The Echelon Conspiracy could spin off a veritable global economy of work in the form of books, magazine articles, documentaries and parodies to investigate and explain the dissonance between the picture’s pre-production pedigree and the post-production fiasco. There are surely a lot of fascinating stories here: How such a rancid wreck got made in the first place; how it didn’t end up going directly to DVD; how so many A-list actors such as Ving Rhames, Jonathan Pryce, Ed Burns and Martin Sheen got involved; why screenwriters Michael Nitsberg and Kevin Elders figured they could rip off the end of War Games–at times, nearly line-by-line–and that no one would notice; and how a movie with a reasonably interesting premise, at least one notable idea at its heart, and enough Bush-bashing to please every liberal film critic in America could end up (as of this writing) with a rare 0% on Rotten Tomatoes.
(And thank goodness for that–keep reading.)
The plot, in brief: The Bush Administration directs its Shadowy Intelligence Agency to override Congress and capture every bit of electronic data in the world, then to analyze it for potential terrorist threats. The program gains consciousness (seriously) and acts first to protect itself, then to take over American security.
It’s silly, but I don’t have a problem with silly. Its politics are tinfoil-hat lefty–but I try to judge a movie on its entertainment value, not on the politics of the filmmakers, so I can live with even that.
What I can’t abide are bald lies about history, slanderous accusations about my country, and the offering up of murderers as heroes.
This B-grade garbage delivers all three.
In The Echelon Conspiracy, America is engaged in careless, self-aggrandizing acts that could lead to war or the occasional violation of privacy. (The filmmakers seem to think that the latter is far worse than the former, never mind the casualties.) SPOILER AHEAD: The movie ends with a twist: the party responsible for ending the Evil American Plot is the Russian Secret Police. (Or maybe the Russian Army. It’s not really clear. Either way, though–same point.)
The bottom line of The Echelon Conspiracy is that democracy is saved by the measured moral judgment of leftover communists.
I expected the credits to play over a denouncement of anti-Semitism delivered by Adolf Hitler.
To make things worse, the soldier-spies in the final scene engage in a more-sorrow-than-in-anger dialogue for the camera in which they wonder if Americans will ever learn, and if the wise Russians will be able to save democracy again the next time the U.S. pulls something like this.
Hey, Echelon guys: Here’s some history for you:
Between 1917 and 1991, the leaders of the Soviet Union killed about 20 million people, give or take a mother or son here and there.
For most of a century, the Soviets incarcerated, exiled or murdered those who spoke out against the government. They banned political opposition. They shuttered churches. They conducted fixed elections so they could pretend their dictators had public support. They directly oppressed the people of Eastern Europe, and held the free world hostage to nuclear weapons. They paid the bills for totalitarian revolutionaries around the world. They buried three generations of Russian human potential under the greed and arrogance and abject evil of leaders without the slightest interest in human rights, democracy, liberty or the freedom of individuals to make their own lives–much less make their own movies.
And some second-rate B-movie makers in a free nation portray the Soviets’ holdover enforcers as world-saving heroes? And the U.S. as the bad guy?
How much do you have to hate humanity to make a picture like that?
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