PaperJoin now to read essay PaperFBI agent Art Jeffries (Bruce Willis) is entrusted with finding 9-year-old autistic savant, Simon Lynch (Miko Hughes) following the sudden deaths of Simons parents. But with assassins lurking round every corner, Jeffries suspects somethings amiss and appoints himself as Simons guardian. Seems Simon has cracked the governments latest and best super encryption code, making him a threat to national security. Miko Hughes turns in an excellent and believable performance as the autistic Simon.
Simon Lynch is an autistic child. This means that, among other problems, he has severe communication disorders. Like Dustin Hoffmans character, Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man, his autism paradoxically is combined with instant intuitive perception of the solution to certain types of problems, notably those having to do with mathematics and puzzle solving. (Please see the links below for information on autism.)
Lt. Colonel Nicholas Kudrow of the US National Security Agency is the leader of a project to develop an unbreakable code Mercury that will protect US operatives and their information. The two NSA cryptography geeks, Crandell and Pedransky, who are responsible for the technical development take their job seriously. As part of validating Mercury, they want to rule out “the geek factor,” so they arrange for a puzzle magazine to publish, inconspicuously among their other puzzles, a phone number that has been coded in Mercury. If anybody innocently cracks the code, they will call the number and Crandell and Pedransky will know that they have a problem.
Somebody does crack the code, and that somebody is Simon. Colonel Kudrow does not take the same benign view of the situation that Crandell and Pedransky do, and he dispatches an operative, so secret that hes listed as “dead” in the Agencys personnel archives, to eliminate Simon. The operative gets only as far as eliminating Simons parents when he is interrupted. Before he can try again, a semi-renegade FBI man named Art Jeffries figures out that Simons in trouble and dedicates himself to helping him, occasionally with Simons cooperation.
Bruce Williss films have been good, in part, because he can act. He can portray emotions that are more sophisticated than surprise, anger, or satisfaction. I have always admired Williss professionalism, never more so than when he patiently undertook the thankless role of Carl Roebuck in the dramatic film Nobodys Fool and managed to add further distinction to a picture that already included exceptional performances by Paul Newman and Jessica Tandy.
Your typical Bruce Willis movie is at the high end of the Action-Adventure genre, much better than your typical Schwarzenegger, Seagal, or Van Damme movie. Mercury Rising is even better, although still not entering the realm of art.
One reason that Mercury Rising sets a higher standard is that it has some sense of the virtue of staying within limitations. Its enough for the villain to be a Lieutenant Colonel, albeit a politically powerful one for a particularly powerful and secret agency. The whole NSA isnt portrayed as corrupt, but only Kudrow and his secret operatives. Everyone else in the NSA who finds out what he is doing is willing to take large risks to stop him. Kudrows goal is not world domination. Hes power hungry and ruthless, but only in the ordinary sense that we read about in the newspapers. He has suave rationalizations about how what hes doing is for the good of the country (plus, of course, suitable recognition for himself).
The NSA is a highly efficient, independent, and even secretive organization. It has made so much money without even showing any “public” purpose, and with no independent authority. There’s an FBI within its agency, its most profitable unit, and its ability to create and use all sorts of drugs. Some of the agents are in many ways a direct line of communication for their agents. That’s even true within the NSA at the time the original leak was published. For the most part, every one who believes in its true purpose is being rewarded not with money but by some powerful, clandestine, or criminal entity.
The US government has almost none of the actual activities of its agency in the real world. It would be foolish to assume that a lot of the NSA is used in such a way that it is like a mafia, even though the agents that do a lot of this abuse are at least vaguely related to some of the “mafia mafioso”.
The NSA’s most important missions have, for the most part, been for surveillance, and a lot of it has been done by individuals who are not directly linked to the NSA or have never been the one leading it, but are in fact part of it (and their main role is to infiltrate private networks and spy on them).
The NSA really was formed with the goal of creating a better understanding of a country’s society, and to prevent it from being turned into a prison for the likes of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton or the like. Some of the most important missions had been actually done in a way that was a political, or military, way. There is a lot of evidence that the NSA was working behind the scenes to make the United States government in the 1960s and early 1970s a better place than it is today. (For a full list of all of the missions at work here, see this article. See also this list of missions about the world, and here.)
As with all missions, they involved a lot of risk. It seemed that if you were running the NSA as a political entity, your mission was pretty easy by comparison. Some missions were much more complex, though. The most important being of course the “hiding places” mission, where you are caught in the crosshairs of a small-scale US national criminal organization and find out about all the ways America is being infiltrated (by some of the FBI’s most powerful members).
After being exposed to a lot of abuse from the public (with more than a few of its agents involved at the highest levels, including the CIA, for instance) the NSA was eventually put together and run out of funds and moved to a small US subsidiary in California. So it was with little in the way of direct financial backing of the company who started this. Eventually the