Looking around suspiciously to see who suddenly leaves the thread.
A corporation turned me into a newt!
Have you ever noticed that in all these eeeevil conspiracy movies, the bad guys seem to always manage to find hordes of trained killers and gunmen? Gunmen who are willing to chase good guys down heavily populated streets firing randomly, and engage in frenzied car chases? Not to mention who are always willing to step out on a weekday night and whack a witness or two. What kind of retainer do you need on guys like that? How do you go about hiring them? Gives new meaning to monster.com…
Last season’s 24 was particularly notable for this – the bad guys had a bigger stable of trained assassins than Walmart has greeters.
Considering all four of those movies are based on Robert Ludlum novels, I can appreciate your confusion.
Wow! I didn’t realize that. A trend!
Maybe I should have read the books. Does it help?
As it happens, those plots were based loosely on real-life conspiracies. Very successful ones, too.
The first three, yes, Ludlum. Thre days of the condor (originally sis days) was James Grady.
Damn, Three Days and Six Days…
What I thought of on seeing the title to the thread. Above average for the genre.
It’s almost a tie with Capricorn One from about the same time in history.
For preposterous, you can’t beat either version of The Manchurian Candidate but the Sinatra version is hands down better.
I didn’t say the conspiracies in those movies had no basis in fact (unfortunately). In another thread, I mentioned the same thing. However, there is some debate about whether the GM/streetcar conspiracy really happened.
I’m reminded of Team America.
Tim Robbins: Let me explain to you how this works: you see, the corporations finance Team America, and then Team America goes out… and the corporations sit there in their… in their corporation buildings, and… and, and see, they’re all corporation-y… and they make money.
As the Wikipedia article notes, The Master has already tackled the GM streetcar conspiracy story:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_335.html
For other good eeeeevil conspiracy movies, may I suggest FX, The Conversation, Enemy of the State, No Way Out, and *The Big Clock * (the movie which inspired it).
The Matrix is really about the biggest conspiracy in human history, if you think about it. Now eat that red pill.
Oops, NDP beat me to it with the SD cite. Thanks!
So . . . given that Hollywood has long since internalized the idea that conspiracy movies, however preposterous, make for good box office . . . why has nobody ever made an Illuminatus! movie?! :mad:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminatus!
Of course, given the long and convoluted nature of the story, it would be impossible to do it justice in any format but a miniseries . . . and the only outfit that would have any interest in such a project would be . . . the Sci-Fi Channel . . .
:eek:
Just forget I said anything.
With regards to Live and Let Die.
This was like in the 70’s. It was a bit late to be flooding the U.S. with dirt-cheat drugs. Plus, he’s a freacking drug kingpin. What did he need to use Voodoo to keep people happy/frightened? He’s got guns!
And of course, the Aqueduct wasn’t even much of a conspiracy. As far as it went, it was just a pack of dishonest government officials who bought some land before making it much more valuable. Everyday, dime-a-dozen corruption, I’m sad to say.
Now, if it had involved Columbian Drug Cartels, Jack Bauer facing an armageddon death clock, ninjas, pirates, and SuperOmniMegaUltra Evil Corporation, it would make a good movie. Or they could just tell the real sory and call it Chinatown. 
Every James Bond movie has a conspiracy of some sort, but I had to cock a suspicious eyebrow at the one in Tomorrow Never Dies. Let’s see: a media tycoon steals a device that lets him manipulate the GPS satellites. And he uses this power to cause conflicts between nations (at the beginning, China gets mighty angry when a ship, thinking it’s still in free water, strays into Chinese space), and because he causes these conflicts, he knows about them first and can report on the conflicts first, thereby becoming the world’s news leader.
So, it’s all about selling newspapers? Wouldn’t just hiring better writers, and more of them, be easier?
And I hear there’s a movie called… what is it? Oh, yeah, The DaVinci Code coming out this summer. Supposed to be based on a book or something. Someone told me it’s about an eeeeeevil (and ancient) conspiracy of some kind.
But I could be wrong.
Conspiracy? I hear that it’s the stone truth. Read that in National Enquirer, I believe.
Even better…The History Channel.
Has no one mentioned Joe Versus the Volcano?
Okay it’s tiny conspiracy…Just Lloyd Bridges getting his doctor to be Tom Hank’s doctor and then getting him to tell Hanks that he is dying of a brain cloud.
How many steps does it take to be conspiracy?
IIRC, the whole point of that story is that it’s a conspiracy but it ain’t evil. (The RCC, OTOH . . .)