Be Excellent To Each Other

I just watched Eagle Eye, and whilst kind of enjoyable, it didn't really work, because the film as a whole made huge stretches as to what current day technology can do. A lot of the rules of what technology can do were fictional, and for a film that pretty much requires it to be believable for any tension whatsoever, that's a pretty big leap.

Any suggestions of films that understand technology?

There aren't any - mainly because the populous don't understand technology, so you'd have to explain it to them, which would be dull.

It'd be like sitting eating popcorn watching Doc Glyndwr talk for two hours.

Really? None?

Well, I was possibly exaggerating a little.

It depends what you class as technology, really - something like Apollo 13 doesn't make massive scientific leaps, I recall. But then that's 40-odd years ago's technology.

Doc Glyndwr talking for two hours? I'd pay to not watch that any day.
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Any film made understands the technology of film-making enough to get it made.

Hackers. Highly realistic film.

'A 28.8bps modem!'.

War Games.

To be fair to DrG, I love him to bits and have known him for ten years now - and I feel you're doing him an (albeit humorous) massive disservice by saying that, as I always find his conversation engaging, interesting and thought provoking.

He is a HUGE nerd though, just one with the capacity for self effacement

Having said all that, your argument is fundamentally correct - cutting edge tech is beyond the ken of 99.9% of the population - even ten year old tech is beyond 99% of the population I suspect.

This will be far richer if we focus on films that massively fuck-up technology in the pursuit of the narrative, or whatever. However, it's been done to death on the internet, so maybe focus on films of the last ten years.

Let's get all those coders working on the errors in Swordfish for starters.
Then there's Inside Man

Have you checked TVTropes?

Crappy science is ususally Did Not Do The Research.
On the other hand, when it's ONLY science, it's Shown Their Work.

TVTropes is like the computer science design patters of fiction. (And they in turn are the Special Moves / Trainer Cards of software development.)

I joke, of course. However, when he lectures we lower mortals on that there science, it's like being a squirrel gazing in awestruck amazement at a flawless rendition of Macbeth performed entirely in Urdu




I would suggest a third category - where they have done their research, decided it'll bore people, so made up alternative science that sounds more interesting.

Hmm, well there's a whole bundle of docu-drama films that I can think of. 'The Right Stuff' is possibly one of the best marrying of technology fun and drama going. As soon as I can think of any proper ones, I shall let you know.

Night of the Living Dead displayed an excellent understanding of the applications of hefty chair legs, petrol-soaked rags and fire.

Oh, I don't know, I think we'd all pretty much agree that D.A.R.Y.L. had it pretty sewn up.

Ooh, ooh, I love it when people do "queries" on a computer and/or the Internet and they go BLEEP, FLEEP, MWEEP, BUGK, DWAWP, BLEEP, FLINK. WAWP WAWP WAWP. Oh no, they've detected us. RUN AWAY. BOO-WUP, BOO-WUP. REEEEEeeeeee...

Damn you. Damn you! I thought I had escaped that time-melting place when I fried my old hard drive, but nay. Damn you.

2001?

Malc

A Christmas Carol?

The Rock?, "It's the string of pearls configuration" Riiiight.

Yeah, perfect representation of the times - green screen text monitors, big clunky keyboard, shitty voice synthesis, audio coupling for the modem, enormous AI capable of near-real-time simulations of global thermonuclear warfare...

whenever a movie or tv show "enhances" a photograph I want to die.

Scene: Hard-nosed Detective Smeg is stood behind a nerd with bad hair and thick glasses sat at a huge 80's computer. They have a cheap digital camera from a crime scene. Smeg has found an interesting picture of the suspect...
SMEG: "Could you zoom in on that piece of paper in his top pocket, dammit?"
NERD: "Sure thing, Smeg" presses 4 million keys
A white box appears over a tiny portion of the picture. Annoying beeping noise as the white box expands to fill the screen. Image zooms in to a highly pixellated section
S: "Hmm, can't make it out dammit. Could you enhance that, fer christ's sake?"
N: "No problemo, Smeg" presses 4 million keys
Beeping noise again as a scanline tracks down the image turning the pixellated image into a clean, crisp reproduction of the train ticket in the suspect's pocket
S: "Excellent work Nerd, dammit! I may even let you fuck my sister!"
N: "YES!" Pumps fist

Don't ever watch an episode of Bones. It'll make your head explode.

Enemy of the State takes that particular cliche to entirely new dimensions, literally.

Or CSI.

