Hide Your Kids, Hide Your Wife! The Eyeborgs Are Out to Get You

Aaron Saenz

Jun 29, 2011

Walking robotic cameras have armed themselves, are seeking your destruction, and the guy from the Highlander TV series is the only one who can save humanity. I love bad movies, and Eyeborgs is a movie so bad it's amazingly good. In the science fiction future of this film, ongoing terrorist attacks have led to the creation of mobile walking cameras, the eponymous Eyeborgs, that can spy on citizens wherever they go. Of course it's only a matter of time before these voyeuristic bots pick up weapons and turn on their masters. Check out the amazingly hilarious trailer below to learn more. While Eyeborgs has the right blend of silly and stunning visuals to make it a cult classic, its underlying message may be even more potent. With concerns over physical and digital monitoring on the rise, this silly movie asks a serious question: is technology robbing us of our privacy?

I wouldn't dare rob you of the satisfaction of watching the Eyeborg trailer, so without further ado, here's the clip:

If you can't get enough of Eyeborgs, don't worry, the full length feature is available for sale on DVD.

When Adrian Paul (Highlander: The TV Series) and Danny Trejo (every B-movie ever) gleefully destroy the Eyeborg menace, they're enacting a vengeful fantasy that's growing more popular these days. CCTV cameras now blanket London, are growing more prevalent in Europe, and have become lucrative means of collecting traffic fines in the US. As governments become more dependent on cameras to monitor security checkpoints, and bring in revenue, they've raised very real concerns about when public behavior can be recorded. The technology behind such cameras is only improving, and will soon be augmented by advanced audio surveillance, and smarter computer analysis.

In a way Eyeborgs, which was released in 2009, is fairly prescient. While we've yet to roboticize, or arm, CCTV cameras, governments are spying on their citizens surreptitiously - they're just doing it online. As we've mentioned before, popular sites like Facebook collect personalized data that can be (and quite frequently is) shared with governments under the auspices of fighting crime, especially terrorism. The perceived dangers to this monitoring are so great that the UN's Human Rights Council released a special report advocating the protection of anonymous speech on the internet.

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Yet the Eyeborgs movie got something else right about this controversy: even as we take it seriously, we act very silly. Privacy concerns about digital and visual surveillance are valid, but they are undermined by cultural attitudes that are increasingly flippant about what constitutes public behavior. We share so much personal information on Facebook and Twitter. In fact, we have dozens of high traffic sites, like Damn You Autocorrect, and Failbook that do nothing but publish our private mistakes made in digital mediums. Every smart phone is a handheld camera waiting to immortalize you on YouTube, and by the end of the year we'll have cheap video glasses that will make it nearly impossible to know when you're being recorded. We may fear the government's surveillance, but we've already invaded our privacy pretty well on our own.

In a world where everyone shares too much information, one man realizes he's become what he hates most...