Skyfall brings back the classic elements of the James Bond mythos such as the gadgets, Q, a male M (played by the immortal Ralph Fiennes), a sexy character (played by the delectable Berenice Lim Marlohe) that dies after minimal screen time, and a very lovely Moneypenny (Naomie Harris). Unlike the poorly conceived, disastrous, and pathetic 50th anniversary celebration of the Spider-Man comic books last year, Skyfall successfully brought very fresh and modern elements to the franchise while paying homage to 50 years of Craig, Moore, Brosnan, and Connery eras of the Bond films.
So-called tech experts panned the scene with Q battling a "stylized" and very graphic cryptographic scene. They said that "hacking" doesn't look as beautiful or as organic as what the main antagonist Silva (played by the awesome Javier Bardem) designed and Q (played by the exceptional Ben Whishaw) attempted to decipher.
I scratched my head over this and consulted a few of my own (ahem) experts (there are people out there you can pay RMB2000.00 to have them break into a Facebook account, steal all the pictures, and post them across Instagram and LinkedIn). They told me that it's actually very easy to provide a graphical and colorful representation of a security system or hacking script. In fact, considering the amount of power most servers and desktop replacement machines have, it takes very little GPU or CPU to provide a visual display of any processing a computer does. Sure, it's nothing more than eye-candy and really doesn't serve any purpose other than to entertain anyone working his/her magic online, but it is entirely possible. I was told to think of it as the randomized visualizations you can display while playing an MP3 on Windows Media Player or iTunes but instead of the application interpreting pitch, volume, beat, and bass, the application displays the system processes that occur - that is, the jousting between the security protocols and the user.
Considering Silva had a knack for drama and affectation, it would have been very much part of his repertoire to merge genius with visual creativity.
Like The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), Skyfall prominently featured Sony products, particularly the Experia and the Vaio. However, unlike the Spidey reboot (which featured Microsoft Windows), Skyfall was more platform agnostic, with MI6 headquarters using largely unmarked user interfaces that could have been any customized FreeBSD or Linux variant.
Although James Bond is a fair third to Peter Parker and Indiana Jones in my list of heroes, I'm a fan and enjoyed Skyfall immensely (though Adele's theme song was nowhere near as good as Casino Royale's "You Know my Name" performed by Chris Cornell). Like most Bond movies, there were horrible plotholes (like the ballistics report that traced the gun to three people), but there was nothing technologically unbelievable about it. I did find it hard to believe that a Cold War dinosaur like Bond can spot the name of a UK train station amidst flowing binary characters - most programmers probably can't.
"I have no idea what is happening on that computer..."
Screenshots from Skyfall
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