This film was entertaining but I also have to agree with warren oates and sonmi451 here. It all felt a little too glossy and wide-eyed about its subject matter, and seemed to defuse its "activism or terrorism?" subject matter by the way it set up its conflicts.
I'm not too harsh about the idea that most if not all of The East have come from privileged backgrounds (in fact when those elements started popping up I was excited, thinking of it being in the vein of a My Own Private Idaho/Henry IV, but it turned into more of a Last Days 'group of buds wandering around a crumbling mansion' film. It was also very reminiscent of that German film from a few years ago, The Edukators), but it didn't seem to push that idea into the most interesting area of that subject and actually confront the idea that you can only live that way coming from a certain lifestyle and in some ways 'slumming it'. That this kind of activism comes from a kind of upper-middle class-drawn, adolescent kind of lashing out which only has a short term effect, and the idea that Marling's character Susan is kind of the ultimate version of that idea, regularly flitting between two different worlds. But it just gets presented without anything really being done with it.
Similarly I loved the Patricia Clarkson character and her unemotional business practicality of not being in her job to bring these kids down (it is more of a symbiotic police and criminal relationship - if there were no crime, or threat of crime, there would be no need for their services) but to drum up clients through controlling the surveillance of which targets would be next. Using 'terrorism' for advancement of her protection services, but it didn't really push through to any more ideas than that, when I would have thought it would be interesting to see if Clarkson and her organisation would perhaps one day move from surveillance to possibly just cutting out the middle man and controlling the activist organisations outright, with the right offer made to them. I suppose that distance between the two groups lends a sense of plausible deniability though.
This actually helped me to be OK with that final over-done speech digging through the bins to prove to Clarkson that there is worth in what others throw away. I can't imagine that not having made Clarkson suspicious and the only thing I can imagine is that she knows that Marling's character will be back. In fact it seems that Marling has taken on Clarkson's 'managerial' position at the end of film, ostensibly because no-one else can be trusted to do the right thing with the contacts list other than her. She (problematically, though it is presented as a success) gets to keep a foot in both camps, which is presumably just what the company Clarkson works for wants (and the activists themselves, though they seem a step or two behind Clarkson's corporation and less thinking about the long game).
The film also hedges its bets a little by dealing purely with corporate surveillance and the rise of businesses that could infiltrate these groups (I'd be interested to know if they really exist or are just a construction for the purposes of the film), rather than having to deal with the idea of the infiltration of activist groups just being another facet of government surveillance of its populace. Instead the film wants the audience more to feel as if it is becoming a part of the gang, and wants them to dreamily gaze at Marling, Ellen Page and Skarsgård's soapy bottom. Well, I hadn't really needed much encouragement to have already been doing all of those things! (I do like the way that the potentially hackneyed love triangle was handled here though, with Marling rather than Skarsgård seemingly the central figure in that tug of war. Though it only helps to reinforce that Izzy has to be sacrificed in order to let the other two be together). It feels a little schematic at times though, with all of the joyful music, basking in nature and spin the bottle games.
This is the new way of life we should be aiming for? It is only a step or two away from a Manson family or David Koresh cult-commune, even before we get to actually harming business-people rather than just teaching them a lesson and the literal baptism into the group that Sarah goes through.
I liked the 'intimate relationships in an activist organisation' spine of the story though, even if that too didn't really cut too deep into its subject matter either. Here in the UK there has been that recent expose on
police officers who have been going undercover with green activist groups, even fathering children whilst undercover. A film using that real-life material as a backbone would be very interesting and would actually have to deal with a lot of issues that The East is managing to elide (government legitimised rather than simple corporate surveillance; double lives and the damage that brings; the corporate or government paranoia angle about what the hell groups of concerned citizens are banding together to do that would cause them to feel it necessary to undertake this kind of spying - a paranoia that The East suggests is an entirely legitimate one, and so on)
In terms of all of the parameters the film sets up I think that it works pretty well and constructs a very entertaining film from its material (the two hours passed very quickly and I think it is mostly down to the excellent performances and filmmaking that make it such an enjoyable, slick ride), but it has sort of pre-handicapped its material from the very start. It makes an interesting introduction to the area (I was interested enough that I would have liked to have seen a lot more in depth exploration of every aspect presented in the film) and I can understand introducing such boundaries or limitations to the story in some ways in order to shape the material or make it more manageable, but this is in no way a spiky, difficult, troubling film about its issues.