Dominic Corry: Which movies to watch about being watched

Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) keeping surveillance in the attic of Georg Dreyman's apartment building, in a scene from The Lives Of Others.

Can movies teach us a lesson about government surveillance? Dominic Corry takes a look ...

Regardless of how much stock you place in recent claims about government surveillance in this country, New Zealanders have this week had more cause to ponder the issue than perhaps ever before.

In these confusing times, where else can we turn but the movies? Here I will cite seven notable cinematic takes on government surveillance that may offer some guidance.

The Conversation (1974)

The film Francis Ford Coppola made between The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, this stars a rarely-better Gene Hackman as paranoid surveillance contractor Harry Caul. The best there is at what he does, Harry's world starts to unravel when he thinks he may have accidentally recorded two subjects discussing a murder plot.

A devastating slow burner, this awesome thriller won the top prize at Cannes in 1974 and remains Hollywood's definitive take on the shadowy world of government surveillance.

Lesson: The people doing the spying are crazier than the people being spied on.

The Lives Of Others (2007)

East Berlin, 1984. A Stasi agent (the late Ulrich Mühe) secretly monitors a playwright (Sebastian Koch) who's been designated a potential rabble-rouser. Over time, the Stasi agent becomes more and more captivated by the lives of the playwright and his lover, to the point where he can't bring himself to report on their planned rabble-rousing.

This Oscar-winning German masterpiece is arguably the best film to ever touch on the issue of (actual) government surveillance.

Lesson: Make sure you're doing something poetic and beautiful all the time, then no government agent will have the heart to dob you in for rousing any rabble.

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

Robert Redford starred in this classic thriller as a CIA analyst working out of a secret surveillance office in New York who comes back from lunch one day to find his colleagues all dead. Now on the run, Redford encounters all manner of duplicitous government types.

Lesson: Never bring your lunch to work.

Enemy of the State (1998)

Will Smith and Gene Hackman star in the high octane action thriller Enemy of the State.

The late Tony Scott (Top Gun, Crimson Tide) riffed on The Conversation with his Will Smith action thriller, in which Hackman played a surveillance expert who may or may not be an aged Harry Caul.

Lesson: The people doing the spying are clichéd Gen-X hipster nerds who behave like they're playing a video game while tracking potential bad guys.

Eagle Eye (2008)

Shia LaBoeuf is tormented by an all-seeing government that (*spoiler*) turns out to be a computer with delusions of grandeur.

Lesson: An artificial intelligence may make for a more productive American President than a human being.

The Net (1995)

It what is either a benchmark moment for ridiculous representations of contemporary technology or an ominously prescient view of things to come, Sandra Bullock plays a computer programmer whose online lifestyle proves her undoing when she uncovers a wide-ranging conspiracy that may or may not involve the government. Whoever they are, they know exactly what kind of pizza she is ordering online, and they're prepared to use it against her. Also they frame her for murder.

Lesson: If a small pi symbol mysteriously appears on your computer screen, don't click on it.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)

Based on George Orwell's idealistic novel, this takes place in a sparkling utopian future, where a warm, loving government keeps a close protective watch over its citizens, thus ensuring society successfully sustains itself.

Lesson: 'Rehabilitation' works.

Special mention at this point must go to Blue Thunder. Because you just know that if the government is watching us, they are totally going to seek out nude yoga practitioners first.

* Favourite government surveillance movies? How nuts is that 1984 trailer? Comment below!