This movie is bad.
1. poor acting
2. constant proselytizing about fairly superficial hacker culture ideas
3. plot isn't executed well. tries to create twists at the end but it simply doesn't come together.
4. lack of character development as well. a large portion of the movie is the main character giving various monologues about how cool he is as a hacker, but it still doesn't create some sort of human connection with the viewer(or at least with me). He was forgettable. The other characters were boring too.
5. the worst part was when there was an overt need for one of the characters to quite uncharacteristically tell the main character to stick to his ideals and fight for something bigger than himself. this cliche moment made me cringe.
I stuck through the movie mainly because my brain still refuses to account for sunk-cost fallacy for time. I know I'm making a lot of claims here--frankly I don't want to spend anymore time substantiating with examples. Just take my word or go watch it. Hope this helps others decide where to allocate their time though.
Having made a feature length film, for what I imagine to be a similar budget or less, I might also be able to appreciate the effort that was put into this better than most here.
I think the general HN rules regarding criticism when people post a Show HN should be applicable here.
Originally, I was going to add in the following:
"Nonetheless, I realize the people behind the movie probably put forth a lot of effort into making the project and commend them for that. I am but a critic. I hope these comments do not deter the people behind the project from pursuing what they want to do but is rather taken as feedback and impetus for improvement."
However, I took it out because I think that it seems almost implicit that those who make products or art for the public are subject to criticism. I did not make any outrageous claims or have ad hominem attacks. Given that I was focused on the content and I spent the time to watch through it, I thought the criticism was fair,
I wanted to write this additional comment because I did struggle with being diplomatic versus just being more indulgently blunt. Perhaps I should have added something that showed some nuance or awareness, but then this leads to my having to do so for ever criticism or review. But maybe that is kinder and perhaps more helpful for people. Who knows. Your comment is duly noted.
Thank you for the sunk cost fallacy reminder: because of it, I'm closing my browser tab after about 35 minutes. The premise is good and intriguing, but I agree with you that the movie is not very good, for the reasons you state.
Seconded. After about 30 minutes in I had to start taking notes about things that bothered me. Some highlights:
SPOILERS BELOW
The acting is bad, yes, but the script is not much better. There are so many places where they seriously oversell something. The classic maxim, "show, don't tell," is very appropriate here. Often times they approach something so straightforward, so on-the-nose that it is hard to take it seriously.
For example, there is a scene that I assume was shot solely to explain how apathetic the interrogators are towards the prisoners because it has almost no further plot significance. They have the guard say, basically, "I don't care about you. If I come in tomorrow and you're not here I don't care. I'll just interrogate whomever is here. It's my job." And while I think that's a poor script, a really good actor could probably sell it to be intimidating, but that didn't happen. It was just boring. Really boring.
Another example is the pair of agents that interrogate hash. The younger one is super aggressive, to the point of being comical. The older is super laid-back, again to the point of being comical. I don't get the feeling that either was suppose to be comical, but they are so one-dimensional and obvious that it is.
The call out to the CSI-style "enhance" was another example. Sure, they had to include a realistic version of that, but the whole scene reads like that was the only point of that scene. Like on the storyboard they just had, "This is where we make the joke about zoom-enhance." Or like they had some checklist of things to make sure they referenced.
You are exactly right also about the proselytizing about superficial hacker culture. I don't get the impression that the main character is an elite hacker with strong convictions about the way the world should be who stumbles onto something. I get the impression he's just a script-kiddie with the soundbite morals of a teenage hacker wannabe. Anyone who has been around for more than 13 years has a more nuanced understanding of the world. Being idealistic doesn't mean you have to have a view of the world that is black and white to the point of absurdity. I guess that would not have been so bad if his views evolved over time, but like you said: no character development. To make it even worse, after spending so much of the beginning of the movie explaining how life-defining his beliefs are he just abandons these core tenants of his world-view at the end like they're nothing.
Also missing is a sense of proportion or even consistency of urgency. Sometimes other characters will freak out over something that happened. But then the next scene you have "yeah, that stuff happens when you hack the government. Shouldn't have done that." Or the government agent who implies, casually, that after a minor mistake she was tortured to the point of not sleeping for days. Like it's no big deal, just part of the job. We torture employees and terrorists alike!
The torture scenes themselves were exemplary of the boring nature of the movie. I loved the "worlds can explain how horrible something like 20 days or torture is" so now let's just show you the words "20 days later." They literally had that voice-over on top of those words. I'm sorry, saying "It was indescribable," doesn't do anything to sell me on the reality of it.
