What on Google Earth?

A few nights ago, I watched Ridley Scott's new movie "Body of Lies," which opens tomorrow and sounds like a thriller his brother Tony might have made. Scott lets Russell Crowe use his second bad accent in a row (this one is "suthurn"). More worrying is that he ends his movie with a shot that pulls up, up and away from the planet. This is the second film I've seen in a month that uses the effect as a lazy finale, the other being the Coen brothers' "Burn After Reading," which slapped on its ending in what feels like a jokey shrug. As cinema, it's not terribly exciting. As technology, I suppose it's neat.

Either way, it's interesting how the surveillance apparatus is colonizing so many aspects of visual storytelling without necessarily enhancing it. The Google Earth effect creates omnipotence without ever requiring ingenuity, which sums up the entire experience of "Eagle Eye": Google Earth the movie. I've already complained about how camera phones and YouTube have lowered filmmakers' standards (and perhaps ours) for visual crispness and narrative coherence. We're inured to messy moviemaking.

It'll be interesting to see how many more filmmakers choose to play with Google Earth technology and whether they'll ever use it to produce images truly worth looking at.