Undisclosed

”After Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct, you'd think Michael Douglas wouldn't mess with seductresses.”

The Netflix description of Disclosure sums up a thought my friend Rey once had about Douglas: “All that dude's problems come from not being able to keep it in his pants.” It does seem to be the basis of a lot of his films, and not necessarily his better ones. A lot did not work for me in Disclosure. It was nothing I hadn't seen before, it made Douglas' character out to be a victim and a hero in a situation where he was at least partially at fault, and characters described what went down with Demi Moore so many times in such clinical coldness, that it lost all significance and eroticism. And in the last twenty minutes, it veers from boring legal “thriller” to borderline “science fiction”, laughably so.

1994 was not, in my mind, all that long ago. I accept cell phones, the internet, e-mail, and media storage capacity as everyday assets we've had for some time. I wonder if the technology portrayed in Disclosure was cutting edge for the ‘90s, because it certainly isn't in 2008. The movie opens with his daughter checking his e-mail, represented by a swiveling three-dimensional “e”. We then go to a graphic of an envelope which unfolds into a horsey piece of paper with 32 point type, the better for the audience to read naturally. I remember sending e-mails when I was in college around the same time as Disclosure would have come out. Compared to what the film depicted, it was a crude text-only set-up with green type on a black screen, and I was amazed that my friend at a college in Pennsylvania could instantly send me a top ten list about our high school teachers. So maybe Disclosure would have wowed me then, but now it looks dated.

Another key element of the film is virtual reality. Douglas' firm, ridiculously dubbed “DigiCom”, is developing a system where a user puts on a headset, wanders grand three-dimensional halls with Roman architecture and...opens filing cabinets. The technology is used to pull up files. They're simulating exactly what people would do with hard copies of their information, only visualizing it with an avatar of themselves holding a graphic of a sheet of paper. Maybe it looked better than reading stuff on a monitor, but it's yet another element that dates the film.

My absolute favorite however are the cell phones, something I've noticed before when my film time traveling spirits me back to the ‘90s. Early on, taking a ferry to work, one of Douglas' fellow commuters remarks, “Smaller, faster, cheaper, better. Remember the first ones where you lugged it around?” Douglas makes polite conversation while punching a name into the green LED display of his twelve inch mobile communication device. It makes me wonder, as small as our cell phones are now, where are we headed in 10 or 15 years? Will I look back on movies with earpieces or devices no bigger than a credit card, and think those are outdated too?

It's interesting that when an entertainment medium attempts to predict the far future, such as the Star Trek® shows of the ‘60s, they're not that far off. It's when we try to guess the near future that we make the biggest misses. I can't fault the imagination of Michael Crichton, and I'm sure the novel version of Disclosure was better. The special effects industry just wasn't advanced enough yet, and it wasn't the focus of this particular film, just an unfortunate tangent crudely tacked on.

Televisions bring us pictures in vivid, high definition quality. Movie theaters have gone digital, and entire movies are produced using computer software. I think we're at a technological apex right now, and I'm sure people felt the same way in the previous decade. Details of the future are undisclosed, and only imagination and current technology can even venture guesses.