Friday, August 30, 2013

The Worst Hacking Scenes in Movies...


I don't normally post funny videos on this blog (as there are too many insanely creative and amusing people out there), but I had to share this one as it compliments a blog post I wrote a while back for Flickering Myth about how the Internet had radically changed Sci Fi films.

Here is a compilation from College Humor of scenes in movies that have tried to both simultaneously predict (and then overly simplify) visualisations of computer coding being hacked. Beautifully quaint...

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Film Review: Elysium (Neil Blomkamp) 2013

Elysium

In the year 2154, Earth has become polluted and overpopulated causing the richest inhabitants to vacate to a space station that orbits the planet called Elysium.  Up on the celestial utopia there is no crime as well as no illness as medic stations diagnose and cure all afflictions and diseases, which has left the poor and the destitute of Earth to try and launch (mostly) suicide missions in order to try and access the medical facilities.

The plot of the film follows Max (Matt Damon), a factory worker living in 22nd century Los Angeles who has dreamed of living on Elysium ever since he lived in an orphanage as a child.  As long as his own dreams, he also made a childhood promise to his friend Frey (Alice Braga) that he would take her there too.  At the factory one day, Max suffers an accident that has near fatal consequences, which forces him to rekindle his previous life of crime in order to get up to the space station and get cured.  There is plenty more going on but as with any sci-fi, there are plot-spoilers aplenty to navigate.  The only other thing worth mentioning is that the defense secretary of Elysium is the Machiavellian Delacourt (Jodie Foster), who values the protection of the utopia over all else…