The movie starts out with the stock market getting completely destroyed, someone has deployed a remote access tool, or a RAT into the system and started to manipulate stock value. Who and why? Once again I could not get past the first twenty minutes, so I do not know, but what we do know is that Hollywood decided to implement some form of circuitry interpretation. What kind of circuitry interpretation you ask? A lack of complete comprehension of how circuitry works is what I would assume. It seems they thought we should follow a lone bit down some form of board and then land near a rear grill of a computer. I would like to clarify this board was integrated into this rear grill, which the camera emerges from and we see a computer. For those who do not understand computers this is completely cool, Hollywood did a thing and now we know how computers work. BUT, and this is a big but, we emerged from the PSU. You are trying to tell me we traversed a circuit board, in a desktop, with an integrated PSU, and a single bit entered the PSU, which somehow had the ability to completely demolish the stock market?
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.

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.

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."

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.