Needless to say, this post contains tons of SPOILERS, so if you plan on watching the film, stop reading now!

———- Spoilers below ———-

We had been strolling up and down the streets of Bristol for several hours and our legs were tired. Nice city, although very hilly! That didn’t show up in Google StreetView. And so we thought, let’s find a cinema! We finally ended up in the new Showcase deluxe multiplex cinemas (much nicer than the shabby Odeon) and chose Terminator 4. There wasn’t much more to choose from; after having watched Transformers, I would require to be paid to watch Transformers 2.

After the movie ended, we felt a bit analytical and began enumerating the little flaws in the script. It’s not bad for an action movie, I argued, … but after having read a good amount of sci-fi books and, specially, since I’m a programmer and have seen how things truly work, the script is overly optimistic.

Optimistic?, you’ll ask. How come, if it predicts a dark, near future where humanity is in a continuous war against the machines. Well, I say so because there’s no way humanity can build such intelligent and advanced systems. Just look around you: air planes which fail and explode in the middle of the ocean, or maybe even just minutes after taking off, trains which collide with each other because the system didn’t take them into account, and etcetera. On a minor scale, look at the operating system you use daily. For sure it has flaws — human flaws.

The only way humanity could build something like the machines in the movie would be as a result of an accident. That is, without acting on purpose or knowing beforehand what they were doing and what did they want to achieve. By pure chance.

Even though, the probability of that happening is so remote that I believe we would have auto-exterminated ourselves centuries before. There’s no biggest enemy for humanity than humanity itself. Simple proof: how many lives have been lost in wars, versus how many lives have been lost in natural disasters? And when I say natural disasters, I take it with a good pinch of salt. Some of the recent disasters, such as rain flooding in the south of England, seem to be a direct consequence of building just too much over places that shouldn’t be urbanised, preventing the rain from being naturally absorbed by the soil, and therefore it’s just an easy recipe for catastrophes.

So that being clarified, here are some other things that didn’t seem very appropriate in the movie:

• USB connectors. So the machines and the humanity are in a war, but they still agree on using USB connectors. Does that mean that fireware is deprecated, then?
• Displays. Why do machines need a display on their equipment? Won’t it be easier for them to send a wireless signal? The Override display on the motorbike that John Connor picks up is useful only for humans.
• The radio is already tuned on the proper frequency. Or is it that they emit the same signal in every frequency, just in case?
• Sony VAIO. The resistance not only uses an amazing array of technology; it’s even VAIO branded. Where is the factory for building them?
• The machines get totally switched off when exposed to a certain frequency. WHAT???? Edit: As luchyx points out, there is something like this already, but it is highly classified: the electromagnetic bomb
• How come that when Marcus connects to the main computer, he actually seems to know what he’s doing, and yet the evil Skynet doesn’t use that opportunity to completely erase any human behaviour from his brain just in case it decides to help its human friends?
• Furthermore: why do they leave him with a human heart when they reconstruct him (or whatever they call the process), when it’s one of the weakest points of failure in humans? Answer: so that we can have a happy ending and John Connor doesn’t die?

I think there were more things like these, but I can’t quite remember now. It’s that kind of flaws you need to ignore and forget if you want to enjoy the movie; as soon as you try to take it seriously, the script falls apart.

Warning: if you haven’t seem this movie don’t keep reading – lots of spoilers below!

Don’t remember how, but I ended up in the page of the manufacturers of the computer which Mathew Broderick used on the mighty War Games, called IMSAI 8080. That page has plenty of trivia and funny facts about the equipment, specially the tricks they did for making the computers stand out more – like adding more leds and indicators (obviously useless), or how did they cheat to make the computer type a complete sentence instead of having to type it by themselves each time (if you pay attention you realise they never mispell a single letter while typing in the movie, and there’s a lot of typing in that non-mouses movie!).

So I decided that it was time to revisit one of my child classics. If I recall properly is almost 20 years since I saw the movie so there are lots of details that I missed or forgot. But when watching it again – oh now I understand how I ended up studying Computer Science! that big 8″ floppy disk, the synthetiser, all the BIG switches there, and the “Yeah whenever I build I system, I always leave a backdoor”. It was so suggestive even then, when I didn’t understand the whole meaning of things and didn’t know almost nothing of english… Now it has been quite interesting since an important joke was lost in the spanish translation, and it is the name of the super computer. What in spanish was simply W,O,P,R, in the english version is pronounced quite similarly to whopper, which is quite funny.
I remember it was also when I started to learn some programming, with LOGO. I used to write programs which output a “Logon:” (even if I didn’t know what it meant) and just didn’t work until we entered “Joshua“. All with that green screen computer… aaah, those were the times, deffinitely…

It was very funny because my school mates were worrying about He-Man and Barbies and I was trying to figure out how to do the kind of pixelated abstract graphics which used to accompany every computer magazine article. But my most important worry was: if we built programs with Logo, and Logo was built with CP/M, which tool was used for creating CP/M?

