Did I misunderstand something? I thought the guy who got shot on the shuttle was the only person who knew how to reboot the computers AND remove the code. So, the code is basically locked in place, until somebody comes along who’s a better hacker (of his code) than he is.
There’s always a better hacker.
Yes, that’s how the movie explained it. However, it’s kind of silly to imagine a functional space station with an unalterable code. I mean, if they have the tech to create and maintain Elysium, they’ll be able to adjust how it runs.
We just watched it, and wow it was awful in so many ways. By far the worst part however was the idea that hacking into the system and recoding everyone to ‘citizen’ would have any lasting impact whatsoever.
My favourite gripe.
You know if i’ve got an Armory full of hyper advanced weaponry and Exo-skeleton battle suits, i might just put some of my robot guards there to stop unauthorised people (say random mercenary psycho’s) accessing it. In fact i might just put some human guards there, wearing the battlesuits and carrying some of the hyper advanced weaponry.
Actually, that’s a very different last third of the movie if they take even the most elementary security precautions.
Armory. Guards.
Command centre.Guards
Vital computer hub of the entire station. Guards.
Clearly, they had to crowbar the script into the desired outcome. Otherwise, the med pods not being on Earth could be explained by having them only working in Elysian microgravity. But they’d need to be placed at the center of the torus instead of in people’s fancy living rooms. And the ending wouldn’t work, unless poor people are all shuttled to Elysium.
Also, it seems rather dubious :dubious: for Matt Damon’s hacker buddy to be able to edit the Elysium control system source code whilst Damon was still alive. The premise of the lethal code failsafe dictates that it be encrypted and not in editable plain text.
That said, I enjoyed the movie and was sad when the noble protagonist died. IMHO, she refused medical treatment when she realized her quest for a more perfect Elysium had failed.
As for the protagonist’s accent, I chalk that up to the result of learning English from future Rosetta Stone. Jodie Foster spoke French to some of the Elysians early in the movie, so I assume that’s her native tongue. And as we’ve seen with a certain Captain Jean-Luc Picard, future francophone speakers of English do so without what we perceive to be the modern French accent.
We had already seen that it wasn’t encrypted from when they look through it in the safehouse. It’s more likely that the kill command was intended to take out someone who wasn’t very good at coding, like for instance Delacourt, when they try to run it and make themselves dictator.
Your explanation doesn’t make sense to me. How and why would running the code during an Elysium reboot “kill” Delacourt? That’s like putting in a Windows disc into your computer to reinstall the operating system… and this action somehow kills you? Bwuh?
My understanding of the movie was that Carlyle rewrote the Elysium code, then created an encrypted file with a password. He chose an option that if the wrong password is used, there’s a lethal side effect. The encrypted file is uploaded into a brain implant, possibly writing into wetware memory a la Johnny Mnemonic.
I’m with them so far… but then Matt Damon steals the code from Carlyle. Here’s where they lose me. Either Matt Damon doesn’t have the right password, which should trigger the failsafe and erase the file and kill Carlyle (perhaps by writing lethal garbage into his brain). Or he pulls the password out of Carlyle’s head along with his other secrets, uses this password to decrypt the file, but then the film’s climax (as explained to the audience) is wrong.
As I stated, if the source code is viewable and editable, then it must be non-encrypted. If you can view the plain text, you can copy it and modify it. You can use your copy to reboot Elysium. Ergo, it sidesteps whatever triggers Matt Damon’s insta-death in the movie. Clearly, the scriptwriter wants a tragic death for Matt Damon. But you can’t have Matt Damon succumb to his radiation sickness, since he can easily go to a med pod and fix it with his forged Elysium citizenship.
Why not have Sharlto Copley mortally injure Matt Damon in the climactic battle, such that he has to choose between healing himself and rebooting Elysium? They could easily make this work with a good disemboweling. Say the med pods are incompatible with his hacked together 3rd party implants, so the data is erased if he removes his implant and also erased if he gets healed.
But if he directly goes to reboot Elysium, he will die from his injuries before the OS reinstall completes and the med pods come online again. Thus, the dilemma is preserved and we just need to move Damon’s sappy soliloquy a little later, to when we’re waiting for the med pods to come online and there’s plenty of time to speechify and die.
Presumably the protection kills anyone who tries to run the program except the original coder, but since it was specifically written for Delacourt and there was no plausible reason for Carlyle to suspect he would get hijacked, it seems most likely she was the intended target after he had traded the code to her in exchange for the defence contract.