Technology BS in movies

I’m not talking about suspending your disbelief for a sci-fi flick, I’m talking about stuff they present as fact that just can’t be done.

I just saw M:I III last weekend and if I see one more movie where they blow a satellite photo so you can read a license plate number my brain’s going to ex

Any why is that any worse than FTL drive? Both are about as likely, aren’t they?

I don’t think that they’re necessarily ‘presenting stuff as fact’, and I don’t think it’s any harder to suspend disbelief for ‘mission impossible three’ or some other big-budget action thriller than it is for Star Wars… as long as you accept that both of them are equally likely to throw in technology BS for the sake of the plot.

Of course, some people who know to suspend disbelief in movies set in the future, will accept everything that they see in MI-3 as fact. (Well, with respect to the technology, geography, politcs… presumably not the actual characters and plot.) Is that really the fault of the people making the movie?

Having not seen the movie, can I just ask:

Did they perhaps have some techie character sitting at a computer, with the main character looking over his shoulder saying, “OK, let’s zoom in on that…OK, now can we sharpen that up a little?”

Where’s the puke smiley?

Gas, darling - *did * your brain explode? Sure seems like it, the way your sentence ends! :slight_smile:

It’s not so much the tech stuff that bugs me as it is the total disregard for physics. That and the prediliction for explosions that look nothing like a real one.

The thing that I can’t get past is that most of us have seen a computer.

Well, most of the viewing audience, that is; I think it’s safe to say that all of us Dopers have seen at least one.

We all know what Windows looks like. We all know what Windows applications look like. With the rare exceptions of those of us who are stuck as admins for archaic systems, you are rarely going to see a black command prompt screen.

Why do they keep showing up in movies? Lost I can understand; the computers are from the 70’s. But The Matrix??? (“Time to wake up, Neo.”)

No, they defibbed me in time. . . . :wink:

I was sure this was going to be a thread about movies made from Michael Crichton books.

Almost. They were explaining how they tracked down a baddie in Europe and showed a high shot of a city, then kept stepping the zoom up until you could read the license plate number on the back of a car (from an overhead view, no less), which of course they traced to him. It was an after-the-fact demo rather than the typical scene you described, but I puked after the third zoom.

BTW there was an article in the Washington Post interviewing some real VDOT traffic engineers (Ethan Hunt’s cover in the movie is a VDOT traffic engineer) and they said that the one line in the story that actually had to do with traffic engineering was BS (". . .a single tap on the brake pedal can have a ripple effect for 200 miles. . .").

Movie computers are in a unique class of their own. Their screens are super bright so that you can see the image of what’s on the monitor shining back on the operator’s face. And when users enter passwords, they don’t just get a simple “Access denied” dialog box on a gray background with the “!” yellow triangle icon like you’d see in Windows, but instead a screen that says ACCESS DENIED in a huge font. Movie computers also make lots of gratuitous beeping and clicking noises that real computers usually don’t make.

Actually, The Matrix Reloaded shows a completely accurate nmap scan and exploit when Trinity hacks the power plant. Yes, the command prompt. Linux. UNIX. To heck with archaic. In the beginning was the command line, and that is where true power still lies.

WarGames was, if simplified, reasonably to highly accurate, as well, showing social engineering, acoustic couplers, and a kid dialing into a expensive computer to play pointless video games. Yes, you could get into school systems something close to that way… back then, the tech support was usually some local guy who didn’t want to come in, so he’d just dial in and fix stuff.

That’s because movies computors come from the same fairy-land where all phone numbers begin with 555. :slight_smile:

Well, the way I see it, Star Wars is all about making shit up and then superimposing a plot on it–that’s the whole philosophy. SciFi (hard scifi, anyway) is about extrapolating, predicting, or inventing science and exploring the possibilities. The idea of a light saber is cool, and it’s just a fun idea. Nobody thinks it’s real or even that it’s possible (notwithstanding articles that explore the theoretical possibility).

I can see suspending my disbelief when Ethan Hunt performs amazing feats; part of the fun is a character who exhibits nearly superhuman capabilities. I can see suspending my disbelief when Ethan is on the phone to home base and they bring his position up on a screen based on the GPS from his phone, and walk him through the city. I don’t know if that could actually be done today but I could believe it is technically feasible.

But in this case they took a plot and in this case, lazily made shit up to fill up a plot hole. The writers had this conversation:

“Well, how did they see the license plate number?”
“I dunno. How about guys on the ground tracking the car?”
“No, then we wouldn’t need to send in more guys on the ground.”
“Wait a minute, satellites send back digital photos, right? Well, you can blow up a photo, right? Why don’t we just have a satellite take a photo, and have them blow it up, like, 100 times?”
“Cool! Let’s go get lunch.”

It’s even worse than that.

You’d need a strange screen that produces a focussed image in the plane where the user is sitting. This means of course that the screen would be useless for its normal purpose. All the user would see is the glaring light of whatever color happened to be falling on his pupils.

I suppose if he moved his head all around, he’d be able to infer, eventually, what was on the “screen”. But that could kill the tension in those movie scenes where the hero is in a hurry. Better yet, if there were a mirror nearby, he could look at himself in that, and read the text from his flesh.

Still, all in all, it seems like a cumbersome technology. Boy am I glad we don’t build 'em that way any more.

Huh? Neo was a geek. At the time of The Matrix, it was still pretty common for geeks to avoid using Windows except in the rare instances when you had to use a Windows application, or even turn up their noses at GUI shells for the various flavours of Linux. You used a CLI as much as possible because you could. Heh.

Speaking of that, though, one thing (apart from the stupid name) bugged me about Firewall:Harrison Ford’s character creates an over-complicated hardware kludge to pull data scrolling off CRTs of “secure” terminals (with no ports) using a scanner from a fax machine taped to the screen and spoojed to a hard drive from an mp3 player. The problem is, the CCD scanner that fax machines use have a tiny vertical scale – they grab one little slice (one pixel high) at a time. Many scanning cycles pass as the paper is scrolled past it. Data scrolling on a screen doesn’t move past the scanner that way, though. (It could, of course, but it doesn’t in the movie.) Everything moves an entire line at a time, so no matter how fast the scanner was, it could only grab the same tiny slice of each line, and most characters would have many other characters that yielded the same pattern with that slice, so you wouldn’t end up with a dataset from which the original text could be reliably reconstructed.But I guess it’s not as bad as Enemy of the State style shenanigans where CCTV images contain unlimited high res data and can be rotated in three dimensions.

preview after 'net outage

Heh. Except for the self-aware minicomputer’s ventriloquist routine, managing to physically reproduce the voice of the kid’s hardware text-to-speech device in the DOD war-room, when said device was still sitting on top of the kid’s monitor at home. :smiley:

Movie computers beep on every keypress. Just imagine how annoying that’d be IRL!

It’s doable, but behind schedule. Basically, a VOIP system I sell is (supposedly) going to be able to take your GPS-enabled cell phone and, when you’re past a certain distance from your office, automatically switch your office extension to “out of office”.

-Joe

I don’t have to imagine it. The dumb terminals we used to have for our AS/400 did exactly that. I was actually disciplined for modifying mine.

Aaaaaaaargh!

I accepted many things when watching “Jurassic Park” but when the little girl sat down to that video game and said “I know this. It’s Unix.” I actually moaned out loud – which I almost never do. But that was just one of the most blatantly awful Tech BS moments in a movie built on them.