I just stumbled across a cracking rant on Empire about film makers bending the truth when it comes to certain seemingly insignificant details, mainly the use of computers.

It sounds like I’m just being pedantic but it really does annoy me because so many people take the little things they see in movies as the truth.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those people who sits down to watch a movie and starts tearing it apart bit by bit as I can quite happily sit and accept that there are dragons and aliens and all other sorts of strange and wonderful things that only appear in films. Yes I would like an Iron man suit and yeah being able to control shit with my mind would be cool too, but these things only exist in the film world and it’s quite easy to accept that.

What really annoys me is when things from the film world spill into my everyday life because directors and producers think that it would be cooler to make things work that way instead of doing a bit of research…

For example:

Some guy asking me to enhance his crappy mobile phone video and assuming that a. it will only take a click of mouse and b. that somehow in five minutes I can produce a full frame hi-def file of the original crappy VGA source all because he saw it on CSI or something.

Whilst on the subject of CSI, have you seen that episode where they take apart a hard drive and then use lasers to read it, all without a hint of a clean room! I mean lasers? Fucking lasers? Since when have they been able to read magnetic data? Come on! And then people expect me to be able to pull their family photos off of a laptop drive that they dropped and maybe ran over with their car or something.

How about hacking? Anyone who has tried to hack anything knows that it’s a case of: find exploit, write script, run script! But in films you can just log onto the FBI secure but somehow PUBLIC mainframe and upload a hacking program and within 30 seconds they have complete access to everything!

Let’s hack the Gibson with my spray painted 386 laptop using a 28kbps modem but somehow manage to have enough bandwidth and processing power to bring up a full screen 3D user interface! That’s a compression protocol that I would love to get my hands on – super compression and low CPU overheads. Sweet!

Swordfish. How many screens do you need to hack a bank’s firewall? Sweet rig, but what screen does the terminal open on? Yeah I know it would be dead boring to watch someone sitting at a console typing bash scripts but I think making hacking look so glamorous kinda takes it away from the actual skill involved, and why do you never see a shit load of jolt by their machines?

What else? Car chases. How about one where police cars don’t manage to fly into the air when they crash into a parked car and explode on landing? Also, I have searched all around my car but I cannot for the life of me find that special gear that you can shift into to get an extra jolt of acceleration and I have yet to see a company that makes cars that can drive away fine after jumping a 150 foot gap without even putting their tracking out of line.

Okay I have lost momentum now but you get my drift!

Here is the original post that started me on my rant: http://www.empireonline.com/empireblog/Post.asp?id=164

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