10 Terrible Portrayals of Technology in Film

Luke Hachmeister writes to mention a light piece at GideonTech on some of the truly terrible portrayals of technology in film. From Hackers to AntiTrust, Hollywoood just can't stick to reality. From the article: "Harrison Ford plays a security expert at a bank. He falls prey to a scheme to steal money for a gang that has taken hostage of his family. The film tried very hard to keep it a rollercoaster ride of thrills. From the beginning, you have Harrison Ford typing furiously to stop a hacker by writing new firewall rules. At least this time, these rules didn't float around in a rainbow of colors ala Hackers. What really puts Firewall at the top of the list, is the dumbest and non-believable use of an iPod to date. This is 2006, not 1995, you can't just make stuff up like this anymore. In the middle of the film, Harrison Ford happens to not only be a security expert, but an Apple hardware developer too."

Comments

Bah

[B3ryllium]

Our jobs are BORING. Admit it. If the true essence of our profession was placed on film, people would walk out of the theatre.

Unless, that is, it was encapsulated in a vehicle like "Office Space" ... ;-)

Re:Bah

[edunbar93]

You know the scene in Hackers where Joey logs into that one computer, and rainbows of stars and other shit come streaming across the screen?

Somehow, I think the audience would have gotten the point if we just got a zoom-in of "Login successful. Welcome to Cyberdyne systems model 101." Especially if he started doing the victory dance.

I don't know about you, but if the "Login successful" screen did the stars shit every time *I* logged into a computer, I would drag the developer into a dark alley and beat him with a crowbar for a couple of hours.

Of course, that wouldn't excuse the other egregious hackery that comprised much of the dialog. You gotta love a line like "Run Antivirus!"

Re:Bah

[B3ryllium]

Yesterday, my dental hygenist attempted to create an analogy of "not brushing my teeth" as being the same as "not updating my antivirus on the machines at work".

She didn't get my point when I said they run "Linux".

Too bad my mouth doesn't, though. Heheh :)

Re:Bah

[RedSteve]

Our jobs are BORING. Admit it. If the true essence of our profession was placed on film, people would walk out of the theatre.

Absolutely.

My wife is a pediatrician, and despite the fact that she deals with disease and injury every day, she cannot help but watch every medical show -- fiction or reality -- that comes on TV. One day I wondered aloud why she would want to subject herself to tv that is essentially work to her, and why no one makes TV shows about my chosen profession.

She replied that
a) the fictional TV shows generally get as much wrong with their medicine as movies with tech themes get technology wrong and
b) no one wants to watch a show consisting of a bunch of web geeks sitting in front of their computers all day.

I had to concede that she was right, but that didn't make me feel any better....

Re:Bah

[CastrTroy]

We already have that simple text login successful movie. It was called wargames. It was a really interesting movie, because it showed how hacking was actually done. Calling the operator and asking for numbers, then trying every number until a modem picks up. Then trying every password you can think of until you actually get into the system.

Re:Bah

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is kinda like flossing. It keeps everything clean, but it's uncomfortable and no one really likes it.

Re:Bah

[nickco3]

I have mixed feelings about War Games. Some of it was good and realistic, the text logins and the war-dialling, like you say, but some of it was pushing things a little, like computers are alive and one them has been put in charge of the nuclear button.

And some of it was just complete fantasy-land, like the cute girl wanted to hang out with the class nerd while he played a computer game in his bedroom. I ask you.

I think the all time classic is........

[Freaky Spook]

Independance Day.

Upload Virus.......

Enough said!

Re:I think the all time classic is........

[AuMatar]

Agreed. There's no way in hell an advanced intelligence would be Windows compatible.

Re:I think the all time classic is........

[bladesjester]

If memory serves, Goldblum used a Mac :P

Re:I think the all time classic is........

[pyrote]

the Alien AI would be adaptive and self-healing, and would totally block out Windows, leaving Mac as the only option

They have been watching us for years and protected themselves from the known operating systems of the world... thus, they completely missed seeing mac as noone had any :) well other than jeff goldbloom.

Re:I think the all time classic is........

[drolli]

Yes, ideed. This was still the time when the idea of malware did not pentrate society to a deep level. I only asked myself: WTF the extraterrestrians build starships as big as cities but they do not protect theyr system at all (they did not even talk about skipping an protection).

