The Post-Cold War Spy Film Sneakers (1992)
The genre lost its enemy in 1991
The Soviet Union dissolved on December 26, 1991. The American spy thriller — which had been a coherent commercial genre since From Russia with Love (1963) — lost the antagonist that had organized its plots for thirty years. Sneakers opened nine months later, in September 1992, into a genre that was still figuring out what to do.
"After 1991 the spy thriller had three options: get nostalgic, find a new enemy, or get smaller. Sneakers chose the third." — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker (1995)
Three responses to the post-Cold War problem
Get nostalgic. The Hunt for Red October (1990), Patriot Games (1992), Clear and Present Danger (1994) — Tom Clancy adaptations that kept the Cold War apparatus running by shifting to drug cartels, IRA splinter groups, and rogue Soviet officers.
Find a new enemy. True Lies (1994), Executive Decision (1996), The Peacemaker (1997), the early Brosnan-era Bond films — Middle Eastern terrorists, rogue states, and "former" Soviet officers selling weapons.
Get smaller and more procedural. Sneakers (1992), The Pelican Brief (1993), Three Days of the Condor-style investigations turned inward, with the U.S. government itself as the antagonist or the failed protector. Sneakers is the cleanest example.
"Sneakers is the first major studio thriller of the post-Cold War period to point the camera at our own intelligence apparatus and shrug. The bad guy is a freelancer. The good guy is a fugitive. The agency is an awkward partner." — Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com (2017)
Cosmo is the post-Cold War villain template
Cosmo is not Russian. He is not ideological. He is not religious. He is a stateless private actor who wants control of information infrastructure for its own sake. This is a villain template that Hollywood would lean on increasingly through the decade — culminating in the financial-information villains of Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) and the Bond reboots.
"Cosmo is the prototype. After him you get the Bond villain who runs a media company, the Bond villain who runs a tech company. The state has been replaced by the platform." — Bilge Ebiri, Vulture (2017)
Bishop is the post-Cold War protagonist template
Bishop is also new. He is not a serving officer of any government. He is a private contractor whose past brushes with the state are a liability, not a credential. The 1990s would produce a series of these private-contractor protagonists — the Tom Cruise of Mission: Impossible (1996), the Will Smith of Enemy of the State (1998).
"By the late 1990s the spy was a contractor. The agency was a client. Sneakers got there first." — David Bordwell, Observations on Film Art (2007)
The genre's politics drift toward institutional skepticism
A consistent feature of post-1991 spy films — Sneakers, The Pelican Brief (1993), Enemy of the State (1998), the Bourne trilogy (2002–07) — is that the antagonist is, increasingly often, the U.S. intelligence apparatus itself or a rogue faction inside it. The Cold War film had assumed the agency was on the right side. The post-Cold War film does not.
"The spy thriller after 1991 is fundamentally a paranoid genre about American institutions. Sneakers is the first sweet-natured one in that mode." — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker (1995)