Geekfoolery

Once again, the film industry is working itself up into its annual lather to hand out prizes to Hollywood’s versions of Employee of the Month. As usual, no one I know has seen, or in some cases, even heard of the movies in contention. So instead, I am going to take the opportunity to review some complaints that I, as a geek, have had about movies over the years.

1. Hackers: It seems as if every awkward guy from about age 12 to maybe as old as 25 who has ever had an AOL account or played a Playstation is a grungy, arrogant, mom’s-basement-dwelling geek hacker who is never more than a few clackity keystrokes away from announcing, “I’m in” before clicking on a garish button that says “Launch Network Virus” and wreaking havoc.
   In Live Free or Die Hard, the Bruce Willis franchise is updated from the sophisticated bank-robbery plots of the first couple sequels to an even more complex hacker plot to cripple the nation with coordinated infrastructure cyberattacks. The bad guys are evil geeks that can take out traffic lights, cellphone networks, and the power grid from their laptops. The good guys include Justin Long, the “Mac” guy from Apple’s Mac and PC ads. Justin tags along as a good-guy hacker in over his head, complimenting the more primitive action-hero stylings of Bruce Willis. While I don’t demand strict realism in a Die Hard franchise, we at least have to be kept from leaping through the more obvious plot holes until after the movie. The story starts plausibly enough by suggesting that the mastermind spent a great deal of time and money planning his cyberattack. But it’s still too easy for the writers to turn their hackers into invincible omnipotent god’s eye masters of the universe. They can still hack anything from anywhere, most notably in the absurd climactic chase scene, where the evil hacker geniuses, while driving at breakneck speed are able to call up a high-tech F-22 jet from the Air Force to take out their pursuer. My willing suspension of disbelief dropped at that point of the movie like a cell phone call between towers.
   An even bigger offender was Transformers, though admittedly a movie that was a remake from a cartoon that was itself a spinoff from a kid’s toy should be held to a less-stringent credibility standard. But still, the movie’s teenage, long-haired, coke-bottle eyeglass-wearing hackers came from the same shrink-wrapped boxes on the Toy “R” Us shelf that the robots did, with the possible exception of the hot blonde with the British accent, though it should be noted that she didn’t actually do any actual hacking in the film.
2. Hacking. This annoys me enough to warrant a separate category from the hackers themselves. Actual hacking is probably about as exciting to watch as a tax audit. Hackers run scripts from command lines, probing ports on a target system, hoping to find an exploitable hole, a lapse in security, or a virtual door that should have been locked.
   Back in 1983, Wargames started off with a promising level of realism by having Matthew Broderick running a wardialer (a hacker term that actually came from the movie) that dialed phone numbers in sequence until a modem picked up the other end. Sometimes if the filmmakers just throw us a bone of realism, we’ll stick around for the ride. Despite the snotty-kid-as-hacker motif, Wargames didn’t stray too far off the mark, or at least if it did, we really couldn’t tell back in the early 80’s.
   Fast forward 20 years and a more sophisticated audience gets a more sophisticated Harrison Ford as a network security expert at a bank. Ford got the unlucky task of having to hack his own security system in Firewall or bad guys would kill his family. The bad guys in this movie were supremely stupid to take this risk–their entire caper depended solely on Harrison Ford getting into his own bank and stealing the money. Apart from basing your gig on someone openly hostile to your cause, these guys never seemed to ask the question, “what if he can’t do it?” People who build network security systems aren’t necessarily the best people to crack into network security. In fact, the best part of the movie came when the bad guys showed up in the server room and Harrison Ford got to tell them ha, ha, you’re too late, we just moved everything offsite! By the time the bad guys regrouped and forced Ford to think of a new hack, they’d already lost me.
   But the absolute worst offender in the category of “this is not the way hacking works” is the forgettable John Travolta flick, Swordfish. In it there is an absurd scene where Travolta throws a stress test at his hacker by holding a gun to his head and having his girlfriend find other ways to distract him, then throwing a laptop at him and demanding that he crack some difficult coding scheme–in 60 seconds, even though both men had just agreed that it would normally take a couple hours. I would compare this to grabbing a plumber off the street, and asking him to install a sink at gunpoint, without his tools–in 60 seconds.
