Pretty Good

Absolutely Brilliant!

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Morgan Sullivan (Jeremy Northam,) tiring of his dull suburban life, gets a job as an industrial spy for a huge software house, but quickly finds himself in a bafflingly complex and perilous web of deception involving a rival corporation, brainwashing, a sinister, inaccessible Mr. Big, and a mysterious femme fatale (Lucy Liu) who appears at crucial moments only to vanish.Cypher is an intelligent sci-fi/espionage/thriller, stylishly filmed and well acted. It's the type of science fiction that depends more on ideas than special effects, though those it employs are convincing. (It seems to be set in a near future -- at any rate, the technology used seems a bit beyond what currently exists.) It's a low-budget film that doesn't look low budget thanks to the the skill of director Vincenzo Natali (best known for Cube,) and features one of the more clever surprise endings you'll find. Lucy Liu, as usual, is a joy to watch, and the other actors are generally good. Idiotically rated R for a few profanities. I saw it on the Miramax 2005 standard DVD, which is of very good quality.

Watched an absolutely wonderful twisty turny psych-thriller movie on Netflix called "CYPHER" even though it is 13 years old had never heard of it before and it is amazingly good. To me, it is everything the Matrix movies tried to be but weren't. To me, Cypher relies far less on CGI and more on human interaction and I am someone who looks to a movie or TV show for the acting and human interactions far more than the special effects and computer generated interfaces.If you are looking for violence and bloodshed or non stop action, you won't find it here. It starts out with us seeing a corporate schlep, named Martin Sullivan (played by Jeremy Northam), wanting to be a corporate "spy". The corporation ships him from city to city to "transmit" their competition's convention speeches, under a "new name".Buffalo is the first city and where we meet a mysterious woman named Rita Foster, (played so-so by Lucy Liu). It is here that we find things may not be what they seem.This movie was directed by Vincenzo Natali, who took us on a great journey in the original and great horror psych thriller flick "The Cube". He keeps you guessing and even while the clues lead in one direction the underlying flow is pointing towards something else. Halfway through the movie, you may guess and think you know the answer but be aware you will NOT because the clues NEVER stop until the very ending.Overall a terrific movie, the writing and direction the movie takes are amazing, the acting and chemistry could have been better especially by Lucy Liu, she does fall flat and at times stiff and others just aloof (not much character development), it could just be the way her character was written, directed or just her acting. But be assured that is just a petty critique that in no way truly harms the movie. It's a definitive 9/10 for me and a movie I could watch a few more times and probably see more to it than I did the first time.

Morgan Sullivan (Jeremy Northam) leaves his boring suburban life to take a job as an industrial spy at Digicorp. He goes to conventions to record presentations. He meets the mysterious Rita Foster (Lucy Liu) and he's pulled into an ever confusing world of competing corporate espionage.This has a great surreal paranoid feel. However some of it has to be attributed to the complicated mess of relationships. It's twist upon twist until the movie stops being compelling. The style is still interesting. Northam and Liu are both good. Director Vincenzo Natali continues to show some fascinating ideas.

This isn't so much a review as a note on the visual style since it wasn't presented objectively in other reviews. If you love movies with stark visual elements like Aronofsky's PI, Cube, or Dark City, stop reading here, you'll probably love this movie.There was a time I savored the effect of high stylization that nears artwork, but I now find its presence a distraction to the story. That said, the visual elements here are so strong and so present that if you're not a fan, it's an impossible movie to watch. I thought the cast with two Hollywood actors would make it borderline Hollywood fare; it decidedly is not.For example, the opening sequence is shot in almost black and white, with actors staged unrealistically far apart with a very unnatural acting style, circa a comic book style. The black-and-white visual theme continues into the following scenes, as the protagonist seems to be the only living element moving freely. This is clearly a directing decision, and one that the viewer has to reconcile to enjoy. I believe the film would have benefited if it had, say, the same feel and the performers were allowed the same acting range as Truffaut's Fahrenheit-451. As it is the film makes sense that it was released for the anime-heavy Japanese audience.