The flip side of MovieOS's sexy user interfaces is Hollywood's manipulative use of plain code to imply arcane secrets. The "code" can be anything really, as long as it is something the legendary Dumb Audience won't understand.

If the filmmakers intend to give the audience a sense of what is happening, they will of course use MovieOS's wonderful GUI. On the other hand, if they want to make the audience feel incredible admiration for a hacker, they will just show line after line of code. Whereupon the audience will hopefully gasp, "Gee whiz. That guy really knows his stuff. Look at all them funny numbers - and he can read 'em plain as English!"

My favourite use of this technique is in the title sequence of "Antitrust", which shows Ryan Philippe hard at work on some arcane black-hat programming, interlaced with the title graphics - which are nothing but a few hundred lines of HTML! That sequence alone is almost enough to make Antitrust an instant cult classic. Unfortunately the rest of the movie is not nearly campy enough to keep that status.