I like how they almost blew themselves up at the Helicopter. Next was the car, close enough for shrapnel damage and lingering odor to mark the next escape vehicle. Anyone nearby knew far more about the crime scenes than if timers were used.
It seems the kind of professionals who plan ahead and take pride in quality work are rare even in fiction.
Yeah - The film doesn't hold up well compared to say, the meticulous planning of the alleged attempted assination in The Day of The Jackel.
Of course, that film suffers very badly from the passage of time too, given all the tension that was dervied from them having to physically run through all the signature cards at hotels and/or banks before the assasin could reach a border crossing. There was a little computer use in that film but today's technology would cut the length of the search to mere minutes and with the European Union memeber nations now having a unified ID for border crossings, that plot elelment goes out the window too.
Still, with all that going against it, I'd still say The Day of The Jackel is still more interesting with regard to the planning involved and the same holds true for the first Manchurian Candidate film although the Denzel/Liev Shrieber remake still worked well.
As long as I'm talking about great conspiracy movies that have been sunk by their own technological timescapes, I should point out one ofmy Faces, Colossus: The Forbin Project about the American and Soviet Super Computers that start talking and decide to hold the humans hostage to prolong their own lives and control. You can see a teenage or pre-teen James Cameron watching that when it first came out and letting it stew in his mind along with a few of the Harlan Ellsion stories he read over the years and then spitting out The Terminator. Ellison, pesky little litigator that he is, along with his bully pulpit of every SF Con that pays him (and flies him first class, "it's my contract!" he brags) managed to get his name in the credit in some nebulous manner in exchange for cold hard cash and the command to SHUT UP, I would assume, since now he's got nuthin' but love & praise for Cameron. The Forbin Project people - they got left out in the cold. They need Ellison's lawyers! Actually, I think he does most of the work himself but still, The Terminator & Skynet owes far more to the Forbin Project than to "Demon with a Glass Hand" if you ask me.
Check out The Forbin Project and the 2 Manchurian Candidate films if you haven't seen them. They're good conspiracy films!
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