august
August
In the genre of personal transition or dot-com hysteria, August is sort of enticing. It’s forced cool is desperate. Overall, it’s beige. But… the period-piece-ness is awesome.
It’s set in 2001. Tom (the CEO of an interweb company), Josh, his brother (the developer), and other bit players run a company locked in the market and desperate for capitol. There’s an offer from a large company with no interweb presence. (Hi-jinx ensue.)
A speech Tom (Josh Hartnett) throws down could have easily been made at CATFOA or MacWorld this year. The cloud, interweb democracy and connectivity dreams were all there eight years ago. That they have yet to be realized is depressing.
(I’m confusing myself. How did Scott Bakula do it?)
Why the delay? A lag? Halted development? Unready technology? The movie offers it’s own reasons, commenting on the current interweb community of the past. It gives credit to the revolutionaries and alludes to the cultural shift to cowardice.*
What LandShark (the imaginary company) does is purposefully vague. The concepts invoked (digital revolution, collective voice, unified space) are real and were. Only now we have the technology to utilize it.
If only they would have made a worthwhile film, instead of something akin to Noise (<rant>car alarms!</rant>). Maybe it would have been able to resonate and inspire instead of proving (again) that Hartnett has no depth (only good in Lucky # Slevin) and flicks about rich failures teach no lessons.
For more proof the ideas of our age were of the last, here are AT&T (now at&t) predictions from 1993. (Creepy.)
* Innovations slowed after 9-11 outside the surveillance or weapons sectors.