Movie review: The Beekeeper (#290)

The Beekeeper [1] positions itself at the non-personal end of an emerging niche in blockbuster media tackling society’s struggles with the poorly under­stood repercussions mass-adopted dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy with­out gatekeepers brings about.

Where­as over a quarter century ago, Hackers [2] celebrated a subculture in pursuit of freedom fighting against a rigid system of rules, with­out a doubt founded on the emergence of the Web and af­ford­able Internet ac­cess evoking liberating visions of a dig­i­tally em­pow­ered society allowing the individual to flourish in its idiosyncrasy, twenty years later, when all shine of such musings seems to have been ground off, Hacked [3] depicts a deeply personal side of tech­nol­o­gy misuse and the perils bound up in its un­ques­tioned glorification. Also personal, Inside [4] traps Nemo (played by Willem Dafoe) in an apathetic fight for relief in form of the sky whose ending leaves open if man has bested dig­i­tal prison or vice versa.
The Beekeeper is insofar a novelty in popular media as it combines the non-glorifying, non-cliché omnium-gatherum of topics exemplified by the term hakr with the Free West’s struggle to uphold its rule of law faced with competent, multi-national adversaries em­pow­ered by p2p chatrooms.

Whilst a purist may turn up their nose at the visual and dramaturgical fluff which inseparably comes with a blockbuster, when keeping an open mind and seeing the story within a movie playing by the rules for being played to a non-vanishing audience, a poly­the­is­tic fable can be reclaimed in which an an­ger­ed god descends onto a failing people which has lost their sense of righteousness, surgically removing the demon haunting it and disappearing. Seen from this angle, one isn’t con­fused by Adam Clay’s (played by Jason Statham) executive prowess nor his misaligned morals. As a non-human entity, the in­ter­pre­ta­tion herein proclaims, unbound by clas­si­cal­ly freedom-preserving rule sets which ap­pear to crumble in the globalized, digitalized world, Clay’s crassness can be viewed as a window to the horrors which await when the non-state organizations overpower.

Doomish as Civil War [5], but keeping itself to the more narrow topic of dig­i­tal misuse aided through societal-wide ignorance, The Beekeeper does two things seldom seen to­geth­er in popular cinema: a) ques­tion­ing the efficacy of and ignoring the rule of law and b) tackling dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy misuse with­out glorifying its technical side, focusing on the human misery.

REFERENCES.
  [1] "The Beekeeper" (German version). 2024.
  [2] "Hackers – Im Netz des FBI" (German version; English title: "Hackers"). 1995.
  [3] "Hacked – Kein Leben ist sicher" (German version; English title: "I.T."). 2016.
  [4] "Inside" (English version). 2023.
  [5] "Civil War" (German version). 2024.