It HURT to watch that opening scene. A power supply unit in no way shape or form should be build into the motherboard of a desktop system, the circuitry we were traveling seemed completely random and with 0 purpose, and follow it up by having us plummet into a power supply unit that ruins everything. It is completely absurd, it is hogwash and garbage, BUT its not over.
Next an agent in a foreign country sees the code scrolling down the screen and recognizes the code, it was a RAT him and a friend worked on in college just by seeing the assembly code at a glance. So I'm not a coder, but I know at a glance everything in hexadecimal looks the same, especially when its flying down a screen at break neck speeds. If some form of secret picture was drawn out in the hex, sure it could be construed as recognizable at a glance but... hexadecimal scrolling down a screen is in no way shape or form recognizable at a glance. Somehow this was enough for this foreign agent to come to the US, talk to some high ranking officials in the US and get his friend weaseled out of jail with the explanation being "you want me to trace this code? It's going to take someone else years, since it is in fact my code." Or some convoluted BS of the sort.The problem we have with this is that he admittedly put the remote access tool code online as an open source code. Yet he's going to be the only person in the world who knows it inside and out? That is complete and total nonsense, the code is readily available, any hacker worth their salt would be able to reverse engineer it in a very short period of time. Why was it even coded in assembly to start with? This part seems to be completely glazed over, assembly code is generally hardware specific, so I'm left to believe that a college project from 15 years in the past is the same piece of hardware used in the stock market? No, once again complete crap.
After Mr Beautiful escapes from jail for half baked crap reasons, he gets to go into an apartment of someone they believe is related to the RAT attack based on a code he had written 15 years ago in a language that would most likely be incomprehensible. In this apartment we find the body of a street thug with a needle in his arm, dead. The girl with him opts to get on his computer and see if he's the perp, or something stupid. What we get in one of the most important pieces of dialog that will make you want to throw your television remote THROUGH your television. Our leading lady, whoever she is, pulls up some assembly code, which as previously stated seems like a poor decision to be the code of which you write, its machine specific and honestly quite complicated, not for your beginner programmer. They start dissecting the code and say "oh he still has some regular words in the code, maybe he was not done." If there is anything but code in a code, it won't run past that point, its an error that will cause the whole code to fail. In the MIDDLE of his code he had English words typed up, just as a simple sentence, not an if/or statement, not legitimate code, just a sentence. What on gods green earth is that?So the code which was open source has now been modified to contain an English written sentence mid code, for a specific piece of hardware that somehow runs from its power supply, which is enough reason to spring a "hacker" from prison. That isn't even the point where you throw the remote, no that is a few words of dialog later, no it is this beautiful half baked sentence. "He has no IP address, he's using onion routing protocol, so he can't be traced" Mr Pretty responds "someone probably taught him that in jail."
What? A guy who is capable of coding in assembly code has to be TAUGHT how to use Onion routing? Which is a simple executable file that you can download 100% for free online, and run with the computer literacy skills of a retirement community. That has to be taught to someone? Are you kidding me? This was literally the final straw, I was forced to resort to turning on something a little less mind numbingly bad, so I turned to the Kardiashians which despite its infinite amount of god awful hogwash and garbage is STILL a shorter pile of human waste than the filth that director Michael Mann force fed us.I had high hopes, I was praying that Hollywood would not make more media crap that would completely obliterate any sense of acceptable left in this world. After the great success of Mr. Robot maybe they had learned something? Sadly that just is not true. Instead we are spoon fed a hollywoodized far fetched story of a guy who wrote a code that is incompatible with anything other than his own computers, the code somehow functions withing the power supply unit of the stock market which is impossible, the onion router for some reason requires a college degree to use, and its all for some reason a good excuse to get a guy on of jail because he knows the ins and outs of an open source code. If it were at all possible to completely erase this movie from existence I would say that is a great idea. Save yourself the two hours this movie is going to ask you to commit to, and do something more productive, watching the Kardashians for three hours is more productive than spending 10 minutes on Blackhat.
Hollywood needs to appeal to the masses of people with a casual interest in hacking. Bear in mind- Roger Ebert gave it a 3.5 out of 4, which is effectively an 87.5% rating, where Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, and MetaCritic gave it 30-50%.
ReplyDeleteThe difference? Ebert is an older guy, reviewing long before the web was a thing. The others were started as online movie platforms, and as such, probably have an audience, and subsequently reviewers, that are more tech savvy. Ebert may have seen the tech as plausible, where the others would have been harder to fool.
Thanks for the review anyway. Excuse me, I'm going to go watch Hackers now.