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| B B B | |
| Review by Xibo | Date seen: January 15, 2001 |
| Viewing Location: Union Square, NYC | Grade: B |
| Summary: Cute spoof of Microsoft | |
| Tim Robbins plays a great Bill Gates-like software CEO obsessed with sucess to the point where he installs secret video cameras in the offices of hackers around the country to spy on their programming progress... the concept is absurd, and the script is absurd, but several scenes and elements are quite topical. Watching simple programs declared to be "brilliant" and "innovative" was likewise very amusing. But it was the little tidbits that a really fun to look for... like the one-second shot of a hacker wearing a red fedora (cf. RedHat).
Ryan Phillippe is far too much of a pretty boy to be a talented programmer, and the girl hacker, played by Rachel Leigh Cook, is also far too good-looking to be taken seriously. But Tim Robbins did an excellent job looking the part of a scruffy software CEO. I'm dying to know which campus this was shot at, it looked pretty interesting. | |
| B- B- B- | |
| Review by Finrod | Date seen: 0, 0000 |
| Viewing Location: netflix DVD | Grade: B- |
| Summary: Great use of open source, good spoof of Microsoft, mediocre movie | |
| This movie probably has the best use of computers in recent movies, which it damn well should since they're the center of the movie. Even so, there were some flaws: most important code isn't just written by one person any more, especially if that person is the CEO of a major software company. It was cool seeing them type command-line stuff to launch GUI stuff, which is As It Should Be, IMHO. The unfortunate thing about this movie is that it's a very pedestrian movie, so all that effort to get the technical stuff right was alas mostly wasted. At least they didn't try to put a number >255 inside an IP address (like The Net), and even got the satellite IPs all in 10.x.x.x. | |
"I should put quotes here."