Eagle Eye Parent Guide

Imagine that someone is watching your every move. Monitoring cell phone calls, ATM withdrawals and routine habits. Hacking into your personal information and collecting family photos and videos from Internet downloads. Make you a tad nervous?

For Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf), the fear has become a reality. Unbeknownst to him, someone out there has gathered enough facts about the young man to create an impressive personality profile. Aware of his family disputes and his father’s (William Sadler) disappointment with him, they load Jerry’s boarding house room with sufficient bomb-making supplies to blow up a small country, pushing him front and center on the FBI’s most wanted list. Now to help Jerry avoid arrest and incarceration, they force him to do their bidding. But what they ultimately want from Jerry is obscure.

“They” have also chosen Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan). Using the single mother’s child (Cameron Boyce) as a pawn in the dangerous game, an unidentified woman gives Rachel and Jerry instructions via electronic billboards, cell phones and other devices while she controls public transit, traffic lights and security systems. With FBI Agent Thomas Morgan (Billy Bob Thornton) and military officer Zoe Perez (Rosario Dawson) close on their heels, the mysterious voice badgers the unwilling recruits through a seemingly endless barrage of detours that moves them toward a nameless destination.

Taking terrorism to a new level, Eagle Eye sacrifices the private lives of citizens, making them mere collateral in a bigger war punctured with high-powered gunfire, intimidation and an endless number of car crashes. With only a brief scene of sexual innuendo, the film’s main focus is non-stop action that also includes the portrayal of an electrocution, the charred corpse of the victim and regular missile attacks.

Unfortunately, despite the proliferation of increased security measures over the past few years, this script, set in the present day, pushes the plausibility of the plot by employing high-tech surveillance methods that leave no corner of the country unseen. While the premise might be more believable in a futuristic setting, it doesn’t work as well in the here and now given the sophistication of the shadowing devices. Yet the movie’s concern over current Big Brother-style interference into the common lives of the people is readily apparent. Although the threat of foreign-based terrorism might make the nightly news, its seems (from the filmmakers’ point of view) that the biggest risk to security is already in our own backyard.

About author

Kerry Bennett

Kerry Bennett is interested in media from both a journalist and parent perspective. Along with authoring articles for several family-oriented publications, she has written for Parent Previews for over 15 years. As a parent herself, she believes parents play a powerful role in teaching media literacy in their homes.