Even Q, James Bond’s legendary god of gadgets, might be stumped.
Hollywood has been turning out spy thrillers for more than half a century, but these days, the bar has been raised. Every day a new batch of true stories about surveillance and espionage surface in the media, and the rapid evolution of technology can challenge even the most inventive filmmakers.
“I would despair of being a moviemaker and trying to have a movie that 5 or 10 years from now [still] appeared futuristic,” says Bill Hammack, an associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who does science and technology commentary on public radio. “I would think it would be very difficult to do.”
Even so, this is shaping up to be a big summer for movie spies: Ben Affleck opens in “The Sum of All Fears” on Friday; Matt Damon arrives in “The Bourne Identity” on June 14; and Vin Diesel plays an extreme sports guy gone secret agent in “XXX,” which is scheduled to open Aug. 2. And this fall, 007 fans will see Pierce Brosnan in “Die Another Day.”
There are also some more lighthearted spy flicks coming up, including “Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams” (Aug. 7), Chris Rock and Anthony Hopkins in “Bad Company” (June 7), Jackie Chan’s “The Tuxedo” (Aug. 16) and Mike Myers’ “Austin Powers in Goldmember” (July 26).
Reality check
Such witty spy films allow moviemakers to paint their characters with broad, whiz-bang strokes. It’s a different story when filmmakers tackle dramatic stories — when they tread the fine line between capturing the subtleties of modern espionage while serving the film’s story line.
Phil Alden Robinson, the director of “The Sum of All Fears,” found that out.
“I am perfectly capable of imagining or inventing something, but it is never going to be as good as the real thing,” says Robinson, who worked with consultants from the CIA.
There was, for example, a scene in which agent John Clark (Liev Schreiber) must cut through a chain-link fence. Robinson figured wire cutters were old school. “Our CIA guys said there is this stuff that we [use that] comes in a spray can,” he said. “You spray it on metal and it super-freezes the metal. You can actually hear the metal turn to glass.” A version of that is in the film.
In “XXX,” the film’s hero, Xander Cage, works for a CIA-type operation, but production designer Gavin Bocquet and director Rob Cohen “wanted to create an image for Xander that was more in line with his street style.” So Cohen and Bocquet researched cutting-edge product design and extreme sportswear to create Cage’s cachet. “What was ironic is that when you started to analyze the really cutting-edge product design of today, [you find that] a lot of it moves into the world of science fiction,” says Bocquet, who worked on “Star Wars” episodes “The Phantom Menace” and “Attack of the Clones.” “So we had to be careful that we pulled back from that range.”
Steering clear of science fiction while staying just ahead of a techno-savvy audience can be difficult. Consider that Damon’s “Bourne Identity” character has a bit of microfilm embedded in his hip. Just this month, a Florida family had microchips with medical information implanted in their arms.
Biometrics and nanobots
And then there are advances in biometrics. “They will actually map the blood veins in your face,” Hammack says. “It turns out that from childhood through the rest of your life, that doesn’t change.”
J.J. Abrams, creator of ABC’s hit spy show “Alias,” dreamed up a story that involved biometric locks, which require the correct retinal scans, fingerprints or heartbeat patterns before they open.
“There is one episode where [Jennifer Garner] wore a pair of glasses that allowed her to read someone’s retina and then transmit it to her partner; [he] was then able to generate a pair of contact lenses that either of them could wear to open up the door,” Abrams says. TV spies sure have come a long way since Maxwell Smart used that shoe phone.
And then there’s nanotechnology. “People have just figured out how they can build small machines out of molecules,” Hammack says. He predicts that 10 or 20 years from now, we might have walls that can be walked through and which seal themselves up and self-cleaning rugs that erase footprints.
In the first “Spy Kids” movie, director Robert Rodriguez provided the youngsters with a tiny camera to help them survey a castle. “In the new movie, one of my favorite gadgets [is] a spider robot,” says Michael Helfant of Dimension Films, which is bringing out “Spy Kids 2.”
In “Sum,” director Robinson had another challenge. The original Tom Clancy book was written in ’91, “a little before personal digital assistants and cell phones exploded,” he says. Yet Affleck’s Jack Ryan uses both. “I wanted to show that [his tools are] things that you and I have in our pockets, in our arsenal.”
But they also don’t always work. “A lot of what this movie is about is that a lot of these things don’t work when you need them to,” Robinson says. “When things are going bad, the technology and the personalities are not always reliable so you have to come down to an individual making a judgment.”
“Basically your head is the best gadget you have,” Helfant says.
Indeed, gizmos aren’t at the heart of real-life espionage. Gathering information is what most spy work is really all about. And that is where Hollywood and real-life diverge.
“Often the things that are the least entertaining may be the most significant to the intelligence world,” says Keith Melton, an expert on espionage.
And often, he adds, gadgets don’t fit into the real world.
“In the real world of espionage, if you’re the spy, you don’t want anything that links you with an intelligence service,” Melton says. “So you want zero gadgets.”
Trade secrets
Gadgets like the ones below may be cool, but they shouldn’t be the whole show. “You don’t want [gadgets] to dominate,” says Gavin Bocquet, the production designer for “XXX.” “You want them to be naturally part of the story and say something very quickly and not dwell on it. You want something that’s going to take it just past the point of the reality and things that are on that cutting edge.”
Top spy flicks
Ask Keith Melton, a professor at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies and a board member of the International Spy Museum (which opens in July in Washington, D.C.) what he considers his favorite spy thrillers and he offers these:
– “CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER” (1994): CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford, right) goes up against a drug cartel.
– “THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN” (1984): An all-American kid (Tim Hutton) and his pal (Sean Penn) sell secrets to the Soviets.
– “THE DAY OF THE JACKAL” (1973): A hired assassin tries to kill French President Charles DeGaulle.
– “THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD” (1965): A British spy at the end of his career (Richard Burton) is sent to East Germany. Will he defect?
– “5 FINGERS” (1952): Uptight English valet (James Mason) — code name Cicero — sells secrets to the Nazis.
– “SCHOOL FOR DANGER” (1947): How agents trained to help the resistance against Hitler.
— J.H.