3. Computers: While you and I can bicker endlessly about MacOS X vs. Windows XP/Vista vs. Linux, movie computers, particularly computers used by big secret government spy agencies, all have displays with stylish graphics and GUIs that animate every action on the computer. Encrypting a file? Watch all the letters swirl across the screen into the random encoded sequence. Sending an email? Watch the envelope spin around before disappearing down an animated mail chute. Copying a file to disk? Watch as 3-D graphic of the file swirls across the screen. The mind-numbing reality is that government computers are running the same crappy OS you and I use, or used a decade ago, or in some cases, some custom app that was written by contractors who didn’t have an extra 3 weeks to code up a slick GUI.
   But the main problem with computers in the movies is that they are constantly doing things that computers just can’t do. Way back in 1986, in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, there’s a cute scene where Scotty asks to use a 20th-century computer, and upon being shown a Mac SE30, he confuses the mouse for a microphone. Ha ha, you see, we talk to our computers in the future, but for a man who has probably never used a keyboard in his life, Mr. Scott manages to whip up an equation for “transparent aluminum”–a 23rd century wonder material–with what, MacWrite?
   Macs must have good agents in the movies, because just a few years later, geek actor Jeff Goldblum manages to use his Mac laptop to upload a virus to a computer system on an alien spaceship in Independence Day. I know Mac fanboys are constantly going on about how their machines don’t get viruses, but this is little ridiculous.
4. Tough Guys: Suppose you wanted to hire a tough guy–a bodyguard, maybe or an elite soldier. You might think a guy like Rambo or Schwarzenegger would be the best pick. We used to think so, in the 80’s. Or you might realize that you don’t want musclebound, you need smart and tough, lean and mean–maybe like Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne, or Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt. Nope. Both wrong. For sheer lethal strength and speed–we’re talking about a killing machine who can take out four or five trained killers in the blink of an eye–what you are clearly going to have to find is not muscular tough guy, but instead, a 105-pound waifish fashion model with perfect skin, teeth, hair and makeup. Think Aeon Flux, Ultraviolet, as well as Live Free or Die Hard, where Bruce Willis’s bare-knuckle brawling is no match for a woman half his fighting weight. The lovely and stylish Maggie Q ultimately had to be run down with an SUV, pushed down an elevator shaft, where the truck then fell on top of her. Anything less would have just pissed her off, I’m sure.
5. Remakes of TV Shows: We ask a lot of Hollywood. We want new ideas, new stories, week after week, summer after summer. So can we blame filmmakers if they dip into back issues of TV Guide every now and then to bring back an old favorite? Well, yes. Not a lot of TV was worth watching the first time around, and only occasionally has a franchise successfully made the jump from the small screen to the big screen. Star Trek was one of the first. Mission Impossible has done OK. But another go-round with The Beverly Hillbillies? McHale’s Navy? As much as we enjoyed these shows at the time, we have to remember how incredibly stupid we were back then. What was Robert DeNiro thinking when he agreed to do Bullwinkle? Did Bugs Bunny Space Jam improve upon the body of work laid down by Chuck Jones and Mel Blanc? Is there anyone who liked Jim Carey’s Grinch better than Boris Karloff? It seems we can look forward to another round of Get Smart in the near future, a new and improved (and perhaps more expensive?) Six Million Dollar Man, and the Knight Rider is supposed to ride again as well, albeit on TV. Isn’t Hollywood worried that someday they will run out of old TV shows to rip off? Shouldn’t they be rationing this out? Future movie producers will find themselves trying to make movies out of TV shows while they’re still being piloted. There will be clear sign that we can all look for that will tell us when the supply of recyclable TV shows has reached critically low levels. When some producer manages to convince a studio that we need another movie about World War II, set in a Nazi POW camp, and that the movie should be comedy–a remake of Hogan’s Heroes–then we will know that Hollywood is completely out of ideas.

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