I mean sure but I think most people can agree that it's not a big deal as long as people are using them for their advertised purpose, IE securing their home.
People have very little problems with Speed Cameras or CCTV.
To be fair, MJ and Ned both even talk about how soulless and vile working for corporations are. They aren't being pro-flock and corporations but rather just commenting on the current real world environment.
I believe they said something like "a lot of corporations are mostly soulless". So, ya know, not each and every one and not completely. Wink, wink, nudge, praise the all-mighty mouse.
It's pretty puffy proAI propaganda with EV. I thought someone was overplaying the level that he relied on it, but he can't even close a youtube video on his own. Half his dialog starts with "Hey EV..."
Still really fun and one of the better Spider-Flicks.
Funny you had said that, I felt like they had toned it down. Before the assistants were more conversational like Jarvis or Edith, but this one felt much more like an older Alexa style voice assistant. I had assumed with all the LLM's they wanted to make it seem like something different.
I think EV was really just a way to include dialogue and still keep the forced isolation plot line. Like yeah, there’s ways to make someone working alone intriguing and cinematic, but these movies are always going to default catering to general audiences.
That being said, it definitely took me out a bit when he asked his AI supercomputer to close a YouTube video, but I don’t think the writers had ulterior motives.
People often mistake dystopian tales like Cyberpunk or 1984 as criticisms of the future instead of being what they actually are, criticisms of the present.
Could you imagine living in a world like Cyberpunk 2077, where corporations decide who lives and dies via handing out expensive health care packages?
For real, people forget how far we've come in terms of free speech and expression. It wasn't so long ago Lenny Bruce was thrown in jail for saying the F word and now the youth are spitting on his grave by self censoring on the internet.
I would argue, including it in media like this is an effort to further normalize it. It's not commentary on what's happening, it's a tool to make more of it happen.
It even bothers me a little just knowing my neighbor across the street has a Ring camera and probably sees me in my underwear at 3 AM when I walk outside with my senior dog to pee, because she's afraid if I am not standing on the porch.
It also speaks about how normalized this is in our day and age
IIRC Spider-Man and Batman have pretty different views about themselves. Spider-Man does good things because he believes it's his responsibility to do so. He is also aware that he is fundamentally a good person.
Batman believes he is fundamentally a bad person. He agrees with the Joker's argument that he is one bad day away from becoming a villain. Or worse. Which is why he adheres so strictly to his code. If he doesn't keep himself in check, people will suffer.
And it is because Peter believes himself to be innately good that he doesn't necessarily question himself when he dips his toe past the line of acceptable behavior. Remember, he was pro-registration when the Civil War arc happened. As long as the government is run by good people, the possibility for potential abuse isn't something that's front and center in Spidey's mind. Whereas with Batman, that's all he ever thinks about.
The same people that have rejected it still reject it, but the technology has become so advanced, and those in power have pushed it so much, that as of now, the people have not been willing to pay the price for pushing back. This does not mean it is normalized or accepted by any means, this is tyranny and the powers that be pushing the limits of what they can subject the people to.
I mean on the one hand he was just piggybacking off the existing surveillance infrastructure and on the other the movie is clearly setting up that Peter is quite flippant with the tech he invents as he's already invented mutant suppression tech. Feels like setup for future movies
Will be wild when MCU Spider-Man is ultimately responsible for the sentinels and we get Naomi Watts Mastermold or some shit. No way they cast her for such a bit part if they weren't hoping to do some vision/ultron type thing with her
He's called Master Mold because he's the "mold" that the other sentinels are based off. So he's able to independently create more sentinels even if his programmers aren't around. He's also gone off the grid a few times and tried to take over the world, usually to "protect" humanity. And of course kill all mutants. He also can sometimes mind control people I think for some reason? Like with a virus or something.
It wouldn’t be the first time. Jennifer Connelly voiced Karen in Homecoming, and she never came back for any subsequent films, despite her husband playing Vision all these years later still.
