Who remembers the Gene Hackman, Will Smith action classic Enemy of the State (1998)? I got a chance to re-watch it and noticed some things about it that had always lingered with me subconsciously – and something I should have noticed at the time, consciously!

By Emad Aysha
I remember not being that interested in the movie in the first half hour, even though it had two big names and clearly was going to be an espionage thriller. It seemed cold and disconcerting, more like a fly-on-the-wall documentary than a spy movie. It’s only with the first chase sequence, which is incredible, that things begin to intrigue and entertain you.

Then, when Gene Hackman shows up, he steals the show, and things become incredible in terms of action, plot, and buddy cop dynamics. But you also noticed Will Smith’s skin is flawed and has small lumps above his cheekbone.

The camera is super-high resolution, just like now with these annoying, overly clear shots of people and things. What good will it do me to know that someone has skin discoloration, a wart, a pimple, or a broken chin?

They’re useless details that serve no narrative or thematic purpose and take you out of the mood of the movie. Tony Scott was notorious for wobbly camerawork, showing a single scene from five hundred different perspectives with nothing actually happening in it.

The same notorious wobbly sensation was in The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009). Observing more closely as Enemy of the State went by, Will Smith stopped having those facial irregularities, his face smooth as it should have been.

TIMES NOT PAST: You may not know this but I think this old Gene Hackman pic is from 'The Conversation' (1974), the conspiracy thriller of its own era.

So clearly, Tony Scott rectified the problem. If only he had done that from the word go. Everything has a crystalline grey tinge, which has it uses but makes you feel like your skin will be sheared off by a shattered glass effect.

Then you have an obnoxiously over-lit scene where you see Tom Sizemore eating, and sweating too much. You feel like the condensation is flowing all over you. Yuk!

But that’s enough of that. The movie is incredible and leaves your mind bent out of shape. You’ll never look at the world the same way again after all this incredible real-time surveillance, anticipated before 9/11 and Snowden and Assange.

That’s exactly it, 9/11—the thing I shouldn’t have missed. Gene Hackman reads the essential stats of the bad guy: “Reynolds, Thomas Brian. Born 9-11-40.” The numbers have a double significance, of course.

1940 means the legacy of WWII, and Hackman himself tells us that the whole telecom and computer industry has been in bed with intelligence and national security from the 1940s onwards. What Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex and what is now called The Deep State.

Then there’s 9/11. That’s obviously not a reference to the Twin Towers attack. I’m not that paranoid, and the late, great Tony Scott didn’t have a crystal ball at his disposal. (He’d probably smash it into a million pieces to get lens flair camera angles).

9/11 here is an apparent reference to 911, the dial emergency number. (In the UK, it's 999.) Being in a permanent state of emergency means willingly giving up your rights to the national security state, run essentially by careerist bureaucrats looking for a luxury early retirement in the private sector.

Hence, the bad guy—married non-coincidentally to a trusting woman much younger than him—is a Cold War relic in charge of the country’s future.

But then there’s the lingering problem, that other real-world problem, the date of the assault. At the time, I watched the Yusri Fuda documentary on Al-Jazeera and his supposed final proof that bin Laden did it.

IN THE DARK: Jon Voight [right] and his too little lady (Anna Gunn). Talk about a country under siege, willingly.

You have a supposedly enigmatic scene where Mohammad Atta calls his comrade, a Saudi boy, and tells him this riddle he has to solve. After decoding it, it's 9/11, the go date. Bullshit!

Arabs don’t use the American dating system. We say 11/9 on the British mould. Also, these supposed Saudi fanatics wouldn’t even be using a Western dating system to begin with. They’d be using the Islamic calendar. It just makes no sense, and still doesn’t.

The date is clearly for domestic consumption, something only Americans would understand and (over-)react to. Again, they willingly give up their hard-earned rights in exchange for physical (not psychological) security. That’s why that date was picked.

Oh, I’ve seen some new pictures and small clips of Muhammad Atta, and he makes your stomach turn. He’s a conniving person, but more than that, he's a chameleon—a very recognisable Egyptian prototype we must endure here.

The Egyptian equivalent of a shyster. He only ever donned a beard in these extra photos. Everything in his life abroad was a performance he enjoyed to perfection. He learned the hypocrisy and ass-kissing bug in Egypt, no doubt, like so so many others.

Then there’s the Twin Towers, something that absolutely means nothing to Arabs. Most of us didn’t even know they existed. I only heard about them in the Guinness Book of World Records museum as a kid. I’d always thought the Empire State Building was the tallest in the world.

Most of us didn’t even know what was done there. It doesn’t stick in our minds as a symbol of America or what the US stands for—liberty or money. Muhammad Subhi once did a comedy play in which, in the closing scene, set in New York, the Statue of Liberty is broken in two, and naturally, he gets blamed as a Muslim. And this was before 9/11.

If 'we' wanted to hit a ‘symbol’ of US finance, we would have attacked Wall Street or the Federal Reserve. (Haven't they watched Die Hard 3?)

Oh, one more information gap example of Arabic cultural miscomprehension. In Egypt, a big-time newspaper editor once asked why Americans dial 911 for emergencies. In commemoration of the victims of 9/11!!