Firewall

I saw Firewall this afternoon. I generally like Harrison Ford movies where he does the whole hero thing to save his family. I particularly like Air Force One, so I thought this one, particularly since it had computer stuff in it too, would be right up my alley.

I have to say it didn't grab me quite as much. For a start, even though the movie is called Firewall, I don't think there was anything in the entire plot that was remotely concerned with firewalls at all. For those interested, a firewall is basically a way of controlling access to a network. You put your firewall between your network and the internet and it decides what to let in and out. Banks and stuff (like the ones in the movie) would have some serious equipment in this area. If you'd like a firewall for your home computer you can download some free software called ZoneAlarm which works on the same principle.

Anyway, not only that, but the supersophisticated bank robbery scenes contained some other really dodgy stuff from a techy point of view:

• they couldn't hack into the bank computer systems because there was no where to plug in their USB flash drive


• apparently by pulling the scanner out of your home office HP multifunction printer and connecting it to your daughter's iPod as a hard drive, you can make a device that will flawlessly read a stack of scrolling data off an LCD monitor (that happens to be scrolling faster than that scanner could possibly work)


• if you're robbing a bank and you need to burn a CD, you should do it on a laptop in the men's toilets instead of on a laptop somewhere else to make it look much more serious


• if you're a serious IT professional burning the aforementioned CD, you use the Windows XP wizard to write files to your disc and longingly wait for the meter to tick down the 15 seconds remaining
  

As for the ending, well, I wouldn't worry too much about that. We all knew that he was going to brawl the chief bad guy to death and save his family anyway, which happens at around the same time as an explosion that produces the only wall of fire that I noticed in the entire film.