At this point, Andrew Niccol has become synonymous with weird dystopias. Gattaca, Truman Show, In Time, Lord of War... even The Host, based on a Stephenie Meyer novel. Now he’s making a dystopia about our surveillance state, with his In Time co-star, Amanda Seyfried.
Anon, his next dystopia, comes on the heels of Good Kill, which was actually a dystopia set in the here and now, about drone strikes. With Anon, Niccol returns to the scary near-future that he usually works within. Clive Owen plays a detective in a world where there’s no anonymity or privacy. Everybody is traceable, everything is known. This means no more crime, supposedly. But then Owen meets a woman, played by Seyfried, who has no digital footprint. And this means that a whole new kind of crime is appearing.
Anyway, Niccol’s somewhat stylized paranoid dystopias are sort of an acquired taste at this point—you either love his weird sensibility or you don’t. I kind of love it, and this sounds like he could actually have his finger on the pulse of our over-surveiled culture. [Deadline]
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, which is available now. Here’s what people have been saying about it. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.