Spy movies are all the rage. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – ROGUE NATION, directed by Christopher McQuarrie, one of the screenwriters of THE USUAL SUSPECTS (1995) and director of JACK REACHER (2012), arrived and dominated the box office for several weeks. The film, part of the saga rebooted by director Brian De Palma in 1996, did not disappoint and once again instilled in moviegoers the feeling of living in a world where hidden powers vie for global dominance.

The next release to round off the summer of 2015 is THE MAN OF U.N.C.L.E., or OPERATION UNCLE, depending on the country. The film is directed by Guy Ritchie, adept at crafting films in which groups of friends confront the forces of evil, imbuing them with pace and spectacle without sacrificing the depth and intelligence that critics demand. Examples of this include RocknRolla (2008) and his two most recent films featuring Sherlock Holmes. THE MAN OF U.N.C.L.E., like MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, has its origins in television series from the 1960s, when the Cold War was at its height and the world was starkly divided between "left and right.".

The spy film genre will reach new heights in October with the release of SPECTRE, the latest James Bond film. James Bond, a character inspired by THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., the 1960s television series, will once again demonstrate that the forces of evil are relentlessly lurking, seeking to seize control of our lives. If everything goes as planned, the film will be well-received by fans of the genre… of course, that's just speculation.

Given this evidence, it's reasonable to think there's a nostalgia for the Cold War era. As David Gistau states in his article... ABC, “The nostalgia for those cosmopolitan wars, which permitted the use of tuxedos, in which antagonism was also intellectual and seethed in universities, was inevitable when the wars now waged by the West contain only appalling primary violence.” Whether as a simple ideological justification to sustain the mere struggle for power, that time in the second half of the 20th century possessed a dramatic clarity that energized daily and intellectual life, even forcing the existence of a planetary consciousness insofar as the nuclear risk was ever-present. Today, although climate change seems to be tightening the noose around our necks and corruption and injustice are pushing countries to the brink, the political elites remain lethargic, failing to offer or resonate with new utopias that provide reasons to guide the world toward hope. The resurgence of spy films demonstrates this need to remember the imminent risk of a lost world without ideological clarity, which, unable to identify what or whom to confront, leaves to fiction the task of creating villains of ink and paper, who frighten us in the darkness of the projection rooms, but who do not provide any guidance to find a new direction when the film has ended.