Anon

Amanda Seyfried in Anon

Andrew Niccol's Anon is a Netflix Sci-Fi film that, like most Netflix features, is disappearing without a trace, but I found it to be slightly better than ordinary fare. Set in the near future, Anon stars Clive Owen as a police detective whose job is made easy because the authorities have access to peoples' memories through the new and improved world wide web known as the "ether". Owen can access perpetrators' and victims' memories through his own retina. This allows Niccol to pile on the subjective images from his characters' mind's eye, similar to what Kathryn Bigelow did in Strange Days. The fly in Owen's Ointment is Amanda Seyfried, who portrays a hacker who is able to erase herself from peoples' memories. She is an analog monkey wrench in a digital future. Not surprisingly, in the course of his investigation of her, Owen falls for Seyfried and, by movie's end, has been won over to her defense of individual privacy.

Hardly a great film, Anon suffers from a sense of Deja vu. The plotting is predictable. The police procedural scenes are rote and the display of female flesh hackneyed and, at times, exploitive. However, I found the relationship between the two leads to be haunting and memorable. As in Gattaca and In Time, Niccol emphasizes the shared humanity that persists in an increasingly impersonal future. Owen and Seyfried are up to the challenge that Niccol provides, but it is a pity that the rest of the film is not as resonant and fleshed out. (5/23/18)