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walkitoutThis had been sitting on the Tivo for a while; I figured I'd give it a try. I am so sorry I did. Even fast forwarding through large chunks of it, it was still shockingly bad.
Highlight: I liked the bit (not quite 40 minutes in) in which Willis drives a cop car over a fire hydrant and the resulting spritzer knocks a shooter out of a helicopter. Very nice. The car taking out the helicopter was okay; the airborne car in the tunnel felt derivative.
In fact, a _lot_ of this movie felt derivative. And misogynistic, at times.
Also, the cybersecurity chief was unbelievably useless. His idea of dealing with a breakin to his computers? Round up the usual suspects. And he _evacuated_ his HQ in response to an anthrax alarm (an _anthrax_ alarm? How could such a thing even exist?) going off, even tho he knew that air traffic control was down, Amtrak's control system was town, blah, blah, bleeping blah. Anthrax does not kill you quickly. Anthrax kills you _very very slowly_. (a) You could probably bet that if all those other computer systems were going down (and you knew your operation had been compromised recently), then that alarm is likely bogus. But more importantly, (b) if the entire freaking country is under multiple attack in your area of specialty, you suck it up and risk anthrax rather than abandon your post.
Do firefighters run out of a building when the smoke alarm goes off? No. They run _into_ the building. Geez.
On the bright side, this in no way detracts from the believability of the film; one could reasonably expect that emergency services under this administration would display this level of incompetence.
Unfortunately, while the film makes one toss off acknowledgment that in order to access some systems you would have to be physically on site, the film as a whole is predicated on a very small number of people compromising, like, _everything_ remotely. Also, the description of the power grid in the movie is so unbelievable that if you have any problem with incontinence from laughing too hard, you should probably go pee before you get to that part of the film (say, if you're pregnant, which is when I had problems of that nature).
I recognize that action movies are not supposed to be realistic, but I tend to take it a little personally when they get the computer stuff this far wrong.
On a final note, I suddenly realized that in addition to the more obvious similarities between romance novels and cheesy action flicks, they share a structural problem. Let's say you're reading a romance novel, er, erotica or whatever for "the good bits". Not that anyone actually does that (gosh no). But the "good bits" tend to actually only be good if the context has made them compelling: through good characterization, so you can relate to the people involved and can really believe they'd be doing what they are doing (to/with each other, in the way that they are doing it, etc.). Through reasonable plot development. Etc. Similarly, if you are watching an action flick for bits like the helicopter and the hydrant, you have to actually care somewhat about the people involved and have a backstory that makes you accept that what is happening is happening -- these people would do these things, etc.
This movie really failed on a lot of that. That's the real problem. I don't mind completely fictional computer systems if the story is there and working for me. And here, it just was not.
ETA: Unbelievable. Just unbelievable. Judging by googling, a shocking number of people out there actually think that this kind of attack is somehow possible. I don't even know what to do with this. Do they not realize how ancient and patched together and impossible to use most really important control systems really are? Even onsite with full access it's hard to get this stuff to do anything new and different. What a bunch of optimists.
Highlight: I liked the bit (not quite 40 minutes in) in which Willis drives a cop car over a fire hydrant and the resulting spritzer knocks a shooter out of a helicopter. Very nice. The car taking out the helicopter was okay; the airborne car in the tunnel felt derivative.
In fact, a _lot_ of this movie felt derivative. And misogynistic, at times.
Also, the cybersecurity chief was unbelievably useless. His idea of dealing with a breakin to his computers? Round up the usual suspects. And he _evacuated_ his HQ in response to an anthrax alarm (an _anthrax_ alarm? How could such a thing even exist?) going off, even tho he knew that air traffic control was down, Amtrak's control system was town, blah, blah, bleeping blah. Anthrax does not kill you quickly. Anthrax kills you _very very slowly_. (a) You could probably bet that if all those other computer systems were going down (and you knew your operation had been compromised recently), then that alarm is likely bogus. But more importantly, (b) if the entire freaking country is under multiple attack in your area of specialty, you suck it up and risk anthrax rather than abandon your post.
Do firefighters run out of a building when the smoke alarm goes off? No. They run _into_ the building. Geez.
On the bright side, this in no way detracts from the believability of the film; one could reasonably expect that emergency services under this administration would display this level of incompetence.
Unfortunately, while the film makes one toss off acknowledgment that in order to access some systems you would have to be physically on site, the film as a whole is predicated on a very small number of people compromising, like, _everything_ remotely. Also, the description of the power grid in the movie is so unbelievable that if you have any problem with incontinence from laughing too hard, you should probably go pee before you get to that part of the film (say, if you're pregnant, which is when I had problems of that nature).