CSI is the worst for bad science.
24 is the worst for bad computing.

Oh hush. It is better than most. Including the ringpull/telephone thing.

to be honest, I've never seen Bones and only watched 1 episode of CSI, like ever. Maybe I subconsciously knew that I wouldn't like it

Admittedly that's the point - feex.

I have visions of the delightful Jacqui Smith watching CSi or 24, gleefully pointing at screen and saying 'want that! want that!' whilst civil servants pass her more forms to sign.

This thread has given me several L-LOLs already. Also, fuck you Cras

Empire did an article on Bad Movie Science recently. The Core is particularly dumb (hey, here's conditions twice as hot and three times more pressurised than ground zero at Hiroshima, I'll just wander out there in my space suit). Almost every film with any sort of space combat (Star Wars, the BSG TV series, Star Trek...) shows rapidly manouvering little fighters with inexplicable wings. At least BSG has some token little positioning jets on the Vipers.

Apollo 13 is an excellent scientific movie, not only for being accurate, but for the bit where they turn out the boxful of bits and say "guys, we have to make an O2 scrubber out of this".

What really annoys me is when the science is bad for no reason. Quite often, films bung in any old crap explanation when they could have just as easily hired a scientist to write something at least half-reasonable sounding with no ill-effects.

I much prefer any sci-fi that just says, 'yes, we know this is impossible, but it just works ok?' than spends half an hour/3 chapters explaining in unnecessary minutae why their pseudo-science works.

Who fucking cares? I can suspend my disbelief long enough for it not to matter.

You can't bank in a turn without atmosphere, it seem obvious when you think about it really... Also, Firefly. They made a big deal about silence in space and it worked well and then ruined it with the space battles in the movie... ah well

The latest CSI Miami-or-New-York-or-Belgium-or-Somewhere overhaul is fantastic, a full-on virtual desktop that spreads over a table and up a wall, with multi-touch all over and scanners for everything built in - want to scan a photo? Put it anywhere on the table! Want to hack a SIM card? Put it anywhere on the table!

You can tell they've just thought "fuck it".

Shut the fuck up and open me another socket, Chloe.

Actually, Chloe's rampant personality disorders are the most realistic bit.

I wish I could "send something to someone's screen" as easily as they do in 24.

Just once I'd like to see:

Scene: Hard-nosed Detective SMEG is stood behind a NERD with bad hair and thick glasses sat at a huge '80s computer. They have a cheap digital camera from a crime scene. SMEG has found an interesting picture of the suspect...

SMEG: "Could you zoom in on that piece of paper in his top pocket, dammit?"
NERD: "No—it's just a fucking low-quality digital photo, you technically illiterate fuckwit. What you see is what you get."
SMEG: "Fuck you, nerd boy! See this bullet?"
NERD: "No."

SMEG shoots NERD in the eye.

SMEG: "You do now, shithead!"

Harsh, perhaps. But the nerd would at least finally put things right in this inaccurate area of quickfire plot devices. (In the same area, what's with US crime-fighting mostly being about using computers? Compare the likes of NCIS with Waking the Dead. The latter has someone recreating scenes using bits of board and chalk. The former, like most US shows, has someone whipping up a CGI animation in about 10 minutes to show everything that's happened.)

Re: Firefly/Serenity space sounds. Pretty obvious that was a compromise thing. Whedon tried to get out of it by saying the occurrences of space sound were within areas that had atmospheres.

and smile for once, you mardy cow!

You heard of email Doc?

Oh, one of my favourite cinema experiences was watching Abyss at the cinema with a molecular biologist. That has some seriously bad science in it. We'll start with being half a mile down and dragging an unsuited non-breathing actor through open water for nearly 2 minutes and then taking a further three minutes to resuscitate them, and then they were fine.

*waits for lengthy DocG explanation as to why email doesn't cut the mustard*

SEE ALSO: Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics. Their reviews of The Core and Armaggeddon are hilarious.

Babylon 5 pwns j00.

They move running programs from computer to computer, not documents. Network transparancy at the render level, basically. I don't think even X-Windows can do that (not to a live running program anyway).

Thinking on, the Empire article was based on the site and written by the site's editor or somesuch.

KVM switch.

I think this thread should be renamed to .... When Nerds disagree with Hollywood

Jurassic Dork

A single program, not the whole OS. Imagine, say, me being able to move my IDE over to a co-workers machine so he could debug some code for me. This'd actually be really useful, which just makes it more frustrating when they casually do it on 24.

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