The 1992 movie Sneakers.
Favorite Bits
Our introduction to the character Whistler (the sound-guy) sees him sitting in the back of a van...reading a Braille-version edition of Playboy.
Gregor: My heart leaps like gazelle to see you two together!
Liz: Tell it to stop leaping, we are not ‘back together’.
The end-game bargaining session with the representative of the NSA:
Whistler: I want peace on Earth, and goodwill toward men.
Abbott: We are the United States government! We don’t do that sort of thing!!
— and —
Carl: The young lady with the Uzi...is she single?
Problems and Questions
The movie opens with a flashback to December 1969. Cosmo and Marty are shown using an early version of the Internet to do some creative refinancing — which gets Cosmo caught, which sets up the whole good / bad dynamic for the movie. It’s a wonderful setup...except the Internet was born in March 1969 as a Defense-Department project. While universities were some of the first non-military users of the Internet, there’s no way in hell that DARPA would have let college students anywhere near their shiny new toy that early on.
At one point, a Russian cultural attache explains that the codebreaker wouldn’t be of any use to the Russian government, largely because the Russian codes are based on a completely separate set of algorithms. I have no idea if this line is plausible, or if it’s thorougly off the beam.
Keywords: | River Phoenix | movies | hackers |
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