23

Saw 23, a fictionalized re-telling of Karl "Hagbard" Koch's story. He was a German citizen hired by Russian spies to hack into American military computers. The film is essentially a drug-dealer story. He starts out on small fry, just enjoying himself and hacking socially. Soon he moves on to bigger scores and ultimately gets peripherally attached to world politics and dangerous, heavy men. In addition to the symbolic, digital drugs, he is involved in literal drugs as well. This provides for some excellent spiralling-out-of-control montages later in the film.

I have to commend the film for its relative accuracy. In this modern time of computers being essentially magic picture-boxes, this film almost fetishizes the giant, chunky computers, the little sleeves that fit over the phone's receiver, the smoke of solder and room-filling mainframes. It's great stuff and makes me itch for the steaming guts of a computer. The explanations of how passwords are brute-forced and how Trojan horses work are a bit belaboured but I guess you can't have everything. The phrase "one-way hash" is thrown out as techno-babble but, marvellously, refreshingly, it is correctly used.

The rest of the film is fairly interesting. Like I say, it follows the general rags-to-riches-to-prison arc that many films about the drug trade do. I was sufficiently dazzled by the tech to give much of the film a pass but generally it holds up. There are some delightful descents into full-blown paranoia. The protagonist at first seems irritating and I was deeply worried that this was going to be one of those films that shows how clever a character is by how incredibly dickish they are. After he looses his political idealism and begins to get scared and cramped, things get much more comfortable. I recommend this film to my fellow nerds. It's not bad at all and gets the tech just right. A fun movie, though of course ultimately kind of a sad one.