Maybe they send a mail like this:

Dear Extraterresrtian friend,

you have not heard of me up to now but i am sure i can trust you. I am the son of the late ruler of this planet and twenty others. However, rihgt now i can not access my power, since enemies of my family have grounded our operations. I now come with a offer to you which i make to you only because i heard of your good morale. If offer you a significant share of my imperium if you can help me to regain power on earth....

Re:I think the all time classic is........

[DA-MAN]

If the Aliens had used Windows..they wudn't have taken off their planet in the first place

Or perhaps we now know why they crash landed in Roswell. . .

Re:I think the all time classic is........

[hey!]

Maybe that's feasible, but on the screen it shows the machine establishing a TCP/IP connection to the mothership.

And "Vint Cerf" sounds like a name actual human beings would give their offspring?

Re:I think the all time classic is........

[Fred_A]

Don't you know that in US English, you can substitute any vowel for any other ?

Re:I think the all time classic is........

[jeremyp]

TCP/IP, wireless LAN, both invented after the alien spaceship crashed at Roswell. Where do you think we got the ideas from....?

Jurassic Park

[innocent_white_lamb]

"This is UNIX. I know this."
 
The file viewer in Jurassic Park really does exist.
 
http://fsv.sourceforge.net/

Re:Jurassic Park

[B3ryllium]

The line is delivered with such egotism and authority that she can't NOT know unix! In fact, *only* Unix admins can be that cock-sure and arrogant.

(Sidenote: I am a Unix admin, at times.)

Re:Jurassic Park

[bladesjester]

Hey, after a day of being effectively dropped off of a cliff in a car, chased by dinosuars, snotted on by a dinosuar, almost being run over by a "flock" of dinosuars, seeing your little brother get electrocuted, and come close to being eaten by dinosuars a couple of times, I have to say that, personally speaking, *I* might come off as a bit cocky if finally faced with something that I know I've got nailed. =]

Re:Jurassic Park

[Bert64]

It's quite disturbing, that kids a few years ago knew DOS and BASIC etc, because that's what their computers had...
Nowadays, most kids are barely able to click an icon.

I have a cousin who showed me how to program on a C64 many years ago, now after years of being stuck with windows, she can't do anything outside of the gui and even then gets stuck if any errors crop up.

Um....

[Anonymous Coward]

Today, we're going to list the Top 10 worst violators. Here is the criteria:

1. Has to be a movie that you can rent on DVD.
2. Wide release, no limited release obscure films.
3. The movie can not be science fiction based.

Yet the number 2 movie:

2) Jurassic Park - 1993

Re:James Bond (The World Is Not Enough)

[glittalogik]

Maybe you could render it useless by installing WinCE on the nuke itself.

Funny as hell

[Cold_Lestat]

The best one is in Days of our lives (yes, i was young and yes i was staying with my grandmother and no I didn't have access to a car: nuff said) when it took 3 episodes to delete one text file.. Man that progress bar took for ever to get accross. ;)

My favourite (not stupid) take off of computer security is in Demolition Man where W/Snipes uses the guys plucked eyeball to get access out of the building. ;) very choice. (NP: This wouldn't work in real life (well shouldn't ;) ))

Uhh...

[mcc]

This is more like "ten films I've seen containing computers, which I will describe in belittling terms". Okay, so some of these movies really did butcher the technology they included. But some of these complaints just show a lack of imagination on the part of the article writer.

In particular, this guy basically loses for complaining about the "This is UNIX, I know this!" scene in Jurassic Park, complaining that a ten year old girl couldn't have "magically" known that the computer was running UNIX. Okay, except that at that exact moment the computer in front of her-- hell, he even has screenshots-- was in fact showing a real world file manager / demo program that came with SGI's IRIX operating system-- which is, as it happens, a System V UNIX. You don't think it's possible that a computer geek from a rich family might have at some point in her life used IRIX, or at least used it enough to recognize a very distinctive tech demo that came with IRIX at the time and could be used as a file manager? Is it really that improbable that a ten year old might know at least enough about UNIX to know what /usr is? Or is the idea that girls don't use computers?

Re:Uhh...

[mcc]

The funny thing is, sometime around the time Jurassic Park came out (before or after, I don't remember) I clearly remember visiting DisneyWorld with my family, and in one of the buildings at Epcot, SGI had this big display set up with some huge mainframe where they were giving demos rendering a complicated Egyptian tomb in realtime, and then there were a bunch of Indigo 2s sitting out on the floor with people to mess with. I spent most of the day just and playing with the tech demos they'd stocked up the Indy 2s with, running what in retrospect I recognize as X windows. I don't remember seeing the 3d file browser thing-- I seem to remember spending most of the time messing with a program called "New Jello", but I was just kind of clicking around at random, and maybe I saw it but didn't remember it. I would have been older than ten at the time, but not by much. I could certainly imagine someone about my age doing the same thing, randomly clicking into the 3d file system visualizer, and playing with it until they basically worked out what was going on.

