Hacker Cinema
Small Soldiers
1998 · Film · 110 min
Directed by Joe Dante
ComedyAdventureFantasyScience FictionAction
When missile technology is used to enhance toy action figures, the toys soon begin to take their battle programming too seriously.
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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.
No Home Alone 2 is kid is lost in New York and a forced cameo with Trump.
You