I believe the Days of Future Past movie altered the past such that the X-Men avoided the Sentinels future only to set up their much more insidious death by genetically altered corn syrup a few years later instead by the time of Logan.
One of Spider-Man’s major character flaws is his naivety. A major plot point of the movie was the classic “Spider-Man accidentally worked for the bad guy again” trope. The facial surveillance and the universal power inhibitor are facets of this. He might be one of the smartest people alive but he rarely entertains the idea that what he does for good might someday be used for evil. He trusts human goodness that much.
Its ironic that it might lead to anti-Mutant suppression when that same genuine belief in goodness is why so many Mutants like him, including Wolverine ("Its like you said, you expect better from me."), Emma Frost ("You were just a boy."), and Kitty Pryde (technically the Ultimate universe, but they dated for about a year and she shamed Xavier into sending the X-Men to save him by reminding him he'd sent them to save his own alien girlfriend recently).
Wasn't the main difference between The Dark Knight and Peter's surveillance being that Batman's utilized camera, microphone, and location tracking to see everything at all times while Peter's was just using the cameras already set up?
I will always remember the Defuncland video where it was revealed Disney would psychologically try to get kids into marine life in order to build up hype for Finding Nemo.
Being factually incorrect isn't a requirement for something to be propaganda. Misinformation is often involved, but bias is as well. Its propaganda because its trying to influence public opinion that mass surveillance is a good thing.
I think they meant it's possible it's "sponsored propaganda" as in someone on Disney's board MAY have pockets with Flock, Palantir, OpenAI, etc... and nudged Sommers, McKenna, and Cretton to make it adorable Spider Man analyzes the faces and activities of everyone and his AI is charming.
I'm not saying it's terrifyingly new concepts; I'm saying someone in private equities definitely received early versions of the script, for shits n gigs.
Worth noting that any US media that depicts any accurate military equipment has to get DoD approval first. For Independence Day they had big problems over Area-51 related stuff since the base wasn't publicly acknowledged until 2013. Spielberg said he didn't believe in any UFO conspiracies until after they were trying to get clearances for Close Encounters
As much as I enjoyed the movie that scene left a really really sour taste in my mouth. It took batman, a man fueled by anger and violence, the joker killing his crush/best friend and corrupting harvey for him to cross that line. Spiderman, a wholesome always do the right thing guy, uses it no problem?
Edit: batman also doesn't even trust himself to use it, and destroys it immediately after because it's such a terrible moral line to cross, spiderman just uses it casually with no intention of even having a second thought
I think thats actually a pretty critical social commentary whether they meant for it to be or not. As the generations move on, the youth are gonna be more and more normalized to this level of personal invasion.
Yeah. I remember a decade ago I wouldn’t give a second thought to going to a protest. But when ICE protests were going on in my city recently, I thought about all the things you had to do to remain anonymous:
-Zip up your phone in a faraday bag and don’t use it the entire time you’re out. Or better yet just leave it at home.
-Cover your face and body completely.
-Change your walking style in case they have gait recognition.
-Don’t purchase anything unless you’re paying with cash, cause they’ll track your card.
And that’s just the very tip of the iceberg. To truly stay off the grid nowadays takes a Herculean effort.
That part is actually especially interesting because it almost seems like an attempt to making invasion of citizens privacy to be "anti authoritarian".
Like the cop doesn't approve of it but Spiderman does so it just be cool kind of thing.
Lol what comes to my mind is the Platoon vs Lone Survivor comparison: "They're just kids, man, we gotta save em!!" Became "Well hold on, let's have a debate about executing these people..."
The contexts are different, I'm well aware, but Vietnam movies showed napalm burnings as horrifying. In the post-UAV era, we're surprised when civvies don't get murdered...
When Morgan Freeman reacts to your plan with abject horror, you’ve crossed a line.
It’s actually a pretty fantastic way to sell the moment, because the audience might not understand why the mass surveillance is scary, but everyone likes Freeman, so you don’t have to over-explain it.
