When an evil genius hacks into government computers, he creates such chaos in traffic and communications that only Bruce Willis and that guy from the Apple Mac commercials can save us. Yet amid all that havoc in "Live Free or Die Hard," one scene is truly chilling: Every television channel is taken over by the terrorist hackers, who send the same frozen image of the White House everywhere, the same ominous questions on a crawl at the bottom of the screen: "What if this is just the beginning? What if you are alone and dial 911 and no one answers?
" Grafting media manipulation onto techno-terror, the latest "Die Hard," being released through October worldwide, expertly captures a current fear: What if we re disconnected from our information overload? The clogged traffic contributes to the film s explosive action, but that idea carries the musty whiff of a Y2K meltdown (been there; we re over it). The loss of our information fix, though, hits a very raw nerve.
"Die Hard" arrives at the right moment to address that fear of disconnection, using the light touch of a popcorn movie. A flurry of darker, less effective cyberthrillers in the 1990s might have landed too soon. In "The Net," Sandra Bullock was a victim of identity theft before most people knew what that was.
In "Hackers" Angelina Jolie - before anyone knew who she was - played a cyberpunk with the screen name Acid Burn. These films treated computers as something exotic, which they probably were to a large part of the audience. "Tomorrow Never Dies," the 1997 James Bond movie, was more prescient, anticipating "Live Free or Die Hard" by putting powerful technology into the hands of a sinister media mogul named Carver (Jonathan Pryce).
The head of a global communications empire, Carver hires a mercenary who, the film tells us, "practically invented techno-terror," and who almost starts World War III. Carver s networks broadcast news he plans to create; his company sells software with bugs built in, so consumers will have to keep replacing it. Today "Live Free or Die Hard" matter-of-factly assumes that computers are central to our lives, with a story that includes a good computer geek, an evil computer geek, even a comic-relief geek.
The film begins when innocent hackers, who have been duped into helping break into the government system, are sent a lethal virus; they hit the "delete" button and delete themselves as their computers explode. Today in Culture Live Free or Die Hard : Cyber-terror and the great disconnect BallinStadt: A passage from the Old World to the New All dressed for the fest, but no ticket to see Wagner Detective John McClane (Willis) is sent to pick up one of the surviving white-hat hackers, Matt Farrell. Matt arrives on screen with a good-geek image and a tongue-in-cheek subtext, because he is played by Justin Long, best known from the commercials in which he represents a Mac as the cool, fast, up-to-the-minute computer that always outshines the PC, depicted as a staid man in a suit.
Matt, who becomes McClane s sidekick in fighting the hacker mastermind, Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant), drags McClane to visit the comic-relief geek, Freddy, a nearly middle-aged computer whiz who lives in his mom s basement and calls it his "command center." In another sly subtext, Freddy is played by Kevin Smith, the director of "Clerks," who caught onto the marketing possibilities of the Web early. This array of high-tech types is no longer just a way to reach a young audience; it is thoroughly mainstream.
Like James Bond before him, Matt realizes that controlling the information flow touches the mainstream audience directly. He sneers at McClane for listening to news on the car radio. "The news is completely manipulated," he says, calculated "by corporate media to keep you living in fear" and "keep you buying things.
" Gabriel is a disaffected Defense Department employee, rather than a media mogul, but Matt is prophesying his control of television. Gabriel s first takeover shows a montage of words coming out of the mouths of American presidents, from Harry S. Truman to George W.
Bush, pieced together the way low-tech kidnappers create ransom notes from words cut out of newspapers. This threatening message includes the warning that "all communications," that "connectivity" itself, is in the hands of the people who hijacked the television system. The later, more horrifying takeover shows the White House and the crawl, a scene that alludes to "Independence Day" (an action movie, like this one, set around the Fourth of July) and that suggests that being able to tell what s real from what s fake on screen is part of a hero s job.
In true "Die Hard" style, those worries are minimized because the action goes to impossible extremes. Yet the film s fears and premises remain in the real world. A car may zoom into the air and smash into a helicopter, but that car hasn t been transformed from an extraterrestrial robot.
Back to top When an evil genius hacks into government computers, he creates such chaos in traffic and communications that only Bruce Willis and that guy from the Apple Mac commercials can save us.
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