Echelon Conspiracy
Taking its story from several computer run amuck movies, especially WarGames, Echelon Conspiracy does not really entertain even with a super computer behind the wheel.
Film making 5/25
Cinematography 5/25
Audio 10/25
Bonus Features 2/25
Total 22/100
Max Peterson, played by Shane West, is a computer security expert who travels the world securing companies computer systems and proves it in the opening scene in the only really decent part of this film. To prove his system will survive a shutdown and reboot with its security procedures intact he short circuits an outlet using his belt to show a client the computer will reboot without losing its login.
Max gets a mysterious phone call that saves his life when it tells him not to board a plane and then the plane crashes thus getting his attention. After a few interesting events like winning at cards and a slot machine for millions he starts to believe that whoever, whatever?, is behind the phone calls knows what they are doing.
Max is led on a worldwide hunt to do the bidding of the text messages while agents tag after him and try to stop him before he unleashes the computer. Some government agents working under the direction of NSA agent Raymond Burke find out that the computer tasked with running the United States Governments security is ordering people around.
With the help of ex FBI agent John Reed, played by Edward Burns, who is now working at security for a casino where Max wins an extraordinary amount of money. He also gets help from current FBI agent Dave Grant, played by Ving Rhames, to figure out what is going on and why a computer is ordering people around.
When Max with the help of the two agents does find out that Echelon, the governments super computer is trying to download itself onto a super computer that Max setup years ago they desperately try to stop it. Max figures out that when the computer program downloads itself on the autonomis computer system the government will no longer have any control over it and they figure it should be stopped.
I never said the story made much sense or was very good but you get the picture, super computer looks out for the safety and security of everyone in the United States and does take its programming very seriously. So they have to stop a computer that can see all and order all kinds of people around using encrypted communications and such.
Echelon Conspiracy would have been good given a better budget and some better direction and production but as it turned out it looks very much like a better budgeted WarGames copy. The film has just about the same premise as WarGames or any of the other films where computers go rampant on their own and is not original at all.
Echelon may have had a better budget and a few good actors but so does a lot of films and any few actors is not going to pull this film out of the dump it landed in. Echelon Conspiracy is not worth bothering with and the film really does have a bad storyline that does not keep much interest over the course of the first half hour much less for more.
The film is not even worth watching and the quality and extra content on the Blu-ray edition does not add up to much more than audio selections and some third rate video. The Blu-ray transfer is decent but nothing more than a film transferred automatically to Blu-ray with mediocre quality color and 1080-p.
Audio is pretty good but not much attention was paid to the film as a whole so when the sound or video of a film is better than average but the film stinks there really is not much to say. Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround sound worked just fine here as well as the subtitles and such but some of the surround did not work out very well.
The film was not good and to add much in the way of additional features or content to the film would have been putting gold plating on a rusty fork and trying to pass it off as the family silverware. There are no extras on the Blu-ray version which is about par for the course here as the film was not good so why bother.
Echelon Conspiracy is not worth bothering to watch or even rent so don’t even bother with the Blu-ray edition.