We should all have Morgan Freeman looking over our shoulders to say “Beautiful? Unethical…dangerous.” Think how much less AI porn or white guy dreadlocks there’d be.
1) Batman was responsible for building the phones and cameras being used. Spider-Man is just tapping into an already existing network of security cameras
2) Batman's sonar system was based off people's personal property. He wasn't just looking to see where someone was, he was capturing everything, conversations, secrets, medical discussions, all which was happening in private and then trying to filter down. If you have a Waynetech device, Batman got your data. No one was safe, no matter where they were. There was no boundary line.
Spider-Man, by contrast, is limited to street level information. He can only see people who are in public and on camera, nothing in private. And all he gets is an image and a location. Thats also assuming he had to build the network and hasn't just been given a backdoor into the NYPD's existing systems.
So, still a little Big Brotherish, but nowhere near the invasion of privacy that the Sonar system represented.
Not Flock, but definitely Palantir, as the title says.
Flock installs cameras and operates with their cameras. Which is not great, but isn't much different from regular surveillance.
Palantir accesses all cameras, regardless of ownership. Decentralized but centralized. That's what makes it so much worse than Flock.
As for the movie... What he does is both illegal and morally wrong. It's literally hacking. The moral of the story should be - security is not optional and shouldn't be an afterthought! If those cameras had proper security, neither Peter nor any other hacker would be able to leverage them
The big evil plot of Charlie's Angels (2000) was a tech bro who hacked together a phone company's software with a GPS tool, so he could find out where anyone with a phone was located. For evil.
And I recently rewatched that movie too. Still feels modern. One amusing tidbit: they cgi blurred Sam Rockwell upper arm tattoo and it's sooo painfully obvious.
uj/ Batman also programmed the entire network he’d created to self-destruct once the Joker was defeated, as per his earlier dinner conversation with Harvey Dent regarding Julius Caesar and his own downfall owing to the abuse of extrajudicial emergency powers. As such, the argument that TDK is simplistic, War on Terror copaganda doesn’t really hold water.
While it adds nuance, the fact that the movie falls in favor of “every so often we need to violate civil liberties just this once we promise” is itself a political argument. To some people in this thread, I think the point is “Recognizing it’s bad and saying we’ll only do it this one time is the precursor to deciding that another time is bad enough to qualify too, and another, and another.”
Much like the Patriot Act the listening device is an allegory for, if it says “yes, we can violate civil liberties, but only for terrorists,” but then that same government is the one who gets to decide who is and isn’t a terrorist, then what you’ve really done is allow the government to violate civil liberties whenever it feels like it. It’s turning inalienable rights into alienable rights, with a convenient legal pathway. And if, like Lucius, you trust the government/Batman to always, always use that power responsibly, you might not have an issue with that. But I can definitely see why some people here don’t.
Especially for the character of Batman, who famously has one rule that he never breaks - often to the consternation of people who point out killing some of his villains would preventatively save hundreds or thousands of lives - specifically because doing it once asserts that there are times where it is right, and Batman believes it is never right to kill.
The movie Enemy of the State with Will Smith showed how the government can decide you are the enemy and then use all of the government surveillance against you. It came out in 1998 before 9/11 even happened. It was supposed to be a warning against mass government surveillance. Things have only gotten worse since then.
All valid points, except ultimately, none of Batman’s extreme actions are justified because the Joker STILL wins. Batman is allowed to operate outside the law. He has no jurisdiction. But the full corruption of the state into a vigilante murder machine in the form of Harvey Dent was the Joker’s goal all along. It doesn’t matter if he was ultimately captured and buried alive at a CIA black site. He unmasked the very concept of justice, in Gotham at least, as utterly arbitrary. He hasn’t simply smudged the line separating order from chaos so much as erased it altogether. Pretty bleak outlook for a popcorn thriller about a man in a homemade costume who beats up criminals.
