Credible IT in Sci-fi
on June 9, 2009 | Writing | credible storytelling, scifi
Back from Terminator Salvation, with lots of things to say.
I’ll mainly talk about Information Technology however, as its nerve-racking lack of credibility made me uneasy through the whole movie. Credible science / IT is something that mostly doesn’t exist in today’s entertainment, and even if it was alright at some point, it just doesn’t cut it.
At the beginning of the movie, Connor and a squad of soldier enter a Skynet R&D Camp – btw, briefing soldiers on their mission when they’ve already hit the ground running is just bad exposition. Soldiers search the compound for intel, and one of them spots a laptop; he starts browsing the files, uploading them to a secured location and…
Wait, what?
So the terminators use laptop. Did they launch Judgment Day from a windows desktop shortcut as well?
2 reasons for which this is stupid:
- Efficiency and convenience: the emergence of Skynet as a sentient being can only be seen as the aftermath of a Technological Singularity: machines breeding faster, better machines. With their exponential knowledge, would these keep on using hardware designed by pre-singularity technology? Of course not. Would they use graphical representations for their data? Of course not. I’d like to believe they’d just plug to a port and go, or simply use some kind of wireless technology.
- Security: as soon as you connect a secured network to the Internet, it is potentially vulnerable: computers are computers, and their operators are humans on both side of the fence. They have the same tools, the same capabilities. On the other hand, Skynet doesn’t have a world wide web to maintain. It would be extremely easy for it to secure their IT: develop user interfaces that are simply impossible for humans to use. Having laptops and interoperable networks is like having Matrix phone booths in the ruins of the real world, powered by the Matrix itself and with a big sign on top “hey, come hack us”
HOWEVER.
Even though the telling of a story must remain coherent enough to be credible, it might change things entirely: locking humans completely out of the information network means they’d have to fight completely in the dark, which could be an interesting story to tell, but rest assured a very different story. I can accept that.
Let’s just not have it so obviously flawed. The resistance could have, for instance, taped into an optic fiber backbone. Or they could have intercepted encrypted wireless communication and decrypted them with an enslaved AI. Or a non-sentient AI. There are plenty of solutions around that don’t jump out of the screen and punch you in the face.
June 9th, 2009 on 7:54 pm
Well said,
or, simplier, they could have hired a real person to write the scenarii and not have it done by a machine (actually a machine could probably have done something more credible).
Any guy in the street could do better.
I loved the “briefing your super powerful mega over trained commandos ON THE GROUND UNDER ENEMY FIRE about the mission they are a part of and which is supposed to be planned for a long time” part.. So ridiculous
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June 9th, 2009 on 8:47 pm
Well, yeah, I was a bit surprised, actually, as both writers were involved in several movies, including the very good “The Game”.
Oh well. I’m expecting “Surrogates” from them later this year, I hope I won’t b disappointed.
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Juan Reply:
June 20th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Most of the research for the infiltrator projects was done by skynets human allies, the luddite movement that believes in externimating humanity so that the earth can survive.
Skynet produces machines with human parts, the infiltrator projects produce humans with machine parts.
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June 20th, 2009 on 7:35 pm
Let’s call it a problem of exposition then, because watching the movie isn’t supposed to require me to read the whole Encyclopedia of the World of Terminator.
And it’s only an example: skynet doesn’t need their terminators to be humanoid at all either. Surely there are more efficient forms. What I’m getting at is that Terminator’s vision of a machine race isn’t very plausible, compared to the one in, say, Matrix, where you have machines directly built to fulfill a purpose, which is a lot more credible.
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June 22nd, 2009 on 4:07 pm
The last two movies have been horrible, in the telling of the final stages of this story. Skynet doesn’t want a machine race, it just wants to ensure its own survival, and the only way to do that is to destroy all humans. After the various hunter/killer’s created to suit each type of terrain and environment, skynet began creating units that could follow humans into their hideouts and kill them. This began with the T101 chasis. Unfortunately humans adapted and learned to spot these versions. Skynet had to resort to its human allies to create cyborgs that could pass for human, and so began the infiltrator series. This required prisoners, for the raw materials needed to create cyborgs from birth, using accelerated growth spurts and indoctrination.
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