In some ways, cyberthrillers are just a new kind of procedural—rough outlines of the technical worlds only a few inhabit. But unlike shows based on lawyers, doctors, or police officers, shows about programmers deal with especially timely material. Perry Mason, the TV detective from the ’50s and ’60s, would recognize the tactics of Detective Lennie Briscoe from Law & Order, but there’s no ’60s hacker counterpart to talk shop with Mr. Robot’s Elliot Alderson. It’s true that what you can hack has changed dramatically over the past 20 years: The amount of information is exploding, and expanding connectivity means people can program everything from refrigerators to cars . But beyond that, hacking itself looks pretty much the same, thanks to the largely unchanging appearance and utility of the command-line—a text-only interface favored by developers, hackers, and other programming types.

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So why has it taken so long for television and film to adapt and accurately portray the most essential aspects of programming? The usual excuse from producers and set designers is that it’s ugly and translates poorly to the screen. As a result, the easiest way to portray code in a movie has long been to shoot a green screen pasted onto a computer display, then add technical nonsense in post-production. Faced with dramatizing arcane details that most viewers at the time wouldn’t understand, the overwhelming temptation for filmmakers was to amp up the visuals, even if it meant creating something utterly removed from the reality of programming. That’s what led to the trippy, Tron-like graphics in 1995’s Hackers, or Hugh Jackman bravely assembling a wire cube made out of smaller, more solid cubes in 2001’s Swordfish.

But more recent depictions of coding are much more naturalistic than previous CGI-powered exercises in geometry. Despite its many weaknesses, this year’s Blackhat does a commendable job of representing cybersecurity. A few scenes show malware reminiscent of this decompiled glimpse of Stuxnet—the cyber superweapon created as a joint effort by the U.S. and Israel. The snippets look similar because they’re both variants of C, a popular programming language commonly used in memory-intensive applications. In Blackhat, the malware’s target was the software used to manage the cooling towers of a Chinese nuclear power plant. In real-life, Stuxnet was used to target the software controlling Iranian centrifuges to systematically and covertly degrade the country’s nuclear enrichment efforts.

In other words, both targeted industrial machinery and monitoring software, and both seem to be written in a language compatible with those ends. Meaning that Hollywood producers took care to research what real-life malware might look like and how it’d likely be used, even if the average audience member wouldn’t know the difference. Compared to the sky-high visuals of navigating a virtual filesystem in Hackers, where early-CGI wizardry was thought the only way to retain audience attention, Blackhat’s commitment to the terminal and actual code is refreshing.