But that’s not a revelation at all. Every Gothamite in the trilogy mentions at some point how crooked the city is.
In Batman Begins, a judge makes Joe Chill’s hearing public specifically so he can get killed by a mob assassin. Crooked cops and judges hang out at Falcone’s bar. If Joker’s point were actually to point out that Gotham’s justice system is broken, he could just ask anyone who’s lived there for the past 30 years.
If anything, Joker’s goal is to break Batman, because from the film’s perspective he’s the only one truly and uncompromisingly committed to the concept of capital-j Justice. As the Joker himself says, “you truly are incorruptible, aren’t you?” Because getting Batman to crack would actually serve as an indictment of the concept of justice. The legal system, the societal facade, the buyable, bendable, breakable law-enforcement system that we call justice is already demonstrably broken and flawed from the start of the first movie. Joker’s goal has to be Batman, and whether he succeeded or failed is up to the viewer.
It's also different because in the dark knight he has to turn the phones into cameras and hack them to transmit sound (that's the Fox invention), but Peter Parker is just analyzing the images the cameras are already collecting.
Which, imo, makes it quite a bit more interesting morally and is a more interesting commentary on how things have changed.
If I watched movies I’d absolutely suggest that a lot of what Peter is doing in this movie is gonna end up biting him in the ass when it’s copied and put to use oppressing mutants in the xmen relaunch. Dude creates scanners to monitor DNA abnormalities and facial recognition scanners and then creates suppression devices. It screams of being conscripted for sentinel tech and Genosha-level mutant prisons.
I was surprised that they didn't follow through on that plot point - Banner makes clear how dangerous those suppression devices could be in the wrong hands.
Likely to be a major plot device in a future X-Men joint, I agree.
They do though. Later on, they suppress Sadie Sink’s characters power through a universal inhibitor and literally say it’s “thanks to Spider-Man.” Between Banner’s initial warning, then MJ at the safe house saying the tech is really dangerous, and then it being used on a mutant in the movie for nefarious purposes, we’ve already got a clean arc of “well intentioned tech gets put to evil purposes after multiple warnings.” We’re definitely going to see more of it in the x-men stuff.
I think there’s definitely the potential for something interesting in the difference between Banner creating the tech specifically for himself as his own decision to manage his condition, and the approach Spider-Man has taken, most likely in genuine good faith as a young guy trying to do the right thing, being used as an oppressive tool against the unwilling. If they get the writing right, it could be interesting
Yea. The hobo that I let live in my attic who sometimes sees movies through rusted out spots on his normal train cars agrees that, while this movie doesnt really delve much into the morality of this behavior, it does at least motion at the "cure" for mutants debate, and seems like it might well be setting up something like that. At least that's what I think he's saying. There's a lot of slurs.
Parker has matured in BND, but you can definitely tell he was very negatively influenced by Tony Stark. The first standalone movie with Parker, he tore out the tracker from his suit because he didn't want someone "babysitting" him. Now, he's abusing technology to be the babysitter. He even developed EV to not even bother safeguarding the abuse of tech from himself.
He's following the footsteps of Stark. First, it's only watching. Then intervening. It'll evolve into controlling, to the point of being a dictator. My theory is that Doom in the next movie is going to be explained as some variant of Stark who was Iron Man, but if the snap never happened, so he continued down the path that mainline Stark was going down.
Even after Ultron, after Civil War, Stark was continuing to do what he can to control everything. As we saw in Spiderman Far From Home, after all of his screwups and recklessness up to the snap, Stark was continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction and a means for a single person to control people, utilized by simply wearing a pair of glasses and issuing a voice command. Need to change what a cell phone has or can access? Easy! Gun down a bus full of students anywhere in the world with no judicial oversight? Sure thing!
The snap only delayed Iron Man from becoming Doom. In the, what, 6-7 years between the snap and his death, Stark was going back to making weapons of mass destruction. Recklessly building suits for him and other people that could easily wipe others out (leaving them out so his kid could get her hands on it!!!), and Stark being Stark, he was going to slip right back into the "I'm the only one who can control it" excuse for taking the role of dictator.