And that's not even addressing the huge plot holes, or trying to understand what the point of the movie actually was (because it definitely wasn't a compelling story). Don't waste your time with this one.
Be careful the movie is available for free on Youtube/Vimeo for a very limited time! After the 24hr free-view period, the movie will be offline (see. http://www.thehackermovie.com/about/ ).
Did anyone figure out who the guy was -- his original client? Was he CIA or was he in the black ops commercial company -- the one that wrote Shepard? Are we to presume that Timothy joined the organization the same way Will does? Is Timothy in the CIA or the company, or does it many any difference? Was part of Timothy's reward the hooker he was playing doctor with? High risk reward there -- torture on one hand, and money and hookers on the other. Did he steal Will's girl too?
Then at the end -- his client tells Timothy that he has been there for 3 weeks and they were closing that facility. Does that mean that Timothy was in charge of how long Will was held? Which friends picked him up at the end?? -- does that mean some of then really survived? And what info were the interrogators after? If it was how Will did it, why is he suddenly best friends with a guy who set him up and will reveal all? Is it implying that the CIA/black ops uses these techniques as a standard recruitment procedure?
I personally don't think that fear based people are very smart. And I think that a little moral fiber also enhances IQ. This character said he didn't care about rules of nations, and then says that he has to continue because it is wrong. Doesn't compute. He doesn't even seem to register that he was endangering his friends. Not that people like this don't exist. Maybe that was the point, that power is in the hands of narcissistic children with crippled moral fiber. If so, there's nothing new in the computer age about that one.
It seems they've taken the movie down, was supposed to be up for 24-hours but given the response here, maybe they thought that wasn't a good idea. To be fair this wasn't the greatest audience for it, we're the type of people to pick things apart and we're collectively pretty clued on "hacking".
The production quality was good, the fact that it's an indie film is pretty cool. I think we're expecting too much from it, although given it's SF roots you'd think they'd target the extremely tech-savvy audience rather than the average movie-goer.
I give these indies a lot of praise. With no money and very little artistic support, the director pulled off a B class movie. Which is extremely admirable. The plot needs alot of work, but the idea of an overlord ei "Sheppard" is rather mesmerizing. It was a Sunday afternoon flick, and I sat through the whole movie. The mention of tor, wireless hacking with something like an raspberry-pi running xubuntu in a can on a battery. It was totally feasible, I might even put one together tonight. But for Geeks, this movie is something like a carrot on a stick for 24hrs.
It definitely took stylistic cues from pi, The Social Network, and Hackers. There were some good ideas and a few good scenes, but overall it was pretty bad -- as many other commenters have detailed.
The premise of the movie seems pretty interesting I love the profit-share model, and the motivation behind creating the film:
"At the core of ALGORITHM’s plot are the questions that are shaking up the tech world to it’s very core, and the nations of the world right along with them: privacy, human rights, the place of government in the lives of citizens, the value and power of technology."
The business model for ALGORITHM is based on the models of tech startups as described in The Lean Startup. It’s a profit-share agreement, giving everyone who works on the movie a vested interest in the success of the project. All profits get shared by the artist who actually made it happen.
Lots of indie movies are put together this way. It's industry code for 'work for free.' I own a percentage of several feature films, none of which are actually worth anything. That's not an altogether bad thing, it can be a good way to gain experience or burnish your credentials, eg I will sometimes work on a project for free because it creates a connection with a particular actor or gives me the ability to call in a favor in the future.
But you should know that it's kind of an indie/student film marketing trick. It's much easier to find talented folk than the money to pay them.
I can definetly understand finding people is easier than paying them. I guess I didn't really factor the economy and indie movie scene into my response.
Experience never hurts - so long as you learn from it (and it is benifical to you (eg. connections and favors; as you pointed out)
The descriptions of "hacking" techniques were cringe-worthy, the character development was just about non-existent, and the plot was pretty basic. However, I liked that they spent some time trying to explain why privacy is important, even if you aren't a criminal.
I bought the soundtrack. It is very reminiscent of the more atmospheric The Social Network tracks, but doesn't hit the highs of that album (as one might expect). Still recommended for people who like synth-y atmospheric background music.
I think you folks are overestimating my interest in troubleshooting a site's uninformative error message on an otherwise working system just so I can view a trailer on a site I don't otherwise use. I just found it a little funny that their "hacker" trailer wouldn't play on my "hacker" computer. Were this a problem I often encountered on sites, it would have been fixed long ago. <troll>And yes, I'm aware it probably works on Ubuntu. But I'm using Linux. :-) </troll>
Shouldn't we play fair with them? Although you can use that link to download it (yep, it works), where is the point to don't keep it to ourselves?
