Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Wed 10th Sep 2003 03:36 UTC
With the computer market exploding into success the last 20 years more and more movies are featuring people using computers. Being a computer geek myself, I expect a level of "technological reality" for the movies that are not in the realm of "sci-fi", but directors usually are feeding their movies with superficial scenes about computers just for the happy clapping from the computer-illiterate audience.
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You missed my point. It may be true that drama suspense and terror are to be had by a hacker, but you can't expect an audience to be engaged by watching an "accurate" depiction of the activity of hacking.
). So most of your hacker's time will be spent watching something like a dictionary hack scroll by while eating pizza or picking his nose. Hardly cinematic. Sure you could cut a few scenes together where he's actually typing something, but you're still stuck with the unappealing command line, and frankly, watching someone else type is very boring.
Suppose your movie hacker has to break into a government computer. Disregarding backdoors, socially engineered password or grossly insecure systems (which in themselves make good alternative plot points), it's going to take long hours, most probably at a CLI, largely using automated tools (i'm guessing about this of course
As for the documentary, well, different rules apply. You are obliged to portray events in a truthful manner. In any event, the actual mathematics were peripheral to Wiles' human drama, which is what the documentary set out to show.
I'm sure you can portray computing accurately in films, I just doubt that anyone would want to watch it. So, it would seem, does Hollywood.