A lot of people are bagging on the movie as having been technically inaccurate in some way. Truth is, they got more things right than they got wrong.
It's not a bad movie, really. It's also not really a blockbuster - not enough special effects, and the drama aspects ... well, they don't really *pop*. Still, it's a solid middle-of-the-pack effort.
Yes there are good looking geeks, and yes there are geeks with hot girlfriends (and sometimes, the geek *is* the hot girlfriend!). Enough with the stereotypes already, guys.
The plot holes are really the girlfriend's sudden change of heart, and the other girl's equally sudden role reversal. Also, the Tim Robbins 'surprise me' approach wouldn't work too well in real life; his goons would get caught too often.
But here's the big spoiler: the idea that a couple of guys in a back room, peering over the shoulders of garage hackers everywhere, would be able to differentiate brilliant source code from typical spaghetti code is ... well, it's the biggest error in the movie, and after reading five pages of comments I am surprised no one else spotted this. Source code is mind-numbingly dull to read, even when the reader is another coder. The primary way to tell what works is to compile and run it, and without an army of code-savvy typists reading inputting that code as they read it from video feeds, there just wouldn't be any way to tell the good stuff from the bad.
Secondly, and I just realized this one, fiber-optic video feeds from every hacker garage on the planet would require a pretty large team of operatives to set up and maintain. So their payroll alone generates a paper trail a mile wide; not to mention the trail generated by all the broadband subscriptions that would be required.
Still, if you are willing to suspend disbelief for an hour and a half, this isn't a bad movie. The Microsoft hatred is slathered on a bit thick, but that's true in most geek hangouts already, so there's nothing new there. The girls are hot, the dialog isn't bad, the general plot is alright. Milo's trick at the end is a good one. The geekery isn't overwhelming to a non-geek, and isn't wrong enough to set off (many) alarm bells for real geeks.
I'd watch it again.
It's not a bad movie, really. It's also not really a blockbuster - not enough special effects, and the drama aspects ... well, they don't really *pop*. Still, it's a solid middle-of-the-pack effort.
Yes there are good looking geeks, and yes there are geeks with hot girlfriends (and sometimes, the geek *is* the hot girlfriend!). Enough with the stereotypes already, guys.
The plot holes are really the girlfriend's sudden change of heart, and the other girl's equally sudden role reversal. Also, the Tim Robbins 'surprise me' approach wouldn't work too well in real life; his goons would get caught too often.
But here's the big spoiler: the idea that a couple of guys in a back room, peering over the shoulders of garage hackers everywhere, would be able to differentiate brilliant source code from typical spaghetti code is ... well, it's the biggest error in the movie, and after reading five pages of comments I am surprised no one else spotted this. Source code is mind-numbingly dull to read, even when the reader is another coder. The primary way to tell what works is to compile and run it, and without an army of code-savvy typists reading inputting that code as they read it from video feeds, there just wouldn't be any way to tell the good stuff from the bad.
Secondly, and I just realized this one, fiber-optic video feeds from every hacker garage on the planet would require a pretty large team of operatives to set up and maintain. So their payroll alone generates a paper trail a mile wide; not to mention the trail generated by all the broadband subscriptions that would be required.
Still, if you are willing to suspend disbelief for an hour and a half, this isn't a bad movie. The Microsoft hatred is slathered on a bit thick, but that's true in most geek hangouts already, so there's nothing new there. The girls are hot, the dialog isn't bad, the general plot is alright. Milo's trick at the end is a good one. The geekery isn't overwhelming to a non-geek, and isn't wrong enough to set off (many) alarm bells for real geeks.
I'd watch it again.