So we could possibly explain that bit in Jurassic Park entirely if "this is UNIX!" girl had at some point in the year or so before the events of the film simply visited Disneyworld.

Non-Science Fiction?

[MrFlannel]

Since when are half of those films NOT science fiction?

Jurrasic Park? War Games? Independance day?

Could they please give me tickets to their dinosaur park? And, while they're at it, give the ID4 aliens my number, I'd like to have lunch sometime.

Hell yeah. Worst list ever

[sterno]

This is really a bad list. Basically they seemed to have made a point of picking movies that naturally involve a lot of technology. They totally ignore things like Independence Day where their little virus takes out an entire alien attack fleet because, persumably, they didn't even try.

Wargames does not deserve to be on this list. He uses an acoustic coupled modem to dial in. He hacks using realistic approaches to it, trying to guess the password. He doesn't magically use a cracking program or have little 3D graphics fly all over his screen trying to crack it. Instead he studies the biography of Professor Falken and after much trial and error actually gets it.

Their biggest nitpick is that computer voice. The "voice" from the computer is clearly just a text to voice synthesizer which, may be a little high end but remember TI had voice synthesizers for their computers around 1980. They didn't want the audience to have to read what the computer was saying the whole damn movie. The computer AI for Joshua is seemingly quite primitive even though it's supposed to be a big defense department computer.

As for Firewall, I think they did a pretty good job of being realistic. The scanner IPod thing was a stretch, but when they do computer security in the movie it looks like an actual computer. We see actual firewall rules and such that look like what I'd see on my actual computer. Given that it was a hollywood movie built around a very technical subject, I was pretty impressed with the realism level.

If you really want to get picky, how about the fact that every time a computer shows up in a movie it has an Apple logo on it :)

Ain't just tech stuff either.

[Entropy]

Hollywood can be reliablely counted on to screw _everything_ up.

Fire 20 bullets from a six shooter. 100 bullets from a semi auto and one magazine.

One bullet instantly kills any bad guy. (But good guys can get shot in the face and still go on to kick the bad guys ass.)

Have a round chambered, but work the action and one doesn't pop out, but hey, "working the action is cool and scary ..".

Lasers being visible. Lasers being audible. Audible shit in space. And no one has ever heard of Newton's laws.

So given that we know Hollywood has such a rotten track record with the things we geeks know, I guess one thing we can rejoice about is this - all that sex the male leads are getting is just as fictional and unrealistic as the above ..

Re:Ain't just tech stuff either.

[bm_luethke]

The worse part is how much of that people believe.

It's not uncoommon to find people who's signifigant other has died leaving behind a handgun. The surviving member knows nothing about them, "unloads" it be removing the clip, and then forgets it. I know my cousing was going around with one pointing it at people saying "bang bang". My father (I was barely old enough to recollect it at all, let alone know much of what was going on) had a fit, he was then told "I unloaded it, it's safe". After explaining you *never* treat a gun as a toy, always loaded, he took the gun away and immediatly made it safe (lock open the slide), it had a bullet in the chamber. They assumed that hollywood removal of the clip was actually unloaded. I can irritate people when I fuss at the cops in the movie having criminals take clips out to "unload" thier guns.

It's gotten bad enough that too many real videos are considered fake because it "doesn't look real" and people make real decisions that can impact many people based on it. In nearly 100% of the cases you can eventually track it down to "It doesn't look like in the movies". Just in firearms alone it is amazing what people think a gun can do and want to legislate against it (sometimes proposed legislation is *detrimental* to safety), and then not know it is horridly dangerous in others and just not care.

Even those of us that are jaded about the whole thing find from time to time where hollywood has colored our ideas (for example, I know something of how several cultures fought with swords, yet I still imagine the classic hollywood edge on edge fighting). It is such a large part of our lives that it can be hard to seperate when you have no references to compare too - even if you do not like to watch too much you still see it everywhere and so much of our society believes it.

