Computers in the Movies

I was watching a movie today. One scene showed a woman sneaking into someone’s office and messing with their computer. I’m amazed by how fake the use of computers in movies is. I guess that really typing, and clicking and doing things just isn’t interesting enough.

So, the woman walks into a guy’s home office. She presses a key (one of the Function keys) and a white text menu comes up on the black screen (Press 1 for this, 2 for that), but flashes by too fast for me to read. She presses a number. Ok, so she’s obviously logged in. The next shot is over her shoulder at the screen, close enough that you can see windows quickly opening and closing, and the mouse cursor never once moving. Once the camera moves to her left side, you can see that she is completely controlling the computer with her keyboard. Pressing letters one at a time — she’s certainly no typist — scrolled the windows up and down, and pressing the space bar was opening and closing them. The mouse was never touched.

The camera never focused close enough in on the monitor to give us any clue about what she was looking at — it looked like an address book. But even more unforgivable — there was absolutely no reason for having this scene in the movie. We, the viewers, already know that the chick is a husband-stealing psychotic freak, we had no clue what she was looking at or for, the scene adds nothing to the movie.

When the wife comes home and finds her, she hits a Function key and the screen goes black again and then says “I hope you don’t mind, I was checking my email.”

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