Hate Watching Anon - Stick Gun Up! This is a Robbery...Of Your Time

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A future where your eyes record everything should make crime harder, truth clearer, and privacy basically extinct. That is the promise of Anon, the 2018 Netflix sci-fi noir starring Clive Owen. We wanted to love the premise. Instead, we end up asking the most brutal question a tech thriller can face: if the movie cannot follow its own rules, why should we believe any of its stakes?

We break down the filmmaking choices that constantly pull us out of the story, especially the stiff first-person POV shots that feel locked to a tripod and the bizarre “gun on a stick” staging that makes tense scenes look like a dated video game. From there we dig into the bigger problems: a surveillance system that is sold as perfect but proves fallible almost immediately, hacking that seems to work differently in every scene, and a mystery that tries to hide the plot instead of building it. We also unpack the twist involving Cyrus and why the motivation never feels earned, plus the movie’s claim that everyone becomes numb and robotic in an always-recording world.

Along the way we hit a few tangents that fit the theme more than you would expect, including a wild story about ChatGPT being discussed in court, plus what we are watching for fun right now and what we are reviewing next. Subscribe, share the show with a friend who loves sci-fi movies, and leave a review. What is the one “future tech” idea you actually think is coming soon?

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