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.
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. <a href="http://www.thehackermovie.com/about/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thehackermovie.com/about/</a> ).
Movie was well done, bit cringey at times but it's what you expect made for a non-tech audience.<p>Fun lines:
"I am a god" (The protagonist)
"She's a lightning god" (Talking about a girl who chips Xbox's)
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?<p>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?<p>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".<p>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.<p>Could be an interesting weekend project. :P
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.
Now if only I wasn't at work right now...<p>The premise of the movie seems pretty interesting I love the profit-share model, and the motivation behind creating the film:<p>"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 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 <i>The Social Network</i> 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 guess I don't understand how the title and subtitle are linked. The synopsis and trailers don't talk about algorithms at all.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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?)