Anon

Anon

I wager Andrew Niccol is a masterful pitcher of scripts. This is all the more incredible when you consider his love of concept-driven sci-fi but he knows how to get the big idea across. It might have been “What if your DNA determined your whole life?” with 1997’s “Gattaca.” Or, in the case of his 2011 action film “In Time,” it was more like “what if time actually WAS money?” For his latest movie, “Anon,” available on Netflix today, he takes a crack at “the mind’s eye,” imagining a not so distant future where our first-person perspective is always on record. So our brains are computers and nothing is private no invasive Facebook app necessary.

What makes watching Niccol’s movies so much fun is that he seems to curate dreams for our future that feel like logical possibilities. And as he uses grounded themes and noirish imagery, there’s always some kind of wrench thrown into the works. In this case it’s Amanda Seyfried’s shadowy title character Anon, who lives off the grid in a world where you can know everything about someone just by looking at them.

She’s being chased through Niccol’s very gray version of NYC by a police officer named Sal (played by Clive Owen), who solves crimes by accessing people’s memories. When Sal learns that someone has been able to murder off the record by messing with the victim’s POV, there is relief if not amusement in his voice: “We actually got ourselves a whodunit,” he tells a colleague, as though it were the first fun thing to happen on Earth in years.

There is plenty else going on here, which makes for an exciting first act. But this movie has the same issue as Niccol’s other futuristic constructs, where he trips over himself trying to explain his latest nifty contraption(s) while using a hard-boiled investigation. Even with the brutal kills and the sparks that fly between Sal and Anon as they play cat-and-mouse, the investigative process of “Anon” can be as much fun as having someone explain every single rule of a board game to you, when all you want is to start playing. This script’s heady intent exhausts itself, reducing a third act twist to a shoulder shrug, and a seemingly profound final line about life off the grid into a blank stare.

Owen and Seyfried create fascinating people on opposite sides of an open-book society here, which gives some momentum to this story. Owen especially has his finest moments portraying the shock and paranoia of having your vision compromised while being fully conscious or more specifically not knowing if what you’re looking at is just someone hacking your mind.

Seyfried is given far less to work with here, however even with her character’s mysterious nature because she has tediously less clear character objective(s). She is more or less a mascot for this script’s functional male gaze, which later pairs 52-year old Owen with 32-year old Seyfried without blinking. Along with Sal’s typical grizzled, pulpy existence, “Anon” recalls the goofy machismo of “Gattaca,” in particular (which had a sincere story climax involving two brothers having a swim race), but it never reaches those heights.

And I’d believe that this story was conceived decades ago whatever fire Niccol had when he dreamt up this project has burned out in execution.

This is not only due to the washed-out, stony-grey look that makes the police station resemble a deserted temple or because New York has been drained of its life until it became dystopic in its monotony alone. It’s also about how cold and uninterested the film feels which is odd considering its richness of detail (it might even be improved by constant pausing); dynamic cinematography (wide and full aspect ratios are used for narrative purposes) and flashes of newness in general. Niccol still has an appetite for original high-concept sci-fi with “Anon,” but I only wish it were executed more interestingly.

Watch Anon For Free On Gomovies.