Montax Inteligência & Busca de Bens: 7 Movies About Private Intelligence and Industrial Espionage

No more government spying and police investigations! The theme of "corporate espionage" is much less explored in films than classical governmental espionage. More than corridor gossip, industrial espionage is very common in the corporate world, a striking feature of economic warfare, a war no one sees, no one speaks.

As if it did not exist. Sex, syndromes and psychopaths are the backdrop to plots of ambition, money, and power. Some scripts had the advice of professionals of private intelligence.

Analyzed from the point of view of corporate intelligence professionals, these movies draw attention to the strategies of private intelligence professionals hired by directors and managers, the decision makers of the companies. And they also show practical materials, equipment and techniques of industrial espionage of private investigators and investigative journalists.

As a private industry professional you earn from results. Watching movies about private Intelligence and industrial espionage will help you have insights to protect you from opponents, after all, budget is getting smaller and the charge for results is greater. You need to know the market and the competition. Death does not come only through illness or violence. Bankruptcy, unemployment, business failure, hunger and the indignity of poverty also kill reputation or the physical body, slowly.

Check it out! Click on the movie title and see the official trailer for each one. Private intelligence and corporate investigations like you've never seen.

#1 The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

The editor of investigative journalism magazine Millennium (Daniel Graig) is hired to locate the niece of a tycoon who disappeared as a teenager. In addition to money, he will receive also as a way of payment sensitive information about his opponent: a businessman, who felt offended by his report, sued the magazine for defamation and earned millionaire compensation. Needing an assistant to check the background of the missing niece, the investigative journalist hires a hacker, a problematic and very intelligent analyst (Rooney Mara), who had already raised information about him for the private intelligence firm at the service of the tycoon. This is the first on the list because it combines archivism, investigative journalism, computer systems, intrusion and professional experience.

Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), in the case of psychopathy that led men of the same family to kill women, is the background to a story about investigative journalism, reputed murder, and other psycho-information or psychological operations typical of Private Intelligence Activity portrayed in the movie "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”

#2 Edge Of Darkness

Thomas Craven (Mel Gibson) is a retired police officer who is shocked to see his daughter being murdered, the nuclear engineer Emma Craven (Bojana Novakovic). Police suspect target was the former police officer because, before firing, the masked assassin shouts "Craven." In US corporate environments, ladies are also called by the surname. The retired detective receives help from a repentant private intelligence professional (Ray Winstone) hired by the nuclear engineer's murderers for screening and "ending" the search for evidence, which alerts him to the dangers of this private investigation. His daughter worked for the nuclear arms industry and threatened to reveal secrets from politicians and industrialists. An excellent drama. A sad and beautiful film about the power of corporations.

The most mysterious character in the Edge of Darkness is just the private intelligence professional, who shifts his mind by confronting the interests of corrupt politicians and industrialists with those of honest corporate victims.

#3 Paranoia

If you do not like "clever" movies you will like Dangerous Connection in which a young and ambitious technology expert (Liam Hemsworth) is fired after making a mistake and his boss (Gary Oldman) then proposes that he pay the damage by recruiting him for an industrial espionage operation: Steal industry secrets from the company competing with its former master and industry genius (Harrison Ford). For the mission, the New York suburban industrial spy needs to reinvent himself, look sophisticated and rich. The film addresses aspects of the economic war, sometimes more secret and violent than we imagine.

Paranoia explores the differences between those involved in industrial espionage and the tension between the rich and the poor in New York.

#4 Duplicity

Just as 80 percent of private intelligence professionals have their origins in State Intelligence, Claire Stenwick (Julia Roberts) and Ray Koval (Clive Owen) are former agents of the CIA (US) and MI-6 (UK) respectively. As former government spies, they know each other. But, they now work for rival private sector corporations and have met "fortuitously" in a case of industrial espionage. Both have as mission to find the chemical formula of a cosmetic that will yield a fortune to who patents it first. And they are on opposite sides.

The movie Duplicity is a Romantic comedy of corporate espionage.

#5 Agnosia

Everyone who enjoys industrial espionage watched "Inception" with Leonardo DiCaprio where he's an industrial spy who steals secrets by means of "extraction" when his victims are asleep and dreaming. However, in the same year a Spanish film of the same theme, "Agnosia" was released. The young and beautiful Joana Prats (Barbara Goenaga) suffers from a neuropsychological dysfunction called agnosia. Mental illness affects the perception of loss or deterioration in the ability to recognize or identify objects despite maintaining sensory function intact (sight, hearing, and touch). Psychoanalysis and psychiatry are themes of a conspiracy to steal secrets from the telescopic industry for weapons in the nineteenth century. Instead of "invading" the mind, in Agnosia the intention is to show how the mind can be "seduced."

In neuropsychopathy, agnosia is a type of perceptual amnesia that consists of the inability to recognize the usual objects or symbols without disturbing the sensations in general.

#6 Demonlover

The French film of early 2002 is a cyber-thriller with beautiful European and Japanese actresses and fantastic soundtrack, the rock and techno of the 1990´s. The film tackles a fashionable theme during the internet “bubble", information technology companies. Diane (Connie Nielsen) of the French Volf Group is in charge of the due diligence about TokyoAnime, a Japanese cartographic cartoon company. The companies Mangatronics eDemonlover - "Demonic Lover" is the original title of the film - they dispute the rights of distribution of the 3D animes porns by Internet. While chatting with japanese partners, the French industrial spy monitors its American competitors from Demonlover to Mangatronics. The dialogues, aesthetics and photography are very different from the American blockbusters. And the economic-technological axis of the film is Paris-Tokyo. Anticonservative, in addition to the sex scenes the film treats the digital porn industry as capable of high investments in industrial espionage.

Demonlover discusses the spying on pornographic teen Anime, Japanese 3D cartoons with stories of sex and violence to be marketed online.

#7 Wall Street

The 1987 film shows one of the most sophisticated corporate frauds and hard to prove: privileged information. Known as insider trading, it is nothing more than the leakage of sensitive information about a company that can favor investors about the best time to buy or sell stocks. Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) plays the young and ambitious stockbroker who turns into the disciple of billionaire Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) after telling him that (Martin Sheen) was a union leader and had informed that Blue Star, the airline company where he worked, had overcome an important cause and its actions would "rise".

Many investors are very successful because they depart from unorthodox assumptions of investment opportunity analysis and internal sources of insider trading.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marcelo de Montalvão is director of Montax Intelligence, a risk consulting firm that assists legal directors & compliance in investigative due diligences, asset searches and corporate investigations in Brazil.

Author of the book "Intelligence & Industry - Espionage and Corporate Counter Espionage" and several articles on Military Intelligence, Business Intelligence, Compliance and Corporate Security.