Yeah, the code, not the plot! This is a first to me, where the code – true, indirectly – becomes part of the plot. Exciting! But I go ahead of myself, let’s talk about the flick first. Glass (2019, M. Night Shyamalan) is a sort of a merger/conclusion between Unbreakable (2000, M. Night Shyamalan) and Split (2016, M. Night Shyamalan). It has an all-star cast with James McAvoy – freaking good – (credited for Patricia, Dennis, Hedwig, The Beast, Barry, Heinrich, Jade, Ian, Mary Reynolds, Norma, Jalin, Kat, B.T., Kevin Wendell Crumb, Mr. Pritchard, Felida, Luke, Goddard, Samuel, and Polly). Bruce Willis (David Dunn), Samuel L. Jackson (Elijah Price, a.k.a. Mr. Glass), Anya Taylor-Joy (Casey Cooke), Sarah Paulson (Dr. Ellie Staple), and Spencer Treat Clark (Joseph Dunn). The movie is entertaining and well done. But, where it stands out, it is in its use of code! [Spoiler alert]. In its attempt to reveal the existence of superheroes to the world, Elijah Price sets in motion plan worthy of Brain & Pinky! In the short, he forces the very ones who want to hide the presence of Gods among us to set up the video surveillance infrastructure to do exactly that. And instead of an escape plan, it is more a suicide mission that needs to be caught on camera. To do so, the code we can spot in the movie becomes an integral part.
During the tensed escape sequence, we see, out of the purple (blue is a sort of purple, no?), Elijah Price sits down affront of a computer and types the spotted code as a virtuoso. And then … nothing until the end of the movie. Indeed, we learn in the last minutes of the movie that the code is responsible for capturing the video feeds and of streaming them to a secret server, from where it will be disseminated into the world! Yeah, first time ever.
Now to the code. It is a code snippet written in MAXScritpt the built-in scripting language of Autodesk 3ds. Not the best choice as it doesn’t even show any networking package use. This must be the preferred development tool of the person who came up with the code. The production could have done much better, but you know, having the code be part of the plot sounds better to me than a more realistic program. Ah, last, we can also spot an Apple iMac, a purple one, of course.