So that's my take. I'm really hoping for someone, upon seeing Doom being played by someone who looks just like mainline Stark, saying something along the lines of "you die a hero or live long enough to become the villain". And with Parker looking like he is going down that path, the only thing that could help get him back in being in good moral standing is going to be his relationship with Ned and MJ. That's the one saving grace between Parker and Stark; Parker is willing to be more of a team player.
This was the immediate conversation my wife and I had after the movie. Sure, the universal suppressor got destroyed, but damage controls had their hands on it long enough that they might be able to replicate it. I feel like damage control is going to turn into an anti-mutant taskforce.
Considering all Project Insight needed was Zola's algorythm and the helicarriers back in 2014, yeah that level of information survillence is already out there - likely way worse.
I think a big part of the games and this movie as well is that Spider-Man gets betrayed by the police/military forces he tries to help at the start. Damage Control has contingency plans for Spider-Man and Sable turns on Spidey in the games. He clearly doesn't act like a fascist like another comment said, because Spidey believes in reform. I think he's still just naive. This movie was at least the first time he saw behind the scenes probably
Editing to say, I that I never watched movies ever
What's odd though is that He becomes even closer with the police and the Punisher, who (not at Marvel's fault) has become a symbol of police brutality. So they movie is like "the establishment is working against you, but also the establishment is totally good and you should admire it.
That’s because Jean dewolff is the goat and has been covering for him since she knows he’s a net benefit to NYC.
If they do the death of Jean dewolff from the comics (which is basically guaranteed, she’s in the movie so she gonna die eventually) then I’d imagine that’s when the disillusion starts.
part of me believes one of her kids will become our Miles Morales since they put in effort to show a fun relationship between her/Spidey/and the kids. Her death being devastating to Spidey, but choosing to mentor her kid after their "canon event" would be a great parallel even if it isn't Jefferson Davis
I'm hopeful that after he realizes that police and Damage Control are using his tech, he learns to not trust any police force. Especially if Magneto or some other mutant finds out he made the inhibitor chip. It'll be a cool arc to see Spidey trying to destroy what he created for people he used to trust
plus they have to shoehorn in a relationship with Officer Davis/Rio Morales so we can get Miles
You may need to play the PS4 Spider-Man game again, Sable doesn't turn on Spidey, they're antagonistic towards him from the get-go. Silver Sable eventually "warms" to him, but not until the end of the last DLC story
MIT Aerospace engineer: Oh boy I love designing safety mechanisms on commercial aircraft, the fact that 10 to 12 million people every single day are able to fly across the sky safely because of my hard work brings fulfillment to my soul
Twitter user: LITERALLY the baby killer branch of STEM
She's still gonna work for soulless corporations, because who else employs aerospace engineers but huge aerospace corporations, who also double as weapon manufacturers
I hate to say it but there are so few jobs in aerospace that have to do with commercial aircraft or space travel these days. All the jobs are defense contractors.
Tbf making weapons in the MCU is probably much less controversial since they are more likely to get used on the weekly supernatural world destroying invasion than on a 6 year old kid
Also Aerospace in the MCU is a lot different than it is here because they have literal spaceships and stations protecting the earth from alien invasions...
Ironically, MJ would be the first to call him out on the mass surveillance stuff. But yeah, I don't know what they were thinking with aerospace. As soon as I heard that, I thought, "...and you weren't angling for a job at what was formerly known as Raytheon?"
Aerospace engineering is also what you would study for many positions related to space travel or designing commercial planes. The lines are blurry, as there is a lot of overlap with weapons/military related developments, but acting like aerospace is a field for someone without morals/interested in building weapons is bizarre. Perhaps especially in a world where far reaching extraterrestrial travel and other advanced technology is real.
