Wowee. Crank the paranoia level up another 10 notches, will ya? I don't think I'm quite freaked out enough by Micros^H^H^H^H^H^H .. ahem.. Nurv's nasty business practices and proprietary, backdoor-ridden software to realize the danger, so let's go for the "Big Brother is watching" angle. Everyone and everything around is being controlled by a huge conspiracy, masterminded by the evil incarnate himself, Bill G^H^H^H^H^H^H Gary Winston.

Now that we've covered the basics, I must say: This is a pretty damn cool movie. The Hollywood propaganda machine cranking it into overdrive, except this time, they're championing one of our causes. (Now I'd like to see them stand behind it by making the DVD release on an unencrypted region-free disc. I'm not holding my breath for it though.)

There came a moment during the movie, when I knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it was doing an effective job at getting the message across. Conveying to the non-techies the kind of elation the Slashdot readership feels when seeing headlines such as "StarOffice Source Released Under GPL", "Netscape Code Goes Open Source", "MySQL Released Under GPL", etc. Letting people who have never written a line of code in their lives get some sense of why this is important to us.

That moment of realization came when, during the movie, source code -- some very important source code (techie critique to come in a bit) -- was released over the Internet. And the audience applauded. A theater packed wall to wall with members of the general public was clapping -- cheering at the release of source code.

Yes, we're talking about a work of fiction, but if this is the sentiment it's generating, then something is going right here.

(Or it could also be that the Slashdot-reading geeks simply flooded the theaters on opening night, and the majority of people in the place were already converts. Heh.)

The movie itself: Well, I'm obviously a biased source here. It's hard not to like a movie whose opening credits feature gobs of html source flying by in the backdrop. Or the lovely Gnome product placement screenshots. (Along with the Sun product placements, the Yahoo product placements, the ubiquitous Pepsi product placements, and probably tons of others I forgot or missed.)

The storyline setup is a very familiar situation: A few garage hackers with good ideas and coding ability are believers in the open source philosophy. (The meme as the movie puts it: Human Knowledge belongs to The World.) As they struggle to get VC funding (hmmmm... ;) so they can get the operation off the ground, one of them gets an offer that's too good to pass up.

The Nurv corporation. A company which takes the ideas of others, writes "inferior proprietary" versions, and sells it to the masses. (Hmmmm.. Nah, we don't know of ANY companies that do that, do we? ;)

At the head of the operation is a multi-billionare whose gigantic house has walls lined with hi-res digital displays of morphing paintings, along with all sorts other extravagant gizmos. (I loved the Bill Gates line, but I can't remember it accurately enough to quote it.)

So anyway, when Gary invites Milo to his mansion to try to entice him into working on the Synapse project, we get, in just a short bit of dialoge, a consise and well worded summary of the philosophy of the open source/free software community, contrasted with the motivations of the proprietary world.

In fact, for the first portion of the movie, I was getting wrapped up in it as a semi-intellectual drama portraying a semi-realistic situation as a way illustrate a lot of very down to earth and relevant points. To my slight dismay, it didn't stay on that level for very long. A half hour in, throw away any sense of the realistic, and toss the intellectual discourse out the window. After all, this is a suspense thriller, isn't it?

From that point onward, the plot turns mostly into a standard cookie cutter conspiracy outline, in the same vein as countless others we've seen. Naming a few off the top of my head without even looking at imdb. Enemy of the State. The Pelican Brief. Dare I mention this one? The Net. There's a bunch of others too. I'm sure there are. You know what I mean.

I can't fault it too much for this. After all, this is supposed to appeal to mainstream audiences. When I saw it through to the end, I would even say that going utterly over the top was probably the right choice as a method to make the strongest impression. The intellectualist in me couldn't help but think this was cheating a bit though.

I mean, we ALL know who was represented by Gary Winston and the Nurv Corporation. Do we really have to resort to accusing (but not actually accusing) them of thuggery and murder in order to convince people? That's my quibble. I'm probably taking it all a leeetle too seriously.

Well, as far as conspiracy suspense goes, this was up there with the best of them. Lots of twists and turns and edge of the seat moments. After I got over the "Aw darn, they aren't going to keep it in the dialog-rich thought stimulating zone," I quite enjoyed the ride. And there were TONS of good set pieces. Flat panel screens. Oh yeah. The legos were a nice touch. If my memories of second or third-hand accounts are right, quite accurate as well.

The acting... at times, it seemed a bit forced. Overall though, it was very good. Tim Robbins was awesome as the snappy, moody, corporate visionary who could hold an intelligent conversation with the geeks, knew an exceedingly large number of them personally, and yet could go into a tirade at those under him if he didn't like what they were telling him. (Also very accurate, based on past reading I've done about the individual who he may or may not represent.)

The ending... The ending... I won't spoil it. It was good though. A bit predictable maybe. But you gotta love the way they.... I'll just shut up.

Oh, and the end credits. Yes indeed! Anyone notice the Special Thanks section? Names such as Linus Torvalds. Larry Ewing of The Gimp. The Gnome Team. What were the others? Hehe. That was cool.

Alright, it's past my bedtime. This long entry won't go in until tomorrow when I get the code finished. I best get some sleep so that can be done, and I can stay healthy and sane. What a lovely movie it was. Might have to see it again. Mmmm.