MovieChat Forums > Enemy of the State (1998) Discussion > When they tossed Will Smith's house (spo...

When they tossed Will Smith's house (spoilers)

posted 9 years ago by mobocracy
10 replies | jump to latest

When they tossed Will Smith's house, why didn't they find the game system that had the video memory card in it? They showed the agents dumping the shopping bags on the bed.

Much later in the film, Will Smith gets the game machine back from his son and his son's friend.

In theory, they could have poached it from the bag but after the agents' first visit, Smith is shown taking the bags down from a high shelf on his closet. It doesn't seem plausible that the kids had the time/access to toss the bags where they were being stored between playing games, eating dinner and going to the other kid's house for a sleepover.

[–] Stratego 9 years ago

Because they were only there to plant bugs. They didn't know where Dean kept the tape or what it looked like, it could've been anywhere and they did't have the opportunity to go through all his stuff.

[–] eddieinportland 8 years ago

After the "Police" left Dean's house the first time. The next scene shown Dean going through the bags looking for anything that he didn't buy or didn't belong there.

Dean found nothing in the bags. So we can only assume the his son already went through the bags and found the video tape recorder and took it. He most likely put in his school bag to show his best friend. As his friend told Dean that it doesn't work.

[–] kuijiblob 8 years ago

It wasn't a video tape recorder, it was a handheld game system released by NEC in 1990 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TurboExpress

[–] kuijiblob 7 years ago

People still to this day think it was a video device meant for displaying the video primarily. Which kinda irks me since Jason Lee's character knew what he discovered and wouldn't be so stupid as to not encrypt it with what he had lying around.

[–] debrecenisrac38 7 years ago

Sure, but he had no time, the spooks were already on his tail, not to mention he gave up a six figure opportunity to be an environmentalist, getting chased by black ops wasn't in the foreground of his mind.

I live in the Gordius Apartment Complex, my interior designer was M.C. Escher.

[–] kuijiblob 7 years ago

My point exactly which is why he grabbed the turbo express and encoded the video into a pixel format that was still watchable. The turbo express was probably the best thing he had to hide it on at the time. Still don't understand the conversion though, he must have shrank the file size before conversion. Don't know if that was really possible in 1998 but I think it was because of the fact that floppies were still being used and on their way out.

[–] debrecenisrac38 7 years ago

Having lived in a country, that was on the COCOM-list, a list of countries that certain technologies cannot be sold to avoid potential weaponization, there were a few things we got accustomed later, like VHS or CDs, but even in our parts, CD has replaced floppies as primary data storage units as early as 1994.

Actually the technological change was so ahead of its time, that while antivirus could scan for removable drives, such as a CD-ROM, the A: and B: drive was left out, and remained a primary source of spreading malware before thumb drives came around.

The other thing is speed. Whereas this movie is close to authentic in showing how long encoding/decoding/data transferring took, on the other hand some had those fantasies, that hackers can expedite the process, or perform other things now perceived as magic with the capabilities of that day.

Now that you mention it, it's close to a character flaw on the part of the bird watcher. While steganography did exist, there weren't publicly available programs for private use, and there was no internet to get them either. There was also no need, cyber security from blackhats wasn't yet a thing, and the all seeing eye of the NSA was a fantasy. In other words, either he knew how to write such a program, providing a very lucrative side job, or he had some shady friends who supplied him.

I live in the Gordius Apartment Complex, my interior designer was M.C. Escher.

[–] kuijiblob 7 years ago

Yeah but he must have compressed the file to fit on a Turbo Express cartridge since it couldn't hold as much info as an snes or sega cartridge. That means it would have had to been compressed highly before being encrypted and then uploaded. This would have taken more time than portrayed in the movie as well since this was done on a computer that I assume ran Windows 98, Or probably a Unix based OS. Still with how little time he had, I can't see him being able to carry this all out so fast.

[–] debrecenisrac38 7 years ago

I've alluded to this in my previous post, back then filmmakers had this idea, that technology just magically works faster for some, especially if they have vague or non-descript equipment.

In reality, he'd have been killed 3 times over before the necessary steps required as shown are completed, but since there wasn't an internet yet worth of mentioning, and geeks had no representation, it was taken as a suspension of disbelief. They cared so little, the goof section lists all technical improbabilities and geographical errors, that the creators made.

I live in the Gordius Apartment Complex, my interior designer was M.C. Escher.

[–] MaximRecoil (4056) 2 years ago

"Yeah but he must have compressed the file to fit on a Turbo Express cartridge since it couldn't hold as much info as an snes or sega cartridge."

It wasn't a TurboExpress cartridge (HuCard), it was a PC card, AKA: PCMCIA card:

https://i.imgur.com/SsxagVx.jpg

It was probably a SanDisk FlashDisk like this - https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/lineupitems/0692oOv79mYt0U0RJYwNmFx.fit_lim.size_800x440.v1569506927.jpg

It is the same size as a HuCard which is how he was able to jam it into the NEC TurboExpress card slot (they are both about 8.5 x 5.4 cm, which is also the size of a credit card). Also, he had a Sun Microsystems workstation, and those were powerful for their time compared to typical desktop PCs. Plus, he only needed to save the clip of the murder, not the whole tape. Several seconds of already-compressed SD video (DV format: 720 x 480, 29.97 FPS) isn't very big in terms of file size; it wouldn't need to be re-encoded/compressed in order to fit.