Ameaça Virtual

I really enjoyed this film--it was exciting as well as thought-provoking. If you enjoyed "The Net" and "The Firm" you'll probably enjoy a hybrid of the two, although I found "Antitrust" to be more satisfying than either of those. Tim Robbins as always was terrific as the "Bill Gates" character and Ryan Phillippe was excellent as his genius protege. "Antitrust" was a great, entertaining way to spend an afternoon at the movies.

For once, a movie about computers where computers look real. The display on the monitors isn't just some 3D animation that seems to serve no purpose. You can recognize interfaces, or at least can imagine that on a real computer monitor. The code on screen looks real (it's either C++ or Java or some kind of C derivative), even though it probably doesn't do what they pretend it does; they don't show it long enough to figure out what it's suppose to do anyway.

Just some things I noticed: All IPs are 10.x.x.x, which is a range reserved for local networks, it should not be accessible remotely, thus would not be usable for a global system such as Synapse. But that is probably done on purpose, just like they do for phone numbers in the movies, all starting in 555-XXXX.

The networks seem to be freaking fast. In particular, for the data transmitted through the satellites with just about zero latency.

The CD burner is quite fast, it can burn a CD in just 20 seconds.

The server which Synapse is being distributed from seems to be very effective, taking millions of hits within hours. In particular, considering that they have never seen that many hits.

Beside the technical details presented, good movie, good action, good plot twists.

I praise Hollywood for creating a movie that does not have mass appeal. Too often movies of this type are designed to be for too wide an audience and all credibility is lost. This film avoids this, for the most part, by primarily appealing to a core target audience in the 15 to 35 age range.

The credits sequence began and I immediately cringed and thought, "Hacker 2...ugh." but it didn't turn out that way, much to my pleasure. Horrible computer idiocy was kept to a minimum, and generally only used for dramatic effect rather than the "computerz r kewl" aspect.

The dramatic performances were very good in my opinion and the film was superb in creating suspense. The soundtrack is rather excellent as well.

By my guess, huge changes were made to this film (based on the trailer) and I look forward to seeing an alternate version or cut-scenes on the DVD.

I definitely recommend this movie for anyone who likes technology and computers. For everyone else, I don't know if you would like it, honestly, but I can tell you it's not a whole movie about computers.

OK, make no mistake, this movie was made to convey a message. If criticised in terms of, say, similarity to "the Firm", or "yet another cyber thriller", then you really missed the point. The message is pretty blunt, and guaranteed to anger a certain large corporation. (This is not an anti-corporate movie, it is anti- a ~particular~ corporation, and if you can't guess which one, maybe you should go back to exploring the Kalahari or whatever you've been doing for the last ten years.) This corporation has been known to spend extraordinary resources on PR (including, for example, bribing journalists and college professors), so almost certainly some of the comments on this message board will be produced by that corporation and should be read in that light.

Second, while murder is a bit over the top, pretty well all the other crimes committed by the large corporation in this movie are things of which the real corporation has been seriously accused, been found to be planning, or in some cases, convicted; yet in every case managing to escape with fines or compensation payments much smaller than the profits they made from the crime. That is why we hate them so much, and why this movie was made. It's also obvious why the motif of murder was added: some of the technical details of why their actions are pure evil are difficult for a non-techie to understand, so to make the movie accessible to a wider audience, they added a more blatant crime (plus pyrotechnic special effects, a tense chase scene, love interest, etc).

Thirdly, it is not a futuristic movie, it is present day; nothing in this movie is more than about 1 or 2 years in the future, at most, and most of it is happening now or happened several years ago.

Fourthly, technical realism: while some of the tech stuff is rubbish (hey, it's a movie!), the effort put into realism is dramatically good compared to information technology in any other movie I have ever seen. When we see IP's, they are actual IPs, but martian (I guess they don't want geeks going home and whois-ing them!), the code is all real code: some HTML, some C++, real scripting, but mostly VB (a language the certain large corporation is known to use a lot). The algorithms they discuss improving are even algorithms the product would really require! Not only that, the product is frighteningly similar to the large corporation's actual current development path!

So, if you walked away from this movie thinking "just for geeks" or "totally unrealistic", you need to give yourself a good hard slap, wake up and see what is really going on in the world around you. This movie was about as unrealistic and irrelevant as "All the President's Men".

Oh, by the way, I better say that all the above comments are only my personal opinions, in case they try to sue me, because they do do stuff like that.

I didn't expect much from AntiTrust, but I was surprised. The story was fast-paced and exciting, it never really slowed-down. When the movie was over I felt satisfied, it had a lot of what I look for in a movie. It requires you to think about what is happening, even if sometimes it gets un-realistic with plot twists. Good things aside, AntiTrust had its share of problems. There was some techy-talk that went on too long, whenever something bad was discovered by Milo(Ryan however you spell his last name) the camera would zoom in and then shake around, and it got a little un-realistic in the finale. All-in-all AntiTrust was good, but I just found-out it opened it 12th place. It deserves better.