Mercury Rising

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watch the 1998 action thriller Mercury Rising, directed by Harold Becker and starring Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, and Miko Hughes.

The film follows FBI agent Art Jeffries, who goes on the run to protect a nine-year-old autistic boy after the child accidentally cracks a classified NSA encryption cipher — drawing the attention of a rogue intelligence official willing to use lethal force to keep the program secret.

In their conversation, Jamelle and John discuss the film’s offensive depiction of autism, its vision of “the deep state,” and the various ways it reflects mounting paranoia around government surveillance.

You can find Mercury Rising available on Apple TV and Amazon Prime. Episodes come out roughly every two weeks, and so we will see you then with an episode on a 1998 TV movie about the Oklahoma City bombing. And don’t forget to check out our Patreon, where we cover the films of the Cold War and do a weekly politics show. You can find that at patreon.com/unclearpod

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Jaksot(108)

Saving Private Ryan

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Steven Spielberg’s World War II epic, Saving Private Ryan, starring Tom Hanks, Ed Burns, Matt Damon and Tom Sizemore, amo...

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X-Files: Fight the Future

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John discuss the 1998 X-Files movie, directed by Rob Bowman with a screenplay by X-Files creator Chris Carter. Starring, obviously, Da...

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Gattaca (feat. Nicole Hemmer)

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle is joined by Nicole Hemmer, a professor of history at Vanderbilt University and co-host of the This Day in History podcast, to discuss the...

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Armageddon

On this week’s episode of the pod, Jamelle and John cover Michael Bay's 1998 asteroid movie Armageddon — the one where oil drillers, not astronauts, are sent to save the world. They discuss why it rea...

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Godzilla (1998)

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, we watched Roland Emmerich’s attempt to bring Godzilla to Hollywood in the appropriately titled Godzilla. Ostensibly a film about the dangers of n...

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Bulworth (feat. Vinson Cunningham)

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John are joined by Vinson Cunningham of the New Yorker to discuss Bulworth, the 1998 black comedy (no pun intended) written, directed ...

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Oklahoma City: A Survivor's Story

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watch the 1998 Lifetime film Oklahoma City: A Survivor’s Story, starring Kathy Baker as Priscilla Salyers, a real-life U.S. Custo...

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