Live soft, Die with a Hard...

Rather belatedly, I actually sat down to watch Die Hard 4.0 last night. It's one of those sorts of films where I plan to watch it in the Cinema, then having missed that, I plan to rent it. Then it gets put out on general release, so I make a note to get a copy. Then it makes budget, and I think to myself 'Yes, I really, really will get it now.' Then, finally my brother in law lends it to me and after it collects around 2 months of dust on my shelf, I finally get round to watching it.

This happens to a lot of DVDs in my household.

Now I am typical Hollywood fodder. I love the occasional action no-brainer, of which this fits squarely into a very large peg. However, this film is exactly like every other Internet-computer-hacker film out there.

Sooner or later, every action hero film star has to be in a film about computer hackers taking over the world. But I can't help but think that this is totally surreal. Computers and Internet connections were super-fast, the OS (obviously not Windows and thankfully not OSX) Gave no errors, or dialog boxes of any kind... and it seems that the mouse has been completely dispensed with. The whole of the US monetary network seems to be hackable from a Palm Tungsten E with a rubber keyboard, and everything went completely smoothly. Naah.

In reality, the script would've contained lines like:

'Virus is now uploading sir. His computer will be completely useless in... 3 hours... providing he doesn't turn his computer off and reboots when we have finished.'

'Patch me though to the Main Street Camera.'
'I can't sir. We have the wrong graphics driver.'

'Has the money been transferred to my account?'
'Don't know sir, I have forgotten the Internet Banking password.'

I can't help but think that the director has obviously got consultants there to help with the 'lingo' and the technical detail, but then he keeps overruling them saying things like 'But that's not fast enough.' or 'That's just too boring.' Or my personal favourite - 'I don't like that. But then, I don't know anything about all this computer crap.'

I just love it when people refer to my field of expertise as crap. You know who you are, you fuckers.

Next week, I plan to review a children's classic film, where Rupert the Bear learns how to download porn.

- Galford.