Heck, I understand we all want to see when we want because we have better things to do now or not enough time. Regardless, I don't think we should ruin from starters their commercial project.
I mean, it's not even a DRM. Just a weak misleading protection layer from Vimeo for deterring little noobs that don't know how to use their browser's debug console.
Let's give the creators some advantage before gaming the system.
Well, downloading the video from Vimeo doesn't cost the project anything. And if I like the video, then I can support them by paying. I don't see any upside to taking on the risk myself.
Also, if someone genuinely can't afford the price, they can still enjoy the video. That seems like a net win for society.
Yes, you can download it and support them by paying later. I agree.
But... I see no point into publishing the direct stream link. Although it's funny due what the movie is about, I think it creates some disadvantages for them.
I hope they took in mind this and they don't feel threatened by this behavior.
> But... I see no point into publishing the direct stream link.
I do: now I can watch the movie on my TV instead of my computer screen. With my current setup, having a naked mp4 file is the only way for me to easily do this.
No matter how long, more "leechers" are going to abuse the system instead of a few "geeks" with the knowledge.
Sure, if the timespan is short, almost no damages will be taken. Unless it gets distributed through other networks. If they didn't expected this, they may be upset.
Hey, even maybe this was the main purpose, to go viral. Who knows. I just wanted to share how I felt to see the stream link published.
Ah, I actually expected this to happen so I guess I wasn't affected the same way. If you check the pirate bay, you can find every mainstream movie no matter how much DRM there is on it. So it doesn't surprise me that a video posted online got ripped off already. Also, it's been proven in multiple studies that piracy doesn't hurt a project's bottom line, so I hope they're not too worried about that.
It changes absoultly nothing in this context here. However you call it. You wanted to keep some knowledge to yourself because you thought it may be some kind of special thing. It's not. Especially not here.
That's hilarious, because from what I've seen so far in the first 30 minutes of the movie, the main characters would have no qualms about bypassing the protections.
I'm hoping that the movie gets better, but so far it's espousing the teenage-wannabe-god version of being a hacker.
And the cool thing is, you can just put http://3626153261 in your browser address bar and end up at slashdot.org (news.ycombinator.com is behind CloudFlare, which doesn't allow IP-based access for obvious reasons)
I guess I don't understand how the title and subtitle are linked. The synopsis and trailers don't talk about algorithms at all.
Also, a lot of the trailers focus on cracking, it appears, and not hacking as in doing creative things and using things in ways not expected? Why would someone aiming at the tech community use a word so wrongly, and in a way that riles some of us up?
While I understand that mono uses the .exe suffix, not many other things do in the *nix ecosystem, but the screen shot they use shows what appears to be ls -l output and all the files have a .exe suffix.
EDIT: Fair enough, I'm being a bit too critical of the exe files. (I don't think there is a strike-out markup supported?)
>Also, a lot of the trailers focus on cracking, it appears, and not hacking as in doing creative things and using things in ways not expected? Why would someone aiming at the tech community use a word so wrongly, and in a way that riles some of us up?
Because most of 'us' stopped complaining about that ten years ago. The meaning of words change.
Stopped complaining when laypersons misuse it, sure. But can't we keep the real meaning within our own nomenclature? When I go to a hackathon I expect to be building something.
Those exe files look like payloads destined for Windows machines. Although the screenshot is surely staged, I could imagine seeing output like that in a USB Linux system for physical-access cracking, or if someone was collecting cracked executables for distribution or examination, or if they went ham generating exploit containers in Metasploit.
Security work/pentesting is one of the few situations where you could legitimately find yourself working with a lot of EXE files in Linux, because your targets are typically Windows systems.
EDIT: replaced * characters that were causing format problems.
> While I understand that mono uses the .exe suffix, not many other things do in the -nix ecosystem, but the screen shot they use shows what appears to be ls -l output and all the files have a .exe suffix.
So? "ls -l" means you have something that provides -nix style command line utilities, which doesn't mean you are on -nix -- plenty of people have that on Windows. And, of course, there's no reason you can't have mono executables -- or Windows executables, for that matter -- all in a directory on a -nix machine, as well.
yeah, I've gotten sufficiently used to nix that I always install some basic gnu utils on a windows box if I am going to use it. And typing ls saves a char over dir.
suspension of disbelief aside, it is totally plausible that he is ssh'ed into a remote linux machine and is listing the contents of a directory called "evil_windows_binaries"...