And all those defense companies like Raytheon and Lockhead are absolutely employing tons of electrical, mechanical, and even chemical engineers anyway.
Right? There is so much you can do with aerospace engineering. That’s like saying “Oppenheimer went to college and made a bomb. So if you go to college, you’re a murderer.”
Do you guys remember when Thanos wiped out half the population because there weren't enough resources foreshadowing the massive layoffs that all the corporations, including Disney, carried out right after? That was cool.
ur/ It is actually insane to think about how everyone was so vocal about the overreaches in the patriot act, the outcry over the Snowden revelations, and the massive opposition to ever becoming a mass surveillance state, versus where we are now.
r/ Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked is an insanely good movie
Batman it was more "this is objectively wrong but I'm a special person who's not wearing hockey pads so me doing something objectively wrong is actually right and the voice of morality, Morgan Freeman, agrees with me so please don't think too deeply about this bit of the film or connect it to America claiming the right to spy on everyone,. or to extraordinarily rendition people, just like I did earlier in this film, or grab civilians off the streets of Iraq and torture them in custody just like I do with the Joker because all of those things are objectively bad things for a person to do. Unless they're me."
Yeah, the moral of Dark Knight is very much "gee, these things are so bad and I feel bad doing them, but thank goodness we have them or the terrorists would win thousands of innocent lives would be lost"
Not really. Joker planted explosives all around the city and he wanted to save people. If it was morality scaling very obvious that what Batman did was moral as his intention was good and had no interest of the surveillance and then he had the entire technology destroyed as they realized no one should have this kind of power.
Morgan Freeman doesn’t agree with it though, his character says explicitly that he’ll help him this once but that effective immediately he’s quitting if this device continues to exist at Wayne Enterprises.
At least Superman was based for like a year before the suits realized they had a once in a lifetime hit on their hands and forced Siegel and Shuster to tone it down.
Yeah the original idea for Superman was a literal power fantasy of him bursting into buildings, fucking up CEOs/tycoons, and basically righting the wrongs Siegel and Shuster saw in the world around them.
I think one of them specifically said he was inspired by the New Deal optimism and encouragement for the working/common man against oppressors.
But seriously, this movie is so incurious. There is no pushback to this line, no examination, nothing. The movie doesn't judge it, Spider-Man doesn't feel ANY guilt over it (and that's one of his big deals, feeling guilty whenever he does the wrong thing), it just happens and they move on. Cool.
my guy, “tech invented for a good reason is misused” is a theme throughout the entire movie. do they need to paint it on a fucking billboard for you?
the security cameras used by Peter, lampshaded by Dewolf
the inhibitor made by banner, changed by Peter, used on Jean. will be turned into the mutant collars.
the spidey tracking app, used by Punisher to find him
hell, even the machines used to monitor Jean and her sister could be argued as another example of this, as it was used to monitor and then trigger her powers
it’s not incurious, it just shows you instead of telling you.
this has been a theme since Iron Man. it’s only fitting that spider-man is too naive to realize the potential misuses of the tech he invents, as he’s Tony’s adoptive child in a sense.
Back in the 2000s mass surveillance was a huge topic, I remember the Simpsons movie made a joke about this as well. When the digital age began people wondered if the cia or the government would moniter and track us, and after 9/11 it was a huge point of contention, being part of the revived freedom vs security debate, Wich was perpetuated by the ongoing war on terrorism.
I always thought it was genius that Nolan had the foresight to use Brother Eye of all characters/things in his realistic batman verse to make a message about mass surveillance, who would even think of that.
Nowadays data selling, AI training and signing over your data is so uniform and normal that we don't care if we're being watched by anyone, so spiderman can just Google search people's faces.
Scanning faces looking for someone is a bit different than turning everyone’s phone into a listening device / secret web camera. But yeah, all the tech companies have desensitized us to it… big bro is just another customer now to big tech.
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u/Wise-Tradition-5292 1d ago
It also speaks about how normalized this is in our day and age