A massive, spinning, 3D envelope? I must have an electronic letter!

As of last year, the penetration rate of the internet for North America is nearly 75% (some of you may mistake the “penetration rate of the internet” to mean something else that, depending on who you ask, is also probably in the 75% ballpark). I also don’t think it’s too big of a jump to say that well beyond the majority of the folk plopping down seven bucks for popcorn and stuffing their asses into the seats for a thrilling summer blockbuster or two use the internet and email on a regular basis. Hell, you don’t have to look too hard to find an asshole checking it during the movie. So why is it that Hollywood continues to pretend that getting an email looks like opening the plans for the Death Star?

The movie industry has a long history of portraying computers as a tripped out light show of a visual metaphor. It’s as if studio execs, still working from a smoky room filled with mechanical adding machines, continue to insist that movie viewers will be bored to death by 10 seconds of a realistic computer. Instead, hacking still involves flying a spaceship through a rendered tunnel, and any time you get hacked you can mash your palm on the keyboard an pop open a world map on your nine filthy monitors and drool at your virtual opponent’s fiendishly mangled packet routing. I really wish I could contain this discussion to a couple famous offenders like Hackers or Wargames or The Net, but, let’s be honest here, I’m talking about EVERY GOD DAMN MOVIE THAT FEATURED A COMPUTER SINCE 1975!

That, of course is more or less when computers in film evolved from this to this.

I can’t decide if Mission Impossible is most dated by the 20 minutes of screen time Tom Cruise spends twirling a CD ROM caddy, or the fact that the entire plot hinges on Ethan Hunt lodging 3D envelopes to to the mysterious Job as she dials up through her 20 pound cell phone. Probably the former, because inexplicably, email still works like that.

Also, why is it, whenever a government agent goes to their FBI, NSA, or LAPD internal search engine, it’s always blank screen with nothing but a department seal and a giant green box with 200pt font? All they have to do is type “arson” or “strange happenings” and like seventy pop ups shit all over the screen listing exhaustive data on the inexplicably elusive culprit. I’m not sure what’s more impressive: the department’s apparent obsession with minimalist UI and impeccable search or their neglect to use this service until after the third body piles up.

I’d be at a loss if I didn’t mention this, but I’ll will sell you a kidney if you can teach me how to look at an image on my computer, security footage for instance, and utter aloud “enhance image!”, and in defiance of information theory, deconvolve the finite resolution image into a crisp sharp photo of a face or a license plate. If this technology didn’t work in the world of movies, there would be no new releases May through August.

However, to its credit, the 3D “UNIX system” from Jurassic Park, was an actual Silicon Graphics IRIX file manager.

Maybe we’re all just still trying to catch up to the movies after all.