Realistic Guns

[sterno]

Best movie ever for accurate portrayal of shooting and ammo: Heat. That gun scene as they come out of the bank is really spot on. They are reloading constantly as you would if you were tossing off 30 round clips in that kind of situation. For the most part they fire in short bursts as well instead of just holding down the trigger and emptying a clip. The only iffy bit is how the hell they'd carry that much ammo on them, but give or take that issue, pretty solid.

Re:Realistic Guns

[dmjones500]

According to IMDB, it was the infamous "Andy McNab" who advised on weapon-related matters in Heat. Regardless, I agree: loud, scary and accurate. A very cool scene in a very cool film.

Armageddon

[PapayaSF]

How could they forget Armageddon? It's a movie premised on the idea that it's easier to teach oil drillers to be astronauts than teach astronauts how to drill a hole. It's got a shuttle docking on the outside ring of a rotating space station. It's got a single Russian cosmonaut refueling the shuttle through a single hose he wrestles around. It's got a nuclear bomb that must be planted exactly 800 feet below the surface of an asteroid, giving an excuse for dramatic dialog of the "Oh no! We're only at 790 feet!" sort. It's got inappropriate machine guns. It's the perfect example of a film about science and technology written and directed by Hollywood types who never took a word of advice from any pesky technical advisors.

Re:Armageddon

[Wellington Grey]

And most unbelievable, a president who understands, and gives a speech in favor of, science. Man, that scene brings a tear to my eye every time.

-Grey

Re:Armageddon

[sidb]

It has a space shuttle that noisily swoops and accelerates into a crash landing on an asteroid with its main engines still burning at full power -- even though it has no fuel tank. That's just about every spaceflight rule in the book broken in a single scene. It's a triumph of art over reality... OK, actually, it just sucks.

Crap article...

[isaac]

Clearly written by a boy who wasn't tall enough to reach the ticket counter when Jurassic Park was in theaters, to say nothing of Wargames.

Yeah, most of those movies are truly terrible (and how did they miss "The Net"?), but the 10-year-old girl in Jurassic Park (who's been of legal drinking age for almost 3 years!) was shown using a real app called FSN that was indeed contemporary with the SGI gear of 1993 - a far cry from the Macromedia Director abominations of Mission: Impossible, for sure.

And listing WarGames - blasphemy! OK, it's ridiculous that Matthew Broderick would leave the speech synthesizer on (unless he was blind), but we (er, some people) really did use wardialers back then (well, just called them dialers before WarGames...), and man that IMSAI rig was sweet, if a little dated by 1983. Considering that typewriters still vastly outnumbered PC's at the time, the Internet had just switched over to TCP/IP, and the notion of booking an airline reservation with a home computer (fraudulently or not) was gee-whiz stuff, I'm willing to cut this movie much slack.

-Isaac

Re:Hell yeah. Worst list ever

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it was a dystopia.

The worst movie about a computer hacker

[BenS350]

I think the worst movie about a computer guy would have to be swordfish. Creating a worm doesn't involve moving little 3-D blocks around on a computer screen.

Re:The worst movie about a computer hacker

[klang]

...while dancing like a retard in front of 15 screens, drinking red wine ..

Bonjour

[Gordonjcp]

Standards compliance is a wonderful thing.

Re:I guess that makes Linux equivalent to supertee

[B3ryllium]

Superteeth! Repelling Plaque at every turn, by virtue of being completely incompatible with it!

Re:Hell yeah. Worst list ever

[Anonymous Coward]

Wargames: *I* was a cracker, hacker, and Phreak at that time. The acoustic coupler was part of the art at the time. Acoustic couplers at 110/300 baud were common. Hayes modems w/direct jacks were just on the scene for a year, maybe two at that point.

You also have to remember that about the early 80's was the time that RJ-12 jacks and the ability to wire your own home for phone service started. Yep youngin's, time was when you got charged by Ma Bell for EACH phone in your house, and those phones came from Ma Bell. Phones were hardwired to the jack. (nb: If you disconnected the ringer bell inside the phone, and left just one on there, then you only got charged for one phone... no matter how many you had).

The voice wasn't that far off from that which I had on my Apple ][ at the time - a "SuperTalker". Did a pretty damn good job too - quite understandable, even if it was a bit 'cyberish'.

And how he hacked in was also 'state of the art' at the time. Anyone remember a Demon Dialer program? Nothing too tremendous - I wrote tons of them in BASIC. Essentially:

Open modem port
Begin for loop with all local prefixes step 1
Begin for loop from 0000 to 9999 step 1
If police station - skip number
dial number
wait for response string
If modem - open printer port, print number out
next
next

You'd fire it off at night before going to bed, wake up in the morning and review the list of numbers. Then you'd call back and see what you could hack into... Sometimes the idiot thing didn't even ask for a un/pw. Sometimes it did, but in the MOTD there was enough info to get you started...

