Save your money and your time

Lori and I got called at the last minute to go out to dinner and a movie with some friends.  The movie “The Echelon Conspiracy”.

Should have known better when I found out that Martin Sheen was in it.

Here is the plot.

A Computer Programmer gets a Cel phone delivered to him

The cel phone delivers him Text messages that “appear” to forecast the future

Guy makes money with it betting in the casino

Some FBI Agents (running around the world) are working with a big wig at the NSA (Martin Sheen) are trying to find the phone and discover who is sending the messages.

Martin Sheen (real life liberal Democrat, but playing a rogue Fascist “Republican” in the movie – with a big smiling picture of Bush in his office) is not happy that Congress voted down an upgrade to Echelon (a real life program put in place by Bill Clinton).

When the NSA appears to be tracing the origination of the TXT back to themselves Martin Sheen realizes what’s going on and aborts the trace.

A cabbie in Prague (but who lives in Moscow) moonlights selling cel phone accessories takes the SIM card from the Computer programmer and the FBI Agents to see if he can find the origin of the TXT.  It’s coming from Echelon he tells them!

Echelon has taken on a life of it’s own and is working to move itself to an unused Data Center in Nebraska.

While the Computer Programmer (now working with the FBI Agents to stop Echelon and Martin Sheen) is trying to abort the upgrade of the Echelon software at the new location the story becomes a rip off of the old movie “War Games”.  This time instead of the computer playing multiple scenarios of the US and USSR launching nuke attacks at each other and deciding that it would be best to play  Tic-tac-toe or Chess the computer is instructed to research itself.  With time running out the Computer Programmer is yelling at Echelon to “Learn”.  In the end Echelon decides that it is a threat to America and shuts itself down.

Guy Get’s Girl.

We find out that the Cabbie is really a Captain in the Russian Army and the Russians have been working to stop Echelon and they are happy that they were able to show the Americans the error of their ways.  But that they will still have to be on the look out for this occurring again.

Who knew!  The Russians are the good guys!