Eagle Eye

Eagle Eye (2008) begins with a woman's voice on an ordinary man's phone. It tells him what to do, dismantles his life when he refuses, and watches him wherever he goes. In another city a mother is getting the same calls. Neither knows the other, and both are forced into the same plan. The idea is Steven Spielberg's. He arrived at it from Isaac Asimov's short story All the Troubles of the World, and Dan McDermott wrote the first script from his concept. When Spielberg became busy with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, D. J. Caruso directed and Spielberg stayed on as executive producer. The idea had existed for more than a decade before the film. Caruso explained it simply: after twelve years in development, the technology had finally caught up to the storytelling. Shia LaBeouf leads. On an 80 million dollar budget it grossed 178 million worldwide. It runs 118 minutes. Good for: surveillance thrillers, action that never stops moving, and technological paranoia. Less good for: the logical gaps are wide and the secret revealed at the midpoint is the most familiar answer the genre has. The characters do not make decisions, the plot carries them, and past a certain point that drains the tension.