Hacker Cinema
Defense Play
1988 · Film · 88 min
Directed by Monte Markham
Professor Vandemeer works on a secret project for the US-Air-Force called DART: a very small helicopter for scouting and defense. When he gets killed, Colonel Denton gets under suspicion. His son Scott and Vandemeer's daughter Karen believe in his innocence and search for the true murderer and his motives.
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4 comments on Hacker News
Something about an obscure movie.
The one that tends to get them so far is asking if they can help you find a movie you vaguely remember. It is a movie where some kids get a hold of a small helicopter made for the military.
The movie I'm concerned with is called Defense Play from 1988. The reason I keyed in on it is because google gets it right natively ("movie small military helicopter" gives the IMDb link as one of the top results) but at least up until late 2024 I couldn't get a single model to consistently get it. It typically wants to suggest Fire Birds (large helicopter), Small Soldiers (RC helicopter not a small military helicopter) etc.
Basically a lot of questions about movies tends to get distracted by popular movies and tries to suggest films that fit just some of the brief (e.g. this one has a helicopter could that be it?)
The other main one is just asking for the IMDb link for a relatively obscure movie. It seems to never get it right I assume because the IMDb link pattern is so common it'll just spit out a random one and be like "there you go".
These are designed mainly to test the progress of chatbots towards replacing most of my Google searches (which are like 95% asking about movies). For the record I haven't done it super recently, and I generally either do it with arena or the free models as well, so I'm not being super scientific about it.
The first is maybe a good example of where an LLM integrated search engine makes sense. Because "compare two movies" has flickchart as the third option for me. But it is nowhere to be seen for "compare two movie posters" which is how I read your search originally (and indeed flickchart is about ranking movies not the posters themselves ... Obviously).
Anyways an LLM clearly teased that out whereas if you misremember or misread something a straight search is going to be bad.
Most of my searches are the opposite. I was to know about an obscure movie from the 80s with a toy helicopter. Google very neatly suggests Defense Play (correct) but most LLMs I've tried end up just suggesting very popular films with a helicopter and it ends up being quite difficult to get it to give me information about obscure stuff. Also with that same search the LLM suggests a bunch of incorrect films since (and I figured this out later) it turns out that it was all sourced from a single forum thread from the 90s where a bunch of the posts suggested movies that don't have toy helicopters in them. Go figure.
I know it isn't strictly what they are designed for, but I always go for movie questions which is what I tend to search for a lot.
Impressions: was very underwhelmed previously with charGPTs ability to tell be plot summaries for obscure films. It almost always made it up, even when prompted with a source (e.g. Wikipedia). Asking vague questions like "I can't remember but I'm looking for a film like war games but with a tiny helicopter" chatGPT always presented me with very popular films and could never quite key in on the "toy" or "small" bit of the query.
Bard seemed better in that while it couldn't quite get the movie right (for the record google itself gets the movie easily, Defense Play) it did eventually give me the right plot. Same with Ghost Fever which no matter what I did ChatGPT would always hallucinate the plot of. Unlike ChatGPT, Bard gave me the specific Wikipedia link quite often as well. It did make up the people and box office of obscure films pretty much universally.
Bard was actually really impressive for returning obscure results (which ChatGPT always seemed reluctant to do). I asked for another ghost film from 1987, and it happily returned Ghost Riders a film with a scant 200 votes on IMDb. Whenever I asked ChatGPT to give me bad or obscure films it would give me movies like Top Gun no matter how much I insisted I wanted something obscure.
I wouldn't trust either really, but Bard seems slightly closer to what I would hope a search/GPT integration felt like. But again I'm probably using it much differently than is intended to how others might interact with it.
Yeah for searching movies, for example, it is terrible. I also don't really see how it is going to get much better than it is since it inevitably seems to try and steer its way to non-obscure stuff even when you are explicitly asking for something obscure.
Just for example. I was trying to remember a film that is basically a knock off of war games involving two teenagers using a scientists small helicopter to do stuff. I typed into Google "film with small helicopter" and it was not only the first result, it was in a little cut out section highlighted at the top. The film is called Defense Play and it has a grand total of 144 votes on IMDb. Incredibly obscure.
I thought it would be fun to ask ChatGPT roughly the same question and at first it just gave me a list of very popular movies with large helicopters. So I said, no this has a small helicopter or a toy helicopter in it. And it gave me a list of films with helicopters but three in Toy Soldiers, Small Soldiers (which probably does have a small helicopter in it) and GI Joe (which is based off a toy and has a helicopter probably).
No matter how much I insisted that this movie is obscure it can't quite figure out how to do anything about returning things that match something as vague as "obscurity" even though there are measures (e.g. IMBd votes) available that could reasonably give it such a notion. It probably does know about the movie, but whenever I ask about obscure movies while it often can give me a year and the first few actors in it it does seem to make up the plot even when asked to just paraphrase whatever plot synopsis it has available to it.
I do see it improving but I also wonder if a model which is heavily weighted towards guessing the next section of text will have difficulty with the unlikely scenario of someone being specifically interested in an obscure film a handful of people have ever bothered to watch. Seems really useful for searches where a person doesn't really know what they want, and very not useful in searches where the person knows they need a specific and obscure piece of information potentially.