I recognize that action movies are not supposed to be realistic, but I tend to take it a little personally when they get the computer stuff this far wrong.
On a final note, I suddenly realized that in addition to the more obvious similarities between romance novels and cheesy action flicks, they share a structural problem. Let's say you're reading a romance novel, er, erotica or whatever for "the good bits". Not that anyone actually does that (gosh no). But the "good bits" tend to actually only be good if the context has made them compelling: through good characterization, so you can relate to the people involved and can really believe they'd be doing what they are doing (to/with each other, in the way that they are doing it, etc.). Through reasonable plot development. Etc. Similarly, if you are watching an action flick for bits like the helicopter and the hydrant, you have to actually care somewhat about the people involved and have a backstory that makes you accept that what is happening is happening -- these people would do these things, etc.
This movie really failed on a lot of that. That's the real problem. I don't mind completely fictional computer systems if the story is there and working for me. And here, it just was not.
ETA: Unbelievable. Just unbelievable. Judging by googling, a shocking number of people out there actually think that this kind of attack is somehow possible. I don't even know what to do with this. Do they not realize how ancient and patched together and impossible to use most really important control systems really are? Even onsite with full access it's hard to get this stuff to do anything new and different. What a bunch of optimists.
anthrax detectors
Date: 2008-11-03 03:32 pm (UTC)alarm could exist.
Anthrax dectors do exist. A Google web search of "anthrax detector" gets
167,000 hits. A Google news search gets 342 hits.
Re: anthrax detectors
Date: 2008-11-03 05:12 pm (UTC)However, to be fair to this response, I'll include a specific link:
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/universal-detection-technology-receives-purchase/story.aspx
This is a recent article from a not too disreputable source about sales of the only prominent (on google) continuously sampling airborne system to detect anthrax. The product is listed in a government database to help first responders and so forth prepare for emergencies so _someone_ thinks this thing is legit. I'm willing to accept the proposition that this thing can find anthrax in the air.
However, the article includes the following:
"UNDT's anthrax detection equipment has been extensively used by first responders and private industry throughout the country. The equipment has been evaluated by the U.S. DOD as well as the United Kingdom military. The equipments capacities include:
* No cross-reactivity with near neighbor strains
* No cross-reactivity to household powders
* No set up time
* No expensive reader needed
* No decontamination requirements
* No false positives
* No false negatives
* No hook effect"
So what we're actually looking at is a press release. And some of those claims _cannot_ be true. In particular, the no false negatives/no false positives.
One possible response to my above claim is to point out that the system could avoid false positives/negatives by resampling in some way to confirm to the point of certainty. And I believe this is in fact how this system works. I think this because back in 2004, deployment of a system to detect anthrax in the mail was delayed for a period of time (I don't know if it ever got deployed at all, in other words) because the resampling system led to inconclusive results -- unable to determine whether or not there was anthrax.
Does an anthrax alarm exist?
Maybe. Is it any good? I doubt it.
ETA: I should probably explain why I'm so pissy about this. Readers of my website (separate from this blog) about reproduction may recall that back in 2005 I learned about a blood test (dried blood, no less) on maternal blood that purported to detect fetal blood cells and determine gender from this. I knew enough about the science to think this was possible. In the ensuing years, however, it has become abundantly clear (from the massive stack of lawsuits) that whether or not this is possible, the company selling this product wasn't implementing it right. _And_ it turned out that things were a lot more complicated in the science than initially appeared to be the case (fetal cells stick around in mum's blood for a _long_ time -- like, decades. And you can be pregnant and not know it, miscarry and not know it. And later, on your first pregnancy, potentially detect gender from that previous pregnancy. Just as _one_ way for things to go wrong.).
Another reason I'm pissy about this is because what's happened with cancer detection. Every time we get better imaging, we find more cancer. There are people out there who say that if we had "perfect" imaging, we'd just learn that we _all_ had cancer.
And one final reason I'm pissy about this: R. wanted a carbon monoxide detector for the whole house that T. couldn't disable (like the plug in ones). So R. replaced the smoke alarms with the smoke/CO alarms that are wired AND have batteries. They are so fucking sensitive, we can't always figure out _why_ they go off. The oven on, that we can figure out. But one night, it was probably a teeny tiny spider -- assuming it wasn't wood smoke coming in from outside.