sleight-of-hand, deceit in broad sight. The camera scrolls on the Y axis. This translates in by-now famous acrobatics on the steep surface of the Burj Halifa skyscraper, and also in our tech-guy controlling elevators.
So far so good, both these scenes have erupted in chaotic fireballs or gunplay, but you can see the blueprint of cinematic control. It is very cleverly staged business.
Notice by contrast the other two sequences. One involves even more meaningless high-tech nonsense and just ordinary seduction by the team's femme fatale, the other a purely chaotic last-minute chase. The last desperate action is that Tom Cruise has to crash a BMW from 4 stories high to manage to hit in time the button that aborts the apocalypse.
All four sequences are ludicrous and highly improbably, but the first two reveal a design. The other two are random. Either inspiration run out or they were intended to as counterpoints, one of the two. I'm leaning towards the former.
Either way, the film unfolds a chain of events that ordinary people watching the news experience as chaotic, turbulent universe, the Kremlin bit is asserted by authorities to be an 'accident', but we know, from our position as viewers, that there are protocols in place and being followed. At the crucial point, the entire organization is disavowed by the government and publicly denounced as 'terrorists', agents of random violence. This is how the historical narrative is being written.
The viewer is ordinarily supplied with the fabricated version. We're given both, and the whole fabricated as a good-vs-evil struggle in the outer layers, which is as far as Tom Cruise and corporate suits probably care to look.
But of course the controls go higher up than we ever see in the film. Our team is equipped with the most impossible gadgetry, key info is magically made available by invisible telecommunication systems, operatives are anonymously issued through public phones. We can surmise a massive infrastructure controlling the controlers.