Friday, August 16, 2013

Top 10 Hollywood Hack scene fails

The Gaijin emails to point out the awesomeist Redit, It's A Unix System I know this!  You will lose a day here, not just in what is posted to it but in what that leads you to.  This is pretty good.



All I can add is that the movie "Hackers" was such a deep sucking chest wound of FAIL that it could have had 3 or 4 scenes in the top 10.  But I guess that would have been bogarting the Fail, or something.

4 comments:

Goober said...

This is a perfect example of that effect where when you’re reading an article on a topic about which you are familiar, and you remark at how wrong the newspaper reporter is on that topic, then turn the page to read an article on a topic with which you’re unfamiliar and assume that the reporters got it entirely correct.

I see so many inaccuracies in movies that it drives me crazy sometimes:

1. Have you ever watched gun handling in movies? Anyone with even a passing familiarity with how to handle and fire a gun should be appalled at how poorly they handle weapons in the movies;
2. Any time they have construction sites in the movies, I typically count hundreds of different OSHA violations, and see means and methods that are just baffling. In the opening scene of the movie Casino Royale, during the opening parkour chase scene, they run through a construction site where they are pouring concrete foundations, erecting structural steel, and installing drywall (in a building that is not yet enclosed and dried in) all at the same time. I know this is a foreign country, and maybe there’s something going on on that site where they do things different for some reason, but it didn’t look like there was any reason for that to be the case (just for those of you unfamiliar with the process, there are very few reasons that all three of these activities would be occurring concurrently. It would be very, very rare, and would involve phased construction or remodel/addition work, neither of which it appeared this site was intended to be);
3. Any time they portray wilderness, and the difficulties of surviving in the wilderness, they just fail. The focus is on things that city folks would assume to be the things to worry about (wolves? Really?) and not on the things that you really need to worry about (freezing to death, finding water).

And yet, I know very little about flying airplanes, so whenever I see someone portraying a pilot in the movies, I just assume it’s a fairly accurate representation of what it takes to fly an airplane. You know as well as I do that any pilot watching is probably rolling his eyes…

Mark Philip Alger said...

I thought it was a good subversion of the satellite imagery trope in NCIS (Kill Ari, Pt 1, I think), when they were trying to read a license plate using satellite imagery. The angle was wrong and McGee actually DUCKED DOWN to try to get a better angle on the screen and Abby said, "It's not a dress, McGee. You can't look up it to see what you want."

M

Mark/GreyLocke said...

I agree with Hackers, but one of my favorite movie scenes is still the train station revolving phone booths.

Ian Argent said...

I basically figured that the people responsible for Hackers decided that showing ACTUAL hacking would be boring as hell, so the hacking sequences are basically the equivalent of some kind of stylized dance (ballet?) or the song-and-dance numbers in a musical. The movie is a lot more palatable that way.