Takedown

Without going deep into the the story I can say that if you want to know about the real world under your computer and the privacy that never been out there you're In the right place. The movie Takedown will show you a small piece of hacking in the past and maybe the name "history of hacking" can be correct too.

you can find some of the items from the movie in the spy-shops around so in my opinion just for the knowledge the movie must be seen. In the movie there are some point who are too stuck ,and some time there is no point for long focus in one position. I can see by the movie the vision of the creator ,and he did understand the story and the "How" not like many times in movies without any contact to the reality ,however he failed in focusing too much on the technology and mess the option to show how really hacker feel against and from the authorities.

Enjoy

This was a movie that deserved to tank. Kevin Mitnick, a genius with computers who was a little too inquisitive for the authorities liking, has been the victim of so many abuses that it can make one's stomach turn. "Takedown" was adapted from a book written by John Markoff and Tsutomu Shimomura who exploited Kevin, a man about whom neither of the authors had any direct knowledge, and pretended to be Mitnick experts when in fact they couldn't have been more clueless.

Markoff, a hack journalist who did everything that he could to portray Kevin a danger to society in order to keep writing articles about him, has claimed wild rumors about Mitnick to be fact (rumors such as Kevin hacking into NORAD computers, harassing Christie McNickle, and converting home phones into pay phones) with no regard for the fact that he was demonizing Kevin in the eyes of society and in the eyes of a justice system - a system that would eventually lock Kevin in solitary confinement for 8 months because they were afraid he would use prison phones to launch nuclear missiles if placed in general population. Tsutomu Shimomura is nothing but a smart-ass hacker wanna-be whose main contribution to the book "Takedown" was a list of his skateboarding and eating habits.

If anyone out there really wants to learn the true Kevin Mitnick story, please view "Freedom Downtime" by Emmanuel Goldstein. [http://us.imdb.com/Title?0309614]

To be honest I watched this film purely for the fact that I am very interested in Hacker Culture/History.. and to my dismay, this film is far from the truth. However it does have its good sides.. it's portrayal of hacking itself and of people with an over-enthusiastic interest in computing for one. Where other hacker-orientated Hollywood movies show flashy tron-like graphics to depict gaining root on a system, Takedown shows you how it is. And the other good thing about this movie is just that... its a movie. If you ignore the fact that the majority of its plot is based on biased views from people who either disliked Kevin, or never even knew him, it's watchable. It contains all the aspects of a Hollywood movie that grab the viewer.. an original topic, a fast moving storyline, a so-called criminal that you really feel sorry for, an unjust American legal system, and a so-called victim who is just as bad as the depicted criminal. If you can easily switch off, this film is for you, but if you care about freedom of information, moral values and the fact that everyone has the right to a fair trial... go watch Freedom Downtime.

From everything that I heard about the original script (which was "obtained" under mysterious circumstances and leaked to the world before shooting started), I was expecting this movie to be really, really awful. I was pleasantly surprised to see that either Miramax, the writers, and/or the producers took some of the hacker community's complaints seriously, and adjusted the script accordingly. The final script that was filmed is certainly more even-handed and fair to Kevin Mitnick than Shimomura and Markoff's horrible book "Takedown" was (for a much better treatment of the Kevin Mitnick story, read Jonathan Littman's 1996 book "The Fugitive Game"), and we should be grateful that this film didn't end up being the hatchet-job on Kevin that we all thought it was going to be.

I was glad to see that the "trashcan cover scene", for example, didn't make the final cut, but a little disappointed that we weren't shown how large of a role that John Markoff played during Shimo's "manhunt" for Kevin, and then afterward; according to their own book, Markoff was present for many of the events that took place in North Carolina, and should have at least been shown in the scenes at the cell site alongside Shimo, Julia and the FBI agents.

They also could have done more with the "Lance" character, who represented a real hacker calling himself "Agent Steal" that was working for the FBI, and who figured prominently in the arrest and conviction of another hacker named Kevin Poulsen. (Poulsen's story, done properly, would make for a great movie too, but I digress..) Another no-brainer, slam-dunk scene that should have been in the movie, but wasn't for some reason, was Kevin and Shimo's one and only face to face meeting, in a North Carolina courtroom shortly after his arrest, where Kevin uttered his now famous line "I respect your skills" to Shimo.

I mean, it's no "Saving Private Ryan" or "Godfather Part II", but it isn't bad, either; in fact, it is a much more realistic and enjoyable movie than "Hackers" or "Sneakers" (to its credit, "Hackers" did have the lovely Angelina Jolie going for it), though not as much fun as "War Games", which is truly the "Citizen Kane" of hacker movies, or "Pump Up The Volume", which was more of a hacker movie than people realize, even though the "hacking" is done with a pirate radio station instead of a computer.

As others have already recommended here, go find a copy of "Freedom Downtime", the excellent documentary about Kevin that was produced by Emmanuel Goldstein and the staff of 2600 Magazine, you won't be disappointed.

Stumbled upon TAKEDOWN's listing here on IMDB.com and had to check it out: I'd read Markoff and Shimomura's book back in grad school and thought it was okay (digression: there's a lot of debate in the hacker community about which book covers the Mitnick case best, and many say Markoff and Shimomura's book is extremely one-sided; Mitnick is guilty of nothing more than breaking into several large corporation's servers and poking around, trying out their code, they say. Whether this is a real crime, I leave that up to you dear reader).

As for TAKEDOWN, the movie: most flicks about computers teeter on one end or the other of the Reality Scale: they are either boring -- afterall, it's just a person typing at a computer -- or way too fantastical for anyone who's used any flavor of Unix to take seriously (e.g., THE MATRIX or the last HACKERS movie). TAKEDOWN straddles the line somewhere in the middle -- and admirably so.

What TAKEDOWN does very well is show the process of social engineering, e.g., talking someone into thinking you're someone you're not to get information. Mitnick mastered this skill. The real crux of TAKEDOWN, though, is the showdown between the two egos of Mitnick and Shimomura (bravo to Russell Wong -- wow, if Shimo really is that much of an arrogant jerk, I can see why he got under Mitnick's skin so much).

Skeet Ulrich is often called the Poor Man's Johnny Depp, but here's a role that was made for him. Joe Chappelle's direction is crisp and keeps the action tense. Minor complaint: The editor should have chilled out a bit though -- man, do we really need all those quick, jarring cuts? I supposed they were trying to make using a computer look interesting, cool and non-boring.

Overall, if you're into hacking, subcultures, law enforcement and computer crime, you should check this one out. It's too bad no one's seen this -- it must have been released direct-to-video; I don't even remember seeing ads in the paper for it.

P.S. keep an eye out for a brief appearance by Amanda Peet in a telling scene that hints at the REAL source of Mitnick's problems: LACK OF SOCIAL SKILLS!