Even then, the box: "an ASIC implementation of a newly discovered crypto attack" complete with a massive white board full of linear algebra is about as good a muggufin as you can ask for in any computer adjacent movie.
The only thing I don't love about it is the macguffin-ization itself. An algorithm is an idea and could've been communicated, published, spread around the world in the blink of an eye.
Some years ago I wrote down a sketch of a sequel based on this exact idea, but the paper is encrypted and the key is sharded, and much of the plot revolves around trying to convince the trusted people who hold the shards that the researcher is actually dead and they should unseal the document, while the adversary tries to convince otherwise.
In a traditional definition of "algorithm", maybe.
But think about a machine learning model or a neural network. The kind of breakthrough that will break RSA might not be describable in a research paper (sure, the science would be, but the science for neural networks took decades before it was able to be applied practically)