That was also the time that I learnt how to play chess, so it was all like a converging movie. As I saw later, it had impacted more people than what I thought: first day in the uni, first lecturer’s warning: “this is not a war games school – we do not teach how to hack here”. You can’t imagine our sadness faces…!

The WOPR – aka the Whopper!

I could never think that I would say that Creep (Your journey terminates here) it’s cool, but in comparison with this one, it completely rocks. The stories are quite similar: people which get suddenly kidnapped when travelling or working on the underground. At least with Creep you can feel some panic or scare, while with Death Line (also called Raw Meat) the only thing you can feel is a mix of disgust and boredom.

The only interesting bit that I found was seeing how was the tube in 1972. It’s funny to see how little has it changed, specially since I’m reading some books about Tube history (thanks to mr.doob in my birthday!). It’s also amazing the little light that there was in those days, with just some poor lightbulbs in the corridors and staircases. And the people smoked inside the trains! ARGH!
I could say that the trains which appear in the film are the same model -if not the same train itself- than the old District Line trains which have those ball-shaped holders hanging from the ceiling, and are still in service. A pic here, look at the ceiling… (each time I use one of those trains I can’t but feel compelled to hit those balls as if they were punching bags! :D)

Although I don’t know if that’s been an artistic license, but I never knew that District Line trains went through Russell Square (where the movie action is located). Nowadays map locates Russell Square in the Piccadilly line, so I tend to believe that is an error. Same goes for the location of the “abandoned British Museum station” where the evil monster stores his victims, which is in the Central Line, not the Piccadilly Line. So even if Russell Square is quite near the British Museum I’m not really certain that both tunnels were actually connected.

I think I have to investigate about this! And you, well… you can try to see the movie actually, but only if you feel really curious and have a gore-proof stomach!
And if you can understand spanish, here’s my post about Creep, almost one year ago: Argh.

La verdad es que es una peli bastante mala, de las de usar y tirar; por lo único que mola es por todas las secuencias grabadas en subterráneos reales, incluyendo una estación de metro, Aldwych, que ya no está abierta al gran público (es decir, ya no se usa). Por supuesto, un fan del underground ha hecho un análisis de localizaciones de la película, dejándome el post que ya es pan comido.

Sólo he de añadir que esa estación se utiliza como campo de pruebas. Al parecer, lo mismo lo usan para probar sistemas de detección de trenes (y que no haga falta tener a nadie mirando para que empiece a sonar el Mind the Gap), que para alquilarlo y grabar videoclips. Para muestra un botón: Prodigy grabó ahí Firestarter :-D
Más detalles, en la página de la estación en la web de antes. Ese tío es un auténtico freak del Underground!

PD ¡Y yo empiezo a sospechar que algún antepasado mío era pionero del metro, o algo así! tanto hablar del metro…

I don’t use to watch too many movies, because doing so implies to be sitting down for at least one hour without being able to do anything else, and you can’t lose the span of attention – otherwise you will get lost.

In any case those are the most recent movies that I have seen, in reverse chronological order:

• Spanglish. This was quite ok, I laughed a bit with almost all humoristic scene. Best one is the grandmother role. That’s the most hilarious character I have seen for ages.
• Mar Adentro. This oscar-awarded movie didn’t manage to get my focus span during the whole movie. It’s ok but I don’t think it should have won an oscar. Also I must recognize that I went out in the middle of the movie to have a walk, so I didn’t see some of the scenes, but when I come back I didn’t feel like if I had lost lots of information. Plain movie, that is. Bardem is ok there, but Belen Rueda reminds me to Lydia Bosch when acting. They are quite rigid.
• Finally, the most absurd horror movie I have ever TRIED to see: Van Helsing. It was so BAD that I couldn’t finish it. I had been warned: that movie is horrible, don’t see it, but the theme (dracula) was quite attractive. Oh my god, what a waste of money. The only interesting part in the movie is the music by Alan Silvestri. The rest is simply cheap special effects with bad actors and script. For example in one of the scenes the gipsy woman decides that she’s going to wear some weapons with her to feel secure. So she puts over herself:
  • a dagger ~15 cm
  • a bigger dagger ~ 22cm
  • a sword ~90 cm
  • a big gun

and all of these weapons go over stretched clothes (scarlett o’hara style) with some kind of high-heeled shoes, which is what she wears even during the battles. YES! She can fight like that and she’s wearing make-up in ~1800. Of course! And even more: Dracula wears what must be one pound earrings and long hair. And he also brings a kind of hairgrip. Quite stylish. I couldn’t stop laughing during some scenes but finally I got asleep and never open again the movie to see the end.