Cypher (2002)

To me, this movie is perfection.

Just perfect...

Best movie of this year hands down!

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Vincenzo Natalie produced a cult classic with his ingenious debut feature Cube. His follow up is just as smart and engaging but unfortunately a lot less well known.Cypher follows Jeremy Northam (delivering a wonderfully transformative performance) as an office worker who becomes entangled in a web of high tech corporate espionage.While individual elements have clearly been cribbed from some more high profile films, taken as whole Cypher feels stylish, cerebral and even unexpectedly emotional by the end credits. List it alongside other under-appreciated Sci-Fi gems like Gattaca, Existenz and A.I.

I don't see a lot of science fiction films. I found "Cypher" both bizarre and interesting. It was made in 2002, and, 12 years later, Lucy Liu looks exactly the same -- great.Jeremy Northram plays Morgan Sullivan, a bored suburbanite, who takes a job as an industrial spy for a company called Digicorp, an international computer corporation.His job turns out to be not that exciting at first. He attends conventions, records the deadly dull speeches, and hands in the discs. When he encounters Rita Foster (Lucy Liu), he finds out there's much more to the job. As he gets more involved with what he's doing, he encounters brainwashing, playacting, and danger.Everyone except for Liu in this film is pasty-looking with bloodshot eyes and bags under them, photographed with a fish eye lens, to indicate that they are all pretty much zombies at these conventions. The color is sort of a no-color muted color. Nearly everyone speaks as if he's a computer-generated voice, but a good one, not the robot type.Thus, one immediately is aware of the world we're in, and it's a perilous, fast-moving one where one doesn't know whom to trust, if anyone. The denouement puts a human face on what all the running around and corporate stealing was about.Northram and Liu are attractive, and the people surrounding them -- Nigel Bennett, Timothy Webber, et al. are appropriately sinister. Definitely worth checking out.

Dominate our attention for several minutes, with brief and intense lapses of excitement, is the least a movie can do for us. Most usually considered ''average'' films serve exactly that cup of tea, not much to be remembered, but innovative and stimulating enough to renovate the feeling of enjoying a movie with no further interest. The sci-fi/noir thriller Cypher lies comfortably in the realm of average productions described above.Entertaining enough, stylish to delight the eyes, compelling to caught the minimum of our deliberation and with a capital twist in the plot to regale the enduring audience. These are basically the positive points. Although, truth be told, it is hard to go wrong with a corporation's espionage story; this whole theme is charismatic by nature, and director Vincenzo Natali's credentials made him just the person to administer such a topic. The direction and production, nifty as always (although as always blatantly unhewn), could not survive without Jeremy Northam and Lucy Liu, the perfect faces to incorporate the somehow impersonal emotionless of the film.Clearly, the purpose of the plot revolves on sustaining its trickiness and glamour, way occupied on that to demonstrate any concern on character appeal or development. And despite the good effort on preserve the interest, the major twist was not revealed in the most exciting way possible, being followed by a rather silly happy ending. But well, a stereotyped finale and forgettable characters are the main trademark of average movies anyway.

I ran across this on cable, and only watched it because I had NEVER seen Jeremy Northam in ANYTHING modern. This was really a stylish little thriller along the lines of - I dunno - Matrix (not much) + Italian Job (cross/double cross)+ 1984 (dystopia for everyone). Northam is excellent, as he always is. He himself is the cypher of the title, I think, and as he peels away the multiple layers of his identity, you can see the panic under the desperately cool exterior he tries to maintain. The end came as a complete surprise to me, but maybe I'm easily fooled. It's hard to get some of Lucy Liu's (ahem) LESSER roles out of your mind when you see her in this, but she acquits herself well enough. Well-written, and well-executed - I recommend this with great enthusiasm.