Hacker Cinema
Poster for Mercury Rising

Mercury Rising

1998 · Film · 111 min

Directed by Harold Becker

ActionCrimeDramaThriller

Renegade FBI agent Art Jeffries protects a nine-year-old autistic boy who has cracked the government's new "unbreakable" code.

2 neutralfrom 2 commenters

IMDbTMDBTrends

Where to watch

No streaming data for this title.

2 comments on Hacker News

  1. NeutralfaeriechanglingDec 22, 2023

    It seems to me it's medicine to blame for people treating autistics as a group, since that is literally how they prescribe that they be treated.

    They used to have 3 divisions, PDD-NOS, Aspergers, and Autism and thought that they overlapped and overlap was supposedly bad.

    The root of the problem hardly seems to be pop culture, which to me has shown a pretty wide spectrum of autistic behaviour and generally portray it far more positively and heterogeneous than medicine does, which treats somebody having a diagnosis of Autism in the same light of them having a diagnosis of cancer. It's pop culture which has eased the stigma, it's high culture which truly looks down upon autistics as poor lambs to be saved.

    When I was a kid, doctors were in love with emphasising how I would probabilistically never succeed. Meanwhile, Hollywood put out a bruce willis film about how autistic children are smarter than NSA cryptographers. I listened to Hollywood, and ignored the doctors.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Rising

  2. NeutralHopkaSep 11, 2013

    Makes me think of the movie Mercury Rising[1], where a kid "wins" an NSA crypto challenge and is subsequently hunted by them because he cracked their code.

    [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Rising