“We
think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity; more
than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life
will be violent and all will be lost.” – Charlie Chaplin
If there is one thing you should learn
in this digital day and age (albeit not as digital as science and science
fiction speculated in the 20th Century) it’s that social networks
will undo you in a matter of seconds if you are not careful. Look at what
happened to model, Jessica Leandra Dos Santos on Twitter last year – two racist
Tweets out of anger and her modelling career went down in flames. Disconnect
looks at how our online activities affect our everyday lives over time. The film is centred around the idea of how
people’s online lives spill over into their ‘real’ lives and how, ironically,
being connected via the Internet people have actually become disconnected from
each other.
The plot follows the stories of
four different sets of characters and contains a number of interconnections
between the different story arcs. Disconnect is not the movie I expected from
what was revealed in the trailer and I am glad it isn’t. I was expecting a
feature with a strong focus on cybercrime in terms of fraud and paedophiles
preying on children by means of social media and sinister chatrooms. The latter
issue is a very important to address but usually movies deal with it in a
manner that freaks viewers out in the same way slasher movies do. Disconnect
deals with all these issues in a very human way. The story is simply about
people who are drifting further and further apart as a result of being too
connected to the communication platforms that the Internet and the technology
surrounding it affords. Henry Alex Rubin’s (Girl, Interrupted, 1999) direction
is brilliant in terms of how the story is paced and how it develops. Many of
the scenes are very quiet and all you can hear is the sound of people typing
away on keyboards and when they do talk it’s usually over the phone or via a
webcam. All these methods of communication feel very natural to the viewer
because that’s how we communicate on a daily basis. Reading a fairly large
portion of the movie’s dialogue onscreen as people text each other becomes
second nature. The film reaches a dramatic climactic point that you just don’t
expect and blows you away for a few seconds – especially after how calm
everything has been more or less up to that point.
Andrew Stern (Nurses, 2007) wrote a
good story that will stay with you for a while after seeing the movie and the
ensemble cast delivers some good performances. The initial story is that of
Kyle (brilliantly played by Max Thierot), an underage chatroom worker who meets
a reporter, Nina Dunham (Andrea Riseborough), in one of his chatroom sessions
who wants to help him leave that world behind by sharing his story. The
question, though, is does he need her help?
There is the story of teenagers, Jason (Colin Ford) and Frye that deals
with the issue of cyberbullying and its outcomes. Ben Boyd (Jonah Bobo) is the victim
of the cyberbullying by the two boys and the plot also centers on the
fragmented lives that he and his family lead. This arc of the story deals a lot
with loneliness as one of its major themes. Jason Bateman (Horrible Bosses,
2011) and Hope Davis (About Schmidt, 2002) play Ben’s parents and Frank Grillo
(End of Watch, 2012) plays Jason’s father. The last story is that of a couple,
Cindy (Paula Patton) and Derek (Alexander Skarsgård) who have become distant
from each other as the result of having lost a child and how they cope with
having their credit card details stolen online as a result of them spending so
much time on the Internet in an attempt to find refuge from their problems.
These stories are all cleverly and subtly interwoven throughout the movie and
at times you are given glimpses of how things could have gone in another
direction instead of the one the plot follows. Things could go horribly wrong
or they can go right.
I enjoyed Disconnect a lot. It’s a
very apt story in our digital age and hits home with its message. I highly
recommend that you go see it.
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