The Lives of Others (2006) was one of two movies that Edward Snowden apparently used as inspiration when he released the information about Total Information Awareness. The other was Coppola's The Conversation (1974) which I also plan to watch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others#2013_mass_surveillance_disclosures

The Lives of Others is about an East German Stasi official who has a change of heart. He is a socialist idealist, and he sees firsthand how the higher up party members are using their power corruptly for their own ends - in this case, the main character Wiesler is assigned to find dirt on a famous paywright because a party member wants his girlfriend - his plan is to use criminal charges to bump off his competition. The actions of the party member remind me of the large number of rapes (and murders) that Stalin secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria carried out. However, by spying on the playwright and the girlfriend Wiesler becomes more and more sympathetic to them - finding their actions human, humane, and responsible.

Halfway through watching, the actor playing Wiesler is excellent - he does most of his acting internally, with his eyes, which is the best kind of acting, and he is transforming before the audience's eyes - by finding criminal conspiracy by the playwright and not turning him in for punishment he becomes complicit in the playwright's actions. In a way he reminds me of Ernst Junger - externally cold and capricious, exacting, detail oriented, but internally eaten up inside by the forces engulfing society. The other actors and actresses are all excellent so far in the film.

The sad thing about a film like this is it can only be made in the ruins of the totalitarian society that it reflects. In other words, today, now, our international central bank elite are enacting a digital panopticon surveillance system about a million times more powerful than the Stasi, and it will be used for extremely nefarious means - yet it is not possible to cover it artistically and commercially if or until this system falls apart; the system itself will not be criticized by influencers or those in power - not really, not to the bone. We can see this too with a film like The Death of Stalin (2017). Who will cover the Rothschild central banking system while it has so much power? Who will cover how they rend everyone into slaves, using divide and conquer tactics in the media so no one focuses on their theft?

So in the meantime I can watch a film like this and appreciate it, but also understand that it is not a courageous film. If it was made twenty years before it would have been courageous, but not in 2006.

I will also note that the current system is evolving in such a way as to utterly prevent the kind of system degradation that occurs in the film, where the system enforcers feel the tug of their hearts and listen to it -- under the nightmare Hellscape system we are entering, humans are excluded entirely and the brutal woke AI will be the ones enforcing social credit scores and compliance -- there won't be a human on the other end to put humanity over ideology.

I will also note sadly that the great actor playing Wiesler, Ulrich Mühe, passed away young (age 54) only a year after the film came out in 2007 from cancer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrich_M%C3%BChe#The_Lives_of_Others,_and_later_life

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrich_M%C3%BChe

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5756467&forum_id=2Reputation#49143951)