No More Secrets

The 1992 Robert Redford movie Sneakers has always held a special place in my movie rack. I decided to rematch it this weekend, and was stunned by the precient language of the script.

The premise is that Redford and his college buddy were proto-hackers in the activist 1960s. Redford is the jock who gets lucky to evade the cops and the buddy Cosmo goes to prison and is never heard from again. The crux is Redford and his team of ex-con troubled "security experts" get involved in a game for the Janek box that could decrypt anything.

At the end, the two protagonists face off.

"The world isn't run by weapons any more, or energy, or money, its run by little ones and zeores, little bits of data, it's all just electrons," Ben Kingsley's character Cosmo proclaims.

"I don't care," Redford's character said.

Remember, this is a 1992 movie. Probably written in 1990, maybe 1991. Re-read that and think about how much it really applies to today. You like that? Try Cosmo's closing soliloquy:

"There's a war out the my friend and it isn't about who has the most bullets, it's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think, it's all about the information."

Chills. As the chapter naming on the DVD says: it's all about the information.

OK, enough drama; how about some fun.

At the end, when James Earl Jones confronts the team to get the return of the Janek box, they each ask for their unusual requests (Dan Aykroyd wants a Winnebago with "burgundy interior", David Strathairn wants "peace on earth and good will toward men" [We are the United States government; We DON'T DO that sort of thing], all River phoenix wants is the girl agent with the Uzi's phone number).

I've seen that scene - yep, just like the laundry list of the Harry rouge's gallery from NASA to drill and plant the astroid killing bomb in Armageddon.