The good and truly awful celluloid depictions of computers

[SineSwiper]

http://www.builderau.com.au/blogs/betal ... =339271089

[Kupek]

The techno-babble in Transformers was painful as well - but I still had fun with the movie.

I imagine this happens with everything that's on tv or in a movie. Think what a lawyer must think while watching a legal thriller, or a special forces operator thinks while watching an action movie.

[SineSwiper]

Yes, but look at the ones that got it right. Most of the ones that got it wrong are shitty movies, anyway. And the ones that got it right are cult classics. Just goes to show how that sort of thing adds to a movie.

[Lox]

I remember that episode of CSI:NY. My wife had it on and I remember turning to her with a look of disgust on my face and then ranting about how awful it was. I showed her this list last night to prove my point. haha

[Don]

While you don't need to be a super genius to write about imaginery quantum physics, you can't be an idiot either, and a lot of the time I got the feeling you got idiots writing about things they have no idea what's going on to try to impress presumably even more clueless viewers.

It really wouldn't hurt if people can just admit on the stuff they don't know about and leave it as 'don't know' or 'works by magic'. Nobody knows why Hyperspace works in Star Wars and that's perfectly fine. You slap on a Hyperdrive and you get across space really fast by magic. Some guys who are into this stuff might even be able to figure out a reasonable explanation, but Lucas sure doesn't have to know about Hyperspace to make Star Wars.

[Tessian]

Nobody knows why Hyperspace works in Star Wars and that's perfectly fine. You slap on a Hyperdrive and you get across space really fast by magic. Some guys who are into this stuff might even be able to figure out a reasonable explanation, but Lucas sure doesn't have to know about Hyperspace to make Star Wars.

I hate to show my inner geek, but you're wrong... hyperspace is one of those very common recurring elements of many scifi fiction. It's always entailed crossing over into another dimension/space/plane and exiting it back into your original dimension/space/plane at the point in space which was your destination. Do you need to know the basic principles of how it works in order to write a story about it? No, but claiming that it's not something most people know how it does work is silly.

And yes... I know Star Trek's warp speed is something totally different... I forget how that one works though, I just remember that the way it's accomplished is how the Federation's emblem was created

I do wish they'd do some research at the LEAST... it takes 5 minutes to do instead of looking like a dumbass on that CSI clip. They mentioned one Matrix clip as a good example but I know there were more. I believe it was in the first movie when Trinity was taking down the nuclear power plant. She exploited some known telnet vulnerability or something to take it all down.

[Don]

Doraemon is written for elementary school students and even there they got the whole 'shortest path between two points is by folding space' thing going. This is certainly a very simple concept to understand but it isn't remotely founded upon any scientific basis. I'm not aware of anybody able to fold space and time, and people aren't even sure how you can do it theoractically, which makes a lot of sense as we don't know if FTL travel is even possible. I think there's a very representative dialogue in Doraemon that represents how you're supposed to handle things you don't understand:

Nobita: How do you fold space like a piece of paper?
Doraemon: Because we can.

And your and mine undestanding of hyperspace is merely an understanding of this extremely dumbed down version. It might as well be a wizard allowed us to fold space. That's not an understanding of the actual science involved, which is not surprising since no one actually knows how to fold space.

[Kupek]

Nobody knows why Hyperspace works in Star Wars and that's perfectly fine.

Talk about what hyperspace is.

There's a difference between describing what something does and describing why it can do that. You described what hyperspace is, but you didn't explain why it works. It's the why that people get tripped up on, and end up sounding stupid.

[SineSwiper]

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Everybody hold it.

We're not talking about sci-fi. Granted, sci-fi should still have some basis in science. For example, Star Trek, especially TNG, took great care in making sure that there was a lot of science to what was in the show. Even if there was a fictional element to make the science get tied together (dilithium crystals), the science was still there.

However, REAL shit in REAL life need to be accurate in movies. Period. Just send the time with the research, and you'll end up with a better movie.

While you don't need to be a super genius to write about imaginery quantum physics, you can't be an idiot either, and a lot of the time I got the feeling you got idiots writing about things they have no idea what's going on to try to impress presumably even more clueless viewers.

Amen. One of the first things my HS English teacher told us about writing essays was "Don't write about something you know nothing about." I think that too many people don't bother with that lesson.

The techno-babble in Transformers was painful as well - but I still had fun with the movie.

I imagine this happens with everything that's on tv or in a movie. Think what a lawyer must think while watching a legal thriller, or a special forces operator thinks while watching an action movie.

Transformers: consider the source. I never liked Michael Bay. I still don't, but I do think that Transformers is a good movie (his only good movie). Pearl Harbor still makes me throw up a little in my mouth...

The 2nd point was talked about in the top of the link:

Ever wonder why your lawyer uncle leaves the room whenever you turn over to Boston Legal? Or why your forensic science cousin can't stand crime drama?

You know the answer: it’s the horrid trivialisation and dumbing down of an occupation to make it appear entertaining. Sometimes it is so unbelievable that it actually hurts and yelling at the screen is the only outlet.

[Don]

Well even if you take real life, it's one thing to have say a movie about hacking (popular these days) and say with my uber leet skillz I hack into your machine! It sounds contrived but people can buy it if you leave out the details. Now when you actually try to explain it, that's when it gets worse, because obviously if it was possible to explain how to hack into stuff so easily, someone would've already done it. At best you might be able to do something like what was mentioned with Matrix ala 'there's some ancient security hole that no one knew about.' But then that's awfully close to the realm of 'and it happened by magic' really.

[SineSwiper]

First of all, if you're making a movie about hacking into shit, you're clearly getting off on the wrong foot already. If your character is the "best hacker in the world" (they always are), then it's really off the deep end.

Hacking is merely exploiting security flaws in servers and breaking in to get information. It's typically not targeted unless it's known to have flaws. Nobody tries to break into the NSA, unless the NSA truly has a security hole somewhere (highly unlikely). Even if you manage to get in, the data is probably encrypted, and there is no magic decryption key to break that.

Also, everybody appreciated the little detail of the NMap hack trick in the Matrix. It showed that, yeah, the Matrix is some fictional world with mind-bending karate skills, but since it's based on the real world, they put it some real-world security hole.

And the security hole wasn't ancient. I think it was a pretty recent hack. And millions of companies forget to patch their shit. Sure, the rest of the details are pretty sketchy, like the actual time it takes to hack into something like that (and then to figure out how the power grid system works). But, fuck, it's certainly better than all of the pretty graphics, worm cubes, and Hackers-like Mac-based video hacking in any other movie on the subject.