This was a very difficult film for me to initially get in to. Possibly due to the low-budget independent nature of it combined with the rather clumsy attempts at casual conversation and character building that takes up the entire first 10 minutes or so of the film. I don't know enough about these characters yet to care about the kind of conversations they have at the beginning, and the rather weak way its handled does not ingratiate me to them any quicker. The whole introductory portion could've been significantly edited down or else sharpened a bit. For me, the low-budget indie style and the initial tone of the film reminded me a bit of "Primer", but the comparisons end there. Primer was very direct, sharply focused, and didn't care if you couldn't keep up with its extreme technical dialogue while not leaving you behind as it unfolds. This film doesn't know enough about the technical matters of its subject to leave you behind with. Its initial introduction to the characters trying to create a means of "telepathy" seems to go over your head, until you realize there's almost nothing actually to it, technically. David types rapidly on the keyboard, Ryan fuses wires to a computer chip, then attaches it to his head, Jordan is there to be the token girl character, Melanie to be the cliché nagging wife, Lana to be the MacGuffin child whose sole purpose is being the object that motivates David. Typing is done, overly dramatic code is displayed, and people are overly concerned with the well-being of the subject guy even when nothing happens.Once going past the introductory stage, we're abruptly introduced to some cliché sketchy generic CIA FBI Men in Black types with what looks to be the exact same type of device trying to put thoughts and ideas into people's minds and getting them to do pointlessly hideous things like get a guy to kill his dog for no reason because they're the bad guys and that's what bad guys do (thankfully, he doesn't kill the dog, but kills himself instead, as any reasonable person would). These two plot elements very quickly come together so you're not left wondering too long what the hell you just saw and get worked up over the painfully cliché evil tone it sets, complete with blinding bright lights and one-way mirror with sinister roughneck government guy angrily complaining about progress being slow. The two main characters are brought before sinister roughneck government guy via Jordan who turns out to be working for the CIA and spying on them. Then they all start working together on some telepathy-based project with no clear or coherent content. There's literally no mention of what they are actually researching or trying to do. They all work in a lab where they've apparently already mastered telepathy perfectly; they can read each others thoughts and be needlessly paranoid around each other while a row of shaved-headed bald white men in black turtlenecks sit in a sinister little room perpetually lit red, spying on the workers with the workers fully aware of them and able to look at each other. It's such an absurd, Kafkaesque setup that I, as a viewer, got needlessly angry at it. It made so little sense to have identically-dressed, identically-hairstyled people sitting in a room opposite a lab, in full view of the lab workers, just constantly monitoring them and staring them down whenever one of them makes eye contact. Suddenly, David spies on the head lab doctor's notes, and finds... literally I don't even know what. We get quick shots at some sinister looking lab notes, the name "DARKBIRD II", a picture of a baby, and some other science-y buzz words and now David is set to bring down the entire operation they're working on. The one opportunity he has at explaining this is via a rapid, paranoid meeting with Ryan in a public place because their apartments are bugged because it would be a major plot twist if they weren't. His explanation is... I literally don't even know what. He rambles some incoherent thing about free will, the gubmint spying on people via telepathy, and gives some dumb examples of CIA being able to manipulate elections or turn random civilians into assassins using their magic macguffin telepathy. Somehow Ryan thinks this is all a good idea, implying it would mean no wars, no crimes, no violence, etcetera, and given how thinly explained the whole project was, you literally could believe either side of this and believe that the other side is completely wrong. You may as well have been told "This project is bad because people will be hurt" versus "This project is good because people won't be hurt" and it wouldn't have done anything more or less. David gets into an incident with his estranged wife, then runs away to become a Buddhist monk, because he told Ryan earlier that he could try to deceive the CIA telepathy turtlenecks by thinking about one thing while doing another and that somehow only Buddhist monks are capable of doing this well enough for him to do it without detection. The montage consists solely of him getting his head shaved, some bland, generic meditation and lecturing from some Buddhist monk guy, then he leaves to go execute his plan. His final plan is basically... kill everyone. He says the project is so dangerous, all of them basically need to die, so he turns on a two-way feed between everyone's telepathy in the lab, causing a feedback loop thing which somehow kills everyone's brains, making them all vegetables. Ryan manages to pull off his telepathy chip and confronts David afterwards yelling at him because he killed Jordan, then non-telepathy CIA agents come in and kill David after he kills Ryan with the feedback loop. What did we learn from the movie? Virtually nothing. The whole telepathy idea the film runs with basically consists of hearing thoughts while the camera flickers back and forth between two still images of the people thinking, like a primitive imitation of 3D. For all the ideas the film offers in terms of telepathy, it's shocking how much literally nothing happens throughout so much of the film, with nothing behind the telepathy, nothing behind the CIA plot, nothing coherent or definite happening, everything relying upon vagaries and hand-waving to try to tell a boring, cliché story that ends up depending so much on the stuff that is hand-waved away