Sometimes you'd stumble on an entire network to explore (Telenet anyone?). VAXen, VMS, CP/M, and SCADA systems connected to phone lines....

The only problem with the sequential dialers was the phone co got lots of complaints from everyone who you woke up, and they'd go digging for records of sequential calls every min or so... Then you'd get a nastygram from Bell Security or a call from the cops...

The next gen Demon Dialers spiced things up a bit... Create a multi-dimensional array loaded with the prefixes and numbers. Have a bit to know if you dialed it or not, and a bit to know if it was a modem or not. Randomly pick a prefix and number to dial and check... Wait a random amount of time between 1 sec and 30 sec between dialing the next number...

But as for the rest of the movie technology usage *yawn* it's not even close... The thing that really gets me are the schmucks who pick a lock with just a pick... WHERE'S THE DAMN TENSION WRENCH?>!?!?!?!!?!?! (oh yeah, I'm also a locksmith and a tunnel rat)...

How about Battlestar Galactica?

[joeflies]

As far as "science" in science fiction...

How 'bout the way in the re-imaged Battlestar Galactica, Season 1, when Starbuck figures out how to launch, fly, and land a Cylon raider that's piloted by genetic material? There's no interface for any human-sized person to fly it, yet with a little tendon pulling, a leg jab here and there, and the raider is off and going? BTW, doesn't she need some viewscreen or two to see what's going on?

Or does it not count once there's enough science fiction involved to override any "common sense" of what a human can do with the science available?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

true story

[circletimessquare]

i am a film buff. so i knew about the movie swordfish a few months before it came out (from fan sites like aintitcoolnews.com, etc.), and i knew sketchy plot points about the movie, namely that it would be about illicit transfers of illicit funds

i also used to work for a large multinational bank as a programmer. and a few months before swordfish came out, i was developing a system used by the bank for monitoring internal transfers. on a lark, i code named the system in development as "swordfish" for my own personal use as a joke

but in email conversations with my boss, i, um, kept calling it swordfish. oops. my boss wound up raving about the system, to his bosses, to other middle management, to everyone. he started telling everyone who would listen about it because the basic idea behind the project was a sound one and it was important for the bank. unfortunately, he kept calling it "swordfish," and the name stuck and went into general use

awareness of the swordfish project just happened to peak when the movie came out. to widespread media coverage and exposure and advertising. and the basic details about a hacker breaking into a financial computer system to transfer funds became common knowledge, even to people who didn't see the movie. and at the same time, here was my boss making an internal push to distribute this program to wider use for testing, and trying to drum up support for it amongst the higher ranking middle management... and it was called swordfish

he stopped raving about the program, and my boss got in the habit of shaking his head and smirking every time he saw me. but we never spoke about the "coincidence". he must have gotten laughed at pretty hard on my behalf

so the plot guys get the technical details wrong sometimes

i am living proof that sometimes the technical guys get the plot points wrong

Re:Hell yeah. Worst list ever

[Haeleth]

This is really a bad list. . . . They totally ignore things like Independence Day

Yeah, that could be something to do with the bit at the top of the article where they said they were deliberately excluding all science fiction movies.

Re:Hell yeah. Worst list ever

[CharlieG]

Heh - I had a hayes direct connect - darn, remember what those things COST!! A 1200baud Hayes cost more than a computer costs now. I had a 300 baud at home, and a 1200 at the lab. Remember having to order data grade lines?

I remember when modens came DOWN to the 200 dollar or so price mark - what a breakthrough - and remember - if you were GOOD, you could actually speedread a 300 baud text data stream - without X-on X-off

Yeah folks - there are some OLD geeks here - I actually worked with punch cards (still have a couple of boxes of them - use them as note paper when feeling geeky) Gettting a terminal was COOL - even a 75 baud teletype. If you had a DEC Flexwriter, you were BIG time..

Sigh

I'll bet that I've offically been a programmer (aka getting paid for it) longer than MOST people on /. are alive (anyway by the last poll I saw)

Gahhh - can't believe I said that - man I'm feeling like an old fart today. Ran into a YL yesterday who recognized me - and she said "hi" and offerered me her cheek - took me a few seconds to realize it was a friend's daughter who I have not seen in 2 years. I remember holding her while she was in diapers.