Classic Coding Movie Scenes – Antitrust

The year is 2001. The movie is Antitrust. Let’s dig into its amazing depiction of coding.

Antitrust is a silly movie for sure, but far from unwatchable. It’s a fun cable movie to enjoy when you have nothing else to do and a great time capsule. The movie centers around a bright young programmer named Milo played by Ryan Phillippe. He’s way into open source and making the world a better place through his computers, and lands a dream job at “NURV”. NURV is pretty much just fake-Microsoft, with a leader named Gary Winston played by Tim Robbins that is equal parts Bill gates and Steve Jobs.

The more involved in the business Milo gets, the more he realizes their into some shady stuff (like murder) and tries to extricate himself from the situation. No spoilers, but he has some trouble doing so and a cat-and-mouse game develops between Milo and Gary Winston.

The opening credits are quite clever in how it uses code to display the cast and crew of the film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pQnV_G17hY

To a novice, you might think it’s something malicious due to the ominous music and frenetic editing. If you know what you’re looking at  though, that ominous music and code is pretty hilarious. The code is simply just the HTML used for the front page of IMDB back in 2001.

The fun doesn’t stop there either. For a Hollywood movie, it’s actually dripping with code, but somewhat predictably, most of the code is completely unrelated to what’s occurring on-screen. Here’s the excerpt we remember most fondly from the film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU-P_lbidB8

This code is supposed to connect a computer to a satellite and then push out incriminating items throughout the satellite’s network. In reality, it’s declaring a few file types and printing them to the screen one at a time. Yeah, that’ll work…

http://ift.tt/2eSrLa4

What do you remember most fondly about this movie? Let us know in the comments!

Join us next week when we focus on how Hacking is depicted across films like Swordfish and Hackers!

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