The Firewall trailer opens with chilling voiceovers from Harrison Ford. “Someone’s been trying to hack in and compromise my identity… You think somebody got my information off the internal network?“

Do members of the lay public grok Firewall’s vision of computer security? I buy into the Vegas of Ocean’s Eleven and the medicine of Grey’s Anatomy, but it’s because I’m hopelessly unfamiliar with gambling and biology.

So does non-geekhood allow one to suspend their disbelief enough to enjoy this flick? To believe that the process of identity theft is simply “hacking in” to some single master database maintained by who-knows-who? That a victim would be aware of attempts to perform this feat when it hasn’t yet seen success?

Relationships are paramount, I’ve said that. But there’s a threshold of believability beyond which a plot becomes too absurd to be enjoyable. It’s called jumping the shark, and it seems likely that Firewall had jumped by the end of that first trailer.

Despite my reservations about it, there was always the possibility that Firewall had a brilliant script and got skewered by a lousy marketing team. After all, Ford and Paul Bettany are both terrific actors. If the film hadn’t hit an embarassingly low tomatometer, I might have even hit the local multiplex to check it out.

Getting Tech Right

The voice of engineering in pop culture is, so far as I can tell, pretty much split between Red Green slapstick and the RC-cars-plus-chainsaws of Robot Wars.

Is there really no way to make real engineering exciting and sexy? What about software development? Office Space? Hackers?

Are automation and software so far removed from public conciousness that it wouldn’t be possible to write a show or movie about them? How about a fictional account of a user experience consultancy, a sexy design firm, or a startup tech company?

The stories are there, they just need to be a story, in episodic pieces, and not a documentary.

Who Tells It

Veronica Mars is not written by investigators. Grey’s is not written by doctors. They’re written by writers who consult with members of the professions in question.

But is simply consulting with an engineer or programmer enough?

What about the hackers who can write? Paul, Joel, Eric, couldn’t one of you cross over the other way and consult with a writer to create an awesome script?

Maybe it would be confusing and inaccessible, like the software that geeks build for each other. But maybe it would be really, really cool.

Mike

Further Reading: On Making Engineering Sexy (PDF)

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