7 ms·
I really don't understand why people need to nitpick stuff like this. I mean, it's a movie -- the point is to tell a story not impart technical knowledge. Yeah,
by sophacles 14y ago
I really don't understand why people need to nitpick stuff like this. I mean, it's a movie -- the point is to tell a story not impart technical knowledge. Yeah, the query someone came up with on the fly isn't perfect, we get it, but in reality, this happens at the sql command line all the freaking time, it's a one-off, who cares? And yeah, the returned results are a bit incorrect for the query, but given that a bunch of freeze frame work had to be done to determine this, it seems like a pointless nitpick. Why not instead applaud the film-makers for actually using shockingly (for hollywood) real stuff.
Like I said, the point of movies is to tell a story. Sometimes this means glossing over bits, getting details wrong, or even presenting things out of order, because the important part is he plot. We all do this when we tell stories, it's human nature. We want to convey how awesome/important/sad/happy/whatever a moment was, and to do that we need to properly contextualize the emotion and key bits, not every detail. When the makers of a fictional story try to get largely unimportant details right, they are showing dedication to craft, not asking for technical advice.
Maybe it's because I'm ramping my team up for demo season, where I have to remind them and the researchers they work with that the grant reviewers haven't spend the last 6 months thinking real hard about the problem, and aren't as expert in the sub-field/topics as we are (they are pretty smart competent people, but they gave us money to do the work because presumably we know more about it than they do...). To do a demo and to make a movie are very similar. You need to convey the importance of the work, without making bogus claims (in demos about research, in movies its about plot breaking), and convey the context in which it can be understood. Sometimes this means leaving out or glossing over really cool technical stuff, because it doesn't actually matter to the bigger picture. Sometimes it means saying "this part is simulated with these assumptions because we don't know yet, or it still needs more reseach, but if true, it shows our point nicely". Sometimes it means showing things happen at 10x or .1x real time, because that is how you tell the story. It isn't lying or being stupid, it is getting points across.
Well anyway, that turned into a rant. TL;DR - Detail are not the point of movies, they are just a vehicle to help the point, we should applaud careful attention to them, not nitpick.
- mibbitier 14y agoThing is, if you're "good" at something, and a movie gets it wrong, it can ruin the movie for you. My pet hate is people playing the piano, but playing the wrong notes (While the soundtrack is playing something different).
- archangel_one 14y agoTotally sympathise, I have the same with archery in movies. I can normally ignore the typical Hollywood stuff in LOTR or whatever, but really can't take it when they pretend to be modern + realistic (current worst case: Blade Trinity).
- gravitronic 14y agoDid you watch hunger games, and how did that archery look? Apparently the actress spent 6 months+ practicing but I'd be interested to hear an informed point of view.
- monopede 14y agoActually, she just spend a few weeks practising with an Olympic competitor, i.e., nowhere near 6 months. I'm not an expert on these things, but it seemed to vary from scene to scene. Someone commented on the trailer and explained how it's very accurate, but there were a few shots in the movie where what the expert explained seemed missing (like "kissing" the string).
- groby_b 14y agoI practiced archery for about 5 years in my mis-spent youth, and it sure didn't seem right. If she spent 6 months on that, she didn't have good instructors, or she paid no attention at all. (It wasn't horrible, but it was not worth 6 months of learning)
- archangel_one 14y agoHaven't seen it yet, sorry. I've read the book but wasn't excited enough to make a beeline for the movie. Probably will see it sometime though. From what I've seen of various shorts about the movie, the archery looks pretty good. I don't think she spent 6 months practising but she obviously spent some time on it with a good coach (a US Olympian, so she knows her stuff). The only thing they get wrong is that longbows aren't as accurate as they're portrayed, but that happens in every movie with an archer and it's just artistic license really.
- dholowiski 14y agoBecause we're nerds and it's fun.
- jwdunne 14y agoI don't see this as nitpicking really. I definitely don't see it as negative. Sure there is a bit of nitpicking but the author seems to have laid down some genuine comments about the movie on top of it. To be fairly honest, if I noticed something like this I'd crack a big grin and I'd wanna share it, like I just cracked a big grin whilst reading the post. I think, overall, this a compliment to the detail in the movie. They're using real technology and (kinda) believable commands/code. It's only after deconstructing the scene it's been found they haven't got it 100% right. Most of the time, when someone is 'hacking' at a computer it's a load of nonsense and usually makes me cringe seeing it. I remember one totally shocking clip where a guy was 'hacking' and you could plainly see it was Windows Media Player. Let's not even mention Hackers. Things like this make me smile and I find them really, really interesting when I either notice them or they are pointed out to me. I could probably waste a whole day reading an archive of these.
- gaius 14y agoSee http://hackertyper.net/ http://hackertyper.net/
- shrikant 14y ago> I remember one totally shocking clip where a guy was 'hacking' and you could plainly see it was Windows Media Player. This is not made up, folks. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DURk7VQhW-k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DURk7VQhW-k
- gravitronic 14y agoEven when this blog post gets into the technical inaccuracies it's just trivia, not nitpicking. Movies want to keep you in the suspension of disbelief (that the storyline is real) and as a programmer it's been hard to do that with most "hacking" scenes in movies. The only other blockbuster movie I can think of with a reasonably believable hacking scene was when Trinity used an openssl exploit in one of the Matrix sequels.
- pyre 14y agoTrinity used nmap to find an actual openssl exploit. Even then, people were nitpicking over whether or not the exploit was known during the time period that the world inside the Matrix is purported to be, though IIRC that was in good fun.
- adavies42 14y agothe hacking in the beginning of _Tron: Legacy_ looked pretty realistic to me (apart from the server's apparently being simultaneously sparc and x86). best of all was the end of _Veronica Mars_ (yes, not a movie) which is the only even vaguely realistic decryption plot i've ever seen.
- scott_s 14y agoI think you missed the point of the article. They were mockingly critiquing it, as the people behind the movie went above-and-beyond typical Hollywood technical gobbley-gook. The point is that it was accurate enough that they could critique it.
- polemic 14y agoI agree, except: hackers ⊈ developers Hackers are not optimizing for performance or readability. I've watched a few penetration testers at work - they have to have a very broad knowledge base and work at speed. They're not sitting around wondering if their query is going to work in 1s or 0.1s - it just doesn't matter. Awesome to see 'real' sql in action though.
- rbanffy 14y ago> Hackers are not optimizing for performance or readability. Speak for yourself ;-)
- polemic 14y agoI'm not a hacker, so I can't. FYI I'm referring to 'trying to break into a system, possibility illegally, with time pressure, hackers', rather than HackerNews hackers. Which I thought was reasonably obvious from the context. If you're actually trying to crack a system, you're generally trying a lot of different things very rapidly. Tweaking performance and nicely formatting code you're going to immediately discard is... a misappropriation of resources.
- jgrahamc 14y agoFor fun... see my decoding of the Morse Code at the start of Downton Abbey: http://blog.jgc.org/2011/11/downton-abbey-series-1-episode-1-morse.html http://blog.jgc.org/2011/11/downton-abbey-series-1-episode-1...
- sofal 14y agoI really don't understand why people need to nitpick humorous little blog posts like this. I mean, it's a joke -- the point is to have some fun picking apart the technical details of a movie that clearly went above and beyond in that aspect compared to other movies. That goes without saying. It's just faux pedantry; it's all in good fun.
- aptwebapps 14y agoNever seen the movie but my take away from the article was that I was really impressed they went as far as they did. The author of the article is just having fun, not criticizing it really.