Untraceable - Review

    So I got this movie on Demand tonight and I found it highly entertaining. On one hand, it was a little sick. I'm not big on horror/slasher type things, I was never allowed to watch those types of movies as a kid, so now movies like that really freak me out. This wasn't as much horror as gory thriller, but still, I'm a big believer in Garbage In/Garbage out so I try to stay away. On the other hand I liked the premise, it focused on an FBI agent named Jennifer Marsh that was in a cyber crimes unit. Since this was a web focused movie, it really piqued my interest. One thing I really appreciated is they fact that it wasn't dumbed down at all. Most of these movies set up these situations where someone says something the average Joe might not know, and someone who happens to be in the roon that isn't so savvy says something like "That's all greek to me" so someone explains it so the people in the audience get what is going on. It may have been irritating for the less aware, but they threw around terms like rotating DNS and botnet, and no one had to explain it in simple terms. Also, no fake OSs this time, she was running Vista on her home machine. There was also no "traveling through the virtual internet" shots where we are shown what the inside of computers look like with floating words, and binary, and beautiful green light.

   It wasn't all realistic though, for example her daughter in the movie had admin rights to her machine that she used for work at home that had sensitive FBI info on it. That was a bit off. They were also using trackball mice, which I thought was just dumb, I guess they thought it looked cooler. The "hacker" killer wasn't very good with a keyboard if you ask me, At work she looked at sites with a proxy IP in a vitual machine, yet at home this was not the case. I may be reading too far into these things. I did however, learn new abbreviations like MTC (more to come) and LFM (looking for more). I'm going to be a texting goddess (incedentally, I am tired of people who don't use t9 when text messaging, that's so 2002. Saw someone doing this yesterday).

  The movie brought up a few issues in my mind. Mostly net neutrality. I'm all for it, and no censorship. However, common sense says that what's illegal IRL should be prosecuted online as well. It does need to be regulated on a level, as much as I hate putting control in govenment hands. There are some real sickos out there, and with the access the web gives them it's that much more important to stop it. It also made me think a little more about my personal safety, I know there is all kinds of personal information floating around the intarnette, and I really need to put a kibosh on that stuff. I'm so trusting, you really want to be. It's nice to think that everyone around you has the same intentions you do, but that's simply not the case and I really need to start protecting myself.

 Anyway, decent film 2 1/2 stars IMHO.