I got to this movie by chance, just looking at sci-fi titles. Its actually quite a well made film. The story is engaging, the characters are intriguing and the acting is good. Its very difficult to find good sci-fi in the last few years. In this JJ Abrams era every sci-fi is the same, the story is the same, the actors all look alike, the characters are full of clichés and boring stereotypes that only teenagers may find interesting. Thats why Im happy to ignore a few flaws in movie Listening, which offers something outside of the cookie cutter scene. Cool movie.

More FAKE reviews from cast or crew or friends of either. Hollywood and the likes are producing Garbage upon Garbage, either it's a lame remake or completely stolen and old ideas, little to no research (most of the time) and misinformation. The list is almost endless. Fake reviewers should be banned from IMDb and there are lots of them.This Movie, like many of late is Crud, but thankfully, the majority of visitors here are NOT complete Morons, like the Movie producers and Reviewers seem to take them for. Save yourself time and for God Sake, be careful not to line the Pockets of these Weasels and Con Artists, because that's what most of them are.

An excellent script well performed.-- When you look at a street in almost any city in the western world today, you see cameras pointing towards the street to automatically and silently film people going about their regular business.The way to protect yourself from this kind of information gathering is by hiding your face ALWAYS, when you are outside. Which would most likely garner you a more intense surveillance - possibly wiretapping and your house bugged and your friends bugged and you mail read and electronic activities monitored, all the way up to physical intervention, incarceration, "evidence planted", defamation - possibly elimination, if the watchers cant make you.If you go on the net, there is no mechanism designed to cover your tracks and actions, which cannot be cracked - leaving your thought patterns, your needs, your funding, connections, friends, family etc wide open to blatant scrutiny or simple data gathering. Forget about VPN or Tor or what ever. One slip, and your IP is toast and not just your secrets are out, but everything your have ever shared digitally with anyone over the net.Why is that? Because ever since 9/11 USA and all other countries (in order to be able to send and receive plane passengers from all over) have treated their citizens and citizens of most other nations as suspects - potential threats to cities, infrastructure, businesses, economic structures and institutions and their national citizens too, if not for humanitarian reasons then from an attempt to prevent widespread fear and out-of-control actions taken by more than gun-ready-and-willing men and women.What if that lack of control over citizens could go away within a short while? What if USA, always seeking to be the bigger, the stronger, the wisest brother in the world, found a way to do that? What if the war on people was really patricide/matricide from blind greed, last rat gets the bigger loot?! = = = = = = = = = = = = = SPOILER = = = = = = = = = = = = = This movie explores well know themes of surveillance and mind control in order to show that mainstream people only used to guns in the media don't realize surveillance and monitoring and pooling private information is really a weapon against a nation's citizens, not a protection from foreigners.As an intellectual exercise this is kinda easy to both realize and sort of accept, but when you actually understand the implications of controlling powers being able to predict your actions and opinions and choices, it loses its intellectual shine as it verges towards actual loss of freedom - of mobility, speech, purchasing power, schooling, teaching, voting, housing, participating, giving aid and assistance etc.Population control is becoming an increasingly difficult task, as shown by the recent Sicario (2015), where whole major cities can be besieged by criminal and violent "examples" and all "loyalty" goes to those, who can instill fear, rather than to those who protect.While "Listening" may skip a bit on the realistic side, when it comes to calculating the consequences of thinking, feeling people falling pray to fascistic measures without relevant opposition - thus over-playing both spread and danger of a technological mind-control scheme - the script still manages to represent the eager greed with which possible control of people's patterns and actions is to be measured. (It IS lucky that everything living by electricity will die from lack of electricity or from magnetism. Making an EMP placed here and there hunky dory, if ever they tried anything similar in reality).But don't take the movie as a literal statement. Take it as a pointer to the magician's other hand: What is everyone upholding power doing in their free time, that they do not want out in the open? What are they doing during working hours, that they don't want to share? See this film as an argument for full disclosure - as long as it is out of VOLITION. In an atmosphere of distrust, meaning: "You go first..."