Will a Rise in Cyber-Terrorism Make Thrillers and Action Films Boring?

So, yes, a group of anonymous hackers broke into Gawker's system and compromised the security of up to 1.3 billion users in what some are calling one of the largest attacks on a media site to date. But, depending on your level of paranoia, it gets worse. Others have argued that this attack - taken with the recent attacks on Visa, Mastercard and PayPal in response of Wikileaks reprimands - signals a new era of cyber-terrorism where small groups can wreak mass amounts of havoc at will. After taking all of this in, I did what I usually do when the news unsettles me a bit: I thought about movies. Then I realized that a sharp rise in cyber-terrorism will probably ruin movies too.

Discounting the days of Hackers and The Net where the internet seemed a bit more like sci-fi, the internet age has yielded precious few mainstream films focused on cyber-terrorism. Mostly, we got The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series and the only PG-13 Die Hard movie. I'm suspect that the reason for this is that, in terms of action and suspense films, the internet is boring. It's not visually interesting, it's certainly not cinematic and it's also a pretty lazy plot device (just like how checking Wikipedia in real life is a pretty lazy way to do research).

So thus far, computers have mostly guided the plot in films where characters actually enter another world in the computer like The Matrix or Tron. At the same time, filmmakers are having a harder and harder time sidestepping them as plot devices. Even in Roman Polanski's otherwise excellent The Ghost Writer, one of the major reveals comes after a Google search. If hacking becomes the in-vogue mode of attack for the new decade, Hollywood probably won't be able to ignore that either.

And yet, I beg that they do! With how much of my life the internet takes up these days, even going out to see a movie feels like a journey into the real world. I don't want to be bombarded with images of other people on computers unless the film is as engaging and as well-done as The Social Network, which let's face it, most movies aren't. Compare the plot of even Die Hard With a Vengeance to the convoluted computers-meet explosions mess of Live Free or Die Hard. Or don't. I honestly had a hard time because while I still remember the bomb-search-madness of the former, I don't remember a thing about the latter besides Bruce Willis and Justin Long going to meet Kevin Smith to talk about hacking.

My point is, even if cyber-terrorism increases exponentially in the next year or two, screenwriters and filmmakers should trust their instincts that originally said, "Computers are not cinematic." Because if we have to watch another scene of someone sweating while they type on a keyboard or waiting for a blue bar to finish loading, then the hacker groups have really won.