Anon (2018)

Anon is one of those movies where premise is better than the movie. It has interesting science fiction concept but it is content to be futuristic detective story without studying the science fiction concept. People's brains are like computers connected to internet. Everything is saved to files. People can send these files to each others. Files are used by justice system to define what really happened. This is how it starts. Later we learn brains can be hacked like computers.

This whole thing is treated like augmented reality. Only one guy sees ability to hack other people's brains as problem because it destroys the system which operates on everything to be transparent. If files can be hacked how you can trust anything any more? How everything being transparent and people sending their memory files to each others is affecting the society is studied very little. It would have huge impact on society and how people live in it.

Anon reminds me lot of Basic Instinct. It is detective movie at its core. It is detective movie where characters have invisible augmented reality helmets. Murder mystery and premise are best movie has to offer. Don't know if it is world building or bad writing but characters are really dull. Maybe recording everything and everything being transparent makes you tone down your personality. Even if that was the case there should still be reason why characters did what they did or characters to learn something.

Main character didn't change at all. Mystery was solved but everyone continued to be what they were before. They just knew to what extent brain hacking was possible but it didn't change them anyway. Privacy was one of the themes but movie comments very little about it or living without it. Main character lives without privacy. Anon character had it but both spent their time similarly alone in empty apartments. That was more than we got from other characters. There weren't any characters building the world. Characters were there to perform a function. Maybe society without any privacy turns people into that but it doesn't make movie more interesting if everyone is there only to perform a function without having any personality.

I thought this would be one of the best science fiction movie during first fifteen minutes. Premise was so interesting. There are clever ideas later but they were too few and far between. Biggest problem is there is almost no world building after the premise is set. It was like this is the world and now we got to detective story happening in this world. Second biggest problem is they don't give reasons for characters. Main character does something he really shouldn't at one point and it goes as you expect. At other point he knows something he shouldn't know at all and there is one twist where there is no build up before the twist.

Should you watch this? Maybe if you like the premise. Anon is not bad movie. It just isn't as good as it could have been.