Movies & Technology

I think I’ve had about enough of movies basing major elements of their plots around impossible computer stunts. We just saw The Recruit, a so-so movie made unbearable by the dumb technical elements of its largely nonsensical plot. I knew it was going to be rough when, in the first ten minutes, our protagonist, a scruffy computer genius, demos his latest creation to a representative from Dell. Apparently, he’s bent the considerable weight of his intellect toward creating a program that can project an image from his computer onto the displays of several other computers on the same network. Re-routing data to a different display! That’s brilliant! Or at least it was in 1983, when X Windows came out. Now it’s just kind of … standard.

And it just got worse. At one point, our hunk-genius needs to perform a complex search for some super-secret CIA blah blah yadda yadda whatever, and so he logs onto a cutting-edge PowerMac hooked up to a lovely flat-panel LCD that can display razor-sharp images in millions of colors and types: ††WIN32_FIND("secret thing"); There are so many things wrong with this picture that it would take far too long to enumerate them all, but here’s a start: Why are they wrapping a command-line interface inside a retro-star trek UI? Why didn’t somebody in the CIA development labs think to come up with a menu option for Search? Why are they using cryptic API calls to enter commands? And, most of all, WHY ARE THEY TYPING WINDOWS CODE INTO A MAC?

Ugh. And it didn’t stop there, not by a long shot. I don’t want to give anything away, but the climax of this movie hinges on another stupid computer trick that is so incomprehensibly idiotic as to make even the most clueless AOL users stand up and beat their breasts in sheer outrage. And remember, these are the same people who consider their recent ability to sort email by column headings a quantum leap in computer technology.

Anyway. I know I shouldn’t begrudge these screenwriters’ their right to trample over good sense in the pursuit of good plot devices, but there are limits. The end of The Recruit rivals Jurassic Park’s sorry climax (a little girl computer geeks sits down at a terminal that’s displaying a bunch of vector graphic boxes in green outline against a field of black and gasps This is Unix. I know this!) in sheer nails-down-the-board irritation. These movie guys hire doctors to vet their medical assertions, don’t they? Lawyers to validate the tortial minutiae of lawyer movies, right? Why can’t they employ the services of a representative of the pocket protectorate to fix the computer bits in their scripts?

It would make a lot of sense. Imagine a typical conversation:

Script Writer: Hey Four-Eyes. Is it possible to transmit a virus through the electrical system?

Computer Geek: Well … no.

SW: Why not?

CG: [long pause] It’s just such a stupid question. I wouldn’t know where to begin.

SW:Well how about using a firewall?

CG:A firewall?

SW:Yeah. Maybe you could bootstrap the firewall to proxy the virus into your kernel.

CG:Um.

SW:Look, I’ve read about this. You can send viruses through email. Why not through electricity? It can’t be that much harder.

CG:Well, maybe if Microsoft ran the utility companies [chortling in self-satisfied geek fashion]

SW:Ok. We can do that.

CG:Do what?

SW:We can put Microsoft in charge of the electric company. [types] There, it’s done. Now can you transmit a virus through the electrical system?

CG:When it’s not crashing, yeah. I guess.

SW:Great. Thanks. Now, tell me again why you can’t write a program to disable all of the fire alarms in Uganda?

I’d be happy to be a computer geek movie consultant. Hell, I’d do it for free. That’s how much I care about the technical accuracy of American movies. That’s how desperately I want to be in the same zipcode as Sandra Bullock when she does the sequel to The Net. So consider this an opportunity, all you producers, directors, screenwriters out there. My services have been offered. If you need to get in touch with me, just do a Google search for computer geeks who want to meet Sandra Bullock. You shouldn’t get too many hits.