Reboot (2012) Reviews

• Poor man's Fight Club nod

  equazcion2012-12-28

  We first sit through five minutes of a broadcast interview over city scenery. Waiting for something to happen here is an immediate disappointment, especially after reading the exciting plot description. Finally, a girl wakes up in a trashed apartment, with no memory and an iPhone glued to her hand. It has a mysterious countdown on its screen. We learn that she's one of a cadre of computer hackers, one of whom is an unhinged revolutionary. Due to some unnecessary side stories, we're given the impression that there's something complex going on, but there isn't. Some blatant Fight Club references later, the conclusion is about as obvious as you'd hoped against. To those of us who know a little something about the technology, several plot holes are evident. For example, at one point, our heroine attempts to hack the program, and in the process of doing so "kills" it with a simple command, then re-starts it; which would seem to defeat the purpose. If you CAN kill it, AND are willing to suffer the unknowable consequences, you might as well just leave it deactivated. Considering the low budget, the camera work is good enough to impress. Nevertheless, the story isn't interesting, and much of it is filler. Some sort of vague philosophical question regarding the state of technology is presented, but is not explored beyond certain characters stating their general disdain for it. It looks like someone wanted to say something short but also wanted to make a feature-length film, and decided to mangle the two together.

• Please don't waste 39 minutes of your life watching this...

  cinet-12012-12-27

  What a great premise: "A young female hacker awakens from a traumatic event that she scarcely remembers, and an iPhone glued to her hand. On the phone, a countdown is ticking away to zero." Unfortunately, that is the ONLY good thing about the film. There is even a clue as to the disaster that is about to be watched in the mention of an iPhone! In the first few minutes of the film, the iPhone gets hooked up to a MacBook and the MacBook is running the simplest JavaScript code imaginable from a "C:\Windows" prompt. Really? A hacker running a Windows emulator on a Mac? Epic tech fails on the level of 24! (see the episode where the 'Internet gets hacked'!) There's also the part where the 'payload' is one single line of plain-English code which Stat (played by Emily Somers) is able to circumvent it by modifying already-running code. At this point, you may be saying, "Dude you are just a geek!" This may be true. This IS true! Unfortunately, there are also major plot letdowns. We're talking about a 39-minute short here. Get in, get out and hit it hard - just like an old-school Isaac Asimov sci-fi short story. There was no need for the side story with the girl bound to a chair watching her life being uploaded. In the end, we find out the punchline is 'the system is bad so it has to be taken down' and all of the lights in the city go out and the closing credits roll. Could you be more generic?

• How to create a hacker movie

  rerooted2013-11-10

  After all the miserable failures to create a decent hax0r movie, this one is actually the first one that I have seen (and some things from Die Hard 4 also comes to mind) that has some sense and code in it that is not embarrassing. Kudos to Offensive Security guys that helped the movie gets some real hacking background, so that people who are writing the code don't look like morons typing holoprojected 3D cubes in hyperspace and instead coding in C, using Metasploit and win command line the proper way. Movie itself has a decent premise, sort of a hacker holy grail. I understand that most of the people not coming from infosec community don't see some real meat here, but let me just say that some of the mentions in the credits of the movie outro are respected in infosec community. It might not be a fully fledged, 2h thriller keeping you on back of your seat, but it is THE BEST movie I have seen on the hacker culture that can fit into the 40 min format.

• An interesting short film with very good acting

  fortionat12013-01-08

  I watched this with an open mind not worrying about the low rating so far on IMDb and I was pleasantly surprised. The acting and quality camera work were very well done and were not diminish by a story that had a good premise but was missing some elements of information. And unfortunately the final song to start the end of the movie was horrible. But the beauty of a well done short movie is it leaves a lot more to the imagination of the audience. The short is one of the hardest movies to make now and this movie was fast paced with intelligent thought and decent dialog. I see about 70 to 80 new movies (new to me) every year but only write a few reviews as I believe a decent review should be well written and the reviewer should have a good sense of films, which takes some time I do not have. But I saw that the review on here was so poorly written without much thought or understanding of this film I felt it necessary to try an give a more realistic and open minded review. First, this film has nothing to do with nor any of its references directly taken from "Fight Club" as one reviewer suggested. If talking about how the cost of materialism has effected the world makes it a "Fight Club" reference then that's like saying any movie that talks about the south is is "Gone With The Wind" reference. In Fight Club one major theme was around materialism and how it controlled our life's, a theme at its pinnacle in 1999-2000 when Fight Club came out. This is 13 years later where we see the cost of having everything available everywhere, like Coffee which is very labor intensive as Jesse spoke of in the movie, is causing a huge divide between the classes of rich and poor and an incredible strain on the world's resources. That is a very real theme today that many people are aware of that goes beyond just the self indulgent life style of the past 20 years. The movie tries to make radical 'change' Jesse's theme at a level that implies that hackers and coders do have much control over what goes on not just in the cyber world but in everyday affairs. The group Anonymous comes to mind, and not that I agree with their methods, but they are real and are having some effect, whether one sees it as good or bad. Emily Somers (Stat) and Travis Aaron Wade (Jesse) both did an excellent job acting. One can notice for a short film how the expressions and feelings have to develop much quicker and they do in Reboot. I recommend you see this with an open mind and not be disappointed with an ending that leaves you thinking about whats next.

• Not particularly memorable

  Horst_In_Translation2016-02-02

  "Reboot" is a 40-minute science fiction short film from 4 years ago written and directed by Joe Kawasaki, his very first work in both professions. I wish I could say something more positive, but I did not enjoy the watch too much. It's very generic and uninteresting and brings really nothing new to the genre. Hopefully he can step things up a bit in the future. The acting was solid, but not enough to elevate the mediocre script. The only thing that really shines in here were the protagonist's hair and looks I have to say. I believe "Reboot" is only worth the watch for huge science fiction suckers, but everybody else can totally skip it. Also had some lengths. Not recommended.