
“The people in noir fiction are dark and doomed—they are losers, they are pessimistic, they are hopeless. If you have a private eye, the private eye is a hero; and he’s going to solve the crime and the bad guy will be caught. That’s a happy ending, but that’s not a noir ending.”
So is Silk Road a noir movie? Yes. Most will not see it that way, but (I can safely say I am not going to let loose any spoilers) we know the story of the Silk Road. Not a happy ending. I knew the mastermind behind the Silk Road went to jail - didn't know he's serving life without the possibility of parole. I think he was aged 27-29 when he got caught - a long time in prison; a bit harsh I think.
But the movie is a movie - fiction, not a documentary - and there is a nice twist (which I won't spoil or reveal here); if you are not familiar with the intricacies of the whole case (which I wasn't). After watching the movie I checked out the Silk Road story on the net - an amazing story in its totality.
Definitely worth watching. What struck me about how it was played was the naivete of the central criminal character. When his girlfriend says, "It's only a website." - she's missing the enormity of what he created - a new channel for the selling of contraband. Using bitcoin to anonymize payments, advising people how to hide illicit drugs (for example) in the mail and setting up a marketplace with reviews, etc. the Amazon of illegal drugs (and other stuff). But the central character also does not seem to realize that even as it explodes and he's making a million dollars a day - that will catch the attention of a lot of people in government.
But that does happen to people, right? They get caught up in their world and it becomes their reality. "Locked" into a digital world, they lose sight of the fundamentals of the "real world".