Pirate Cinema

Pirate Cinema

by Cory Doctorow

Synopsis:

From the New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother, Cory Doctorow, comes Pirate Cinema, a new tale of a brilliant hacker runaway who finds himself standing up to tyranny. Trent McCauley is sixteen, brilliant, and obsessed with one thing: making movies on his computer by reassembling footage from popular films he downloads from the net. In the dystopian near-future Britain where Trent is growing up, this is more illegal than ever; the punishment for being caught three times is that your entire household's access to the internet is cut off for a year, with no appeal. Trent's too clever for that too happen. Except it does, and it nearly destroys his family. Shamed and shattered, Trent runs away to London, where he slowly learns the ways of staying alive on the streets. This brings him in touch with a demimonde of artists and activists who are trying to fight a new bill that will criminalize even more harmless internet creativity, making felons of millions of British citizens at a stroke. Things look bad. Parliament is in the power of a few wealthy media conglomerates. But the powers that be haven't entirely reckoned with the power of a gripping movie to change people's minds....

My thoughts:

When I chose this novel, I was expecting to get piles of drama and adventure, but I was not expecting close friendships. It begins with a regular 16 year old boy, Trent McCauley, who downloads illegal footage from the Internet. His Internet gets cut off because of this. He was only doing it because “In [his] mind, [he] was one of [those great directors], someone who had to get the bloody film out of [his] skull”. To me this is important, because it ends up being the main theme in the novel. When Trent goes to London he becomes famous for his films. In this way, this quote has a little bit of foreshadowing.

Another little quirk in this novel is that its written in a British dialect. For example, at one point, Trent asks his girlfriend about her last boyfriend, and he asked “Was he posh?”. I didn't really understand it, and I still don’t, but words like this really made it a bit challenging to understand parts of the novel.

This novel really got me thinking about our government, and in general, governments around the world. This modern form government resembles governments from real, corrupt nations from around the world, past or present. Trent and his friends couldn’t stop the government, even if they were the majority, without help. And it’s the same in some real world nations. Even though I’m not into politics, this book was a very good read, and I think many people would agree.

reviewed by N. B., Grade 10 Scona student