MI6 Fallout Falls Flat— An Open Letter to Tom Cruise
Tom, Love the retro motor bike chase. But nuclear cores on the black market? …seriously? We think the nuke core black market thing was tired back with The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977. Let’s see, …that was Forty One years ago. Wait, we gotta say that again — Forty One years ago. That’s twice the age of most movie goers. It is back before things like, oh, say, the internet. And commercial space flight. It’s before the serious mobile phone.
This is 2018, bro. We have China purchasing the U.S. Economic infrastructure un-challenged, we have Russia meddling with elections incognito, we have Digital Mega-Corps determining what can and can’t be said online. We have rich guys going to outer space with pocket change for no other reason than to tip a champagne glass. We have asymmetrical terrorism metastasizing worldwide, and the ability to darkweb modify any video to make people say anything we want. We have fake news, flash mass social media mobs, a super-volcano in Yellowstone that could incinerate 2/3 of North America… We have eruptions in Hawaii that are raining glass shards. We have the specter of melting polar ice caps. We have Digital czars purchasing storied news outlets and re-purposing them as personal lobbying and propaganda factories. We have Europe in an identity crisis, mass illegal immigration, and a reactor core melt-down in Japan caused by a tsunami — and we still don’t know what’s going on inside that crumbled building. We have the average adult spending 60+ percent of their waking hours consuming media of some form. We have government surveillance in phone calls, email, texting, and we now know beyond a doubt that extremely biased operatives are at the highest level of the FBI. We have Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and “Mixed” Reality — all changing the very nature of consciousness, …and you go with nuke cores on the black market?
Now, we understand that politics in action flicks has been determined a no-no so you don’t alienate audiences, but what ever happened to creativity? In 1977 Bond drove out of the ocean in a sports car.
He punched a guy with stainless steel teeth, and yea, he ski-jumped off a cliff in the alps with a parachute. And now that we think about it, Sean Connery flew in a jet pack in 1965 for gosh sake — in Thunderball… Today we have bird-sized drones that can shoot 8K cinematic video (we have a few in our content studio). They can carry a 2 lb package over any arena, airport, or metropolitan core on the planet. They have facial recognition at distance. And yes, they can also come in configs that can carry a person.
…and the best you got is a helicopter chase? …really?
In Spy Who Loved me (c.1977), we had James romancing the Russian spy in a nautical spaceship getaway pod. It was like 2001 A Space Odyssey underwater — complete with literature on a bookshelf. ‘Cause international spies need good reading.
On the human level, Fallout is about mostly one guy , whereas the MI series used to be more about a team.
MIXer Ben Bidlack commented that the new vibe focusing mostly on Tom is not as imaginative as it used to be in terms of the team. No apartment briefing? — aw, man! Is that because building that kind of script — where a diverse group of elites are cooperating — takes more imagination?
See, here’s why this matters. Our world relies on creative storytelling to help us ponder what the heck is going on — to see options, good and bad, for the future. When we drop the ball on creativity, we risk a chaotic future because people are guessing. And they’re missing the potential consequences of their actions. We’re not talking about dour “cautionary tales.” Instead, we can show the grand potential — the fun, the adventure, and the ..Magic.
We live in an amazing time when information is changing everything — everything, …except, that is, for one thing. It is not changing our need for good, creative storytelling!
Consider how we’re intersecting the virtual world with the real world today — for construction, for research, and for education. And for entertainment. A modern gamer workstation has more computing power than the whole U.S. Government 25 years ago. We have tools like MIXONIUM that are changing the agility and impact and accessibility of digital media content. Consider how nearly the entire volume of human knowledge is accessible on-line at any moment. Consider how that can be great, and how, of course, bad guys might exploit this funky new reality.
What are the really menacing scenarios today? Just look around — we have a content platform with 2 billion users selling the deep persona profiles of those users with impunity. Villains of every type — nationalistic, greedy, snoopy, creepy, and political, able to target citizens without the citizens knowing what is going on. The CEO of that ledger bait-and-switch company is building a stone fortress wall around his mega-plantation on the island of Kauai, while simultaneously espousing the virtues of open borders and “connecting.”
We have black box “algorithms” that provide bullet-proof plausible deniability for tech CEOs to use in shadow-banning content they don’t personally align with or approve. It is the true science fiction incarnation of what it means to be “dissappeared.”
We have the CEO of Google saying that any employee statement that offends someone else is sufficient cause for termination. …huh? It’s a fantastic rule, that is if you are in the position, like the CEO of Google, to decide who is worthy of claiming offended status, and who is not. Let’s be clear — this is not a single country company — this is a CEO who decides this for the entire world…
Here at home, we have a congress and government overall that is generationally incapable of comprehending what privacy violations even mean.
Three years ago (not today, but three years ago) we had fake entrepreneurs like Elizabeth Holmes who could seduce an aging former secretary of state, then partner with bay area hedge fund investors (Partner Fund among others) to game our digital mirage of a public information system and fake a global health care miracle. A PR firm of lofty silicon valley reputation (Chiat Day) was engaged to juice the illusion in print, media, and online by branding her “the next Steve Jobs.”
The Theranos myth syndicate even recruited the venerable and inherently media savvy Rupert Murdoch for $120 million... They used a shell corporation to buy competitor equipment and hack those systems since theirs never came close to working… Thousands of doctors (real ones, not fake ones) were deceived and sent poor patients (real ones) to get poked and mis-diagnosed by her fraud needles. $900 million in working capital vaporized. And the valuation went up and up and up. Elizabeth talked of saving the children, healing the world — Maria Schriver and Bill Clinton lauded her in full fanfare from grandiose stages…. Indeed... The trio of Cunning, Bluster and Deception has met Sky Net.
…and you went with plutonium cores on the black market?
We can’t stop — the list is so easy! …How about, we have the chairman of the largest digital identity and user profile ledger owner on the planet (Google) personally funding and chairing, and staffing the information operations of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in the 2016 election. This in intimate coordination with Hillary, her staff, and the DNC. Anyone find that disturbing? There were a few stories about it at the time (wikileaks revealed his covert activities), but those stories don’t quite make it to page one of …Google news.
We won’t even go into Ed Snowden, and the seismic story told by Glenn Greenwald from Hong Kong half a decade ago — literally hiding in a hotel room as global government forces converged to punish Ed for a crime …of revealing the government’s illegal activity — that the U.S. surveillance apparatus was recording and tracking every citizen phone call in the U.S. and to outside the U.S., and all you needed was to be an intern contractor — hanging in the tropical nirvana of Hawaii of all places — with an IP address or email, and you could sniff it. Snowden was all of 20 yrs old when he had full access to the NSA datasets and downloaded 20,000 files to a thumb drive. Ed was younger than Tom’s kids today when he blew the whistle and jumped the island for HK, for reference.
In our view, a spy-thriller movie should at least be a little more interesting than what is happening in the real world around us. We rely on great creative stories to help us comprehend what the near and distant future might hold so we can use that insight in navigating this ever-changing world in the present. And it can be great fun, and even drive new ideas and thought, and yes, it can sell BMW M5s too. — so get to it!
In order to assist you with gaining a bit of historical perspective, we’ve made a MIX of nuclear brinksmanship threads. Not all spy stuff, but the bomb defusing elements are all sooooooo “been-there, done-that.” …
Everyone, pls comment with other movie reference ideas — this is not just a casual exploration — our future is at stake!
And, Tom, if you need some help with MI7, just let us here at MIXONIUM’s MIXology desk know — we offer strategy and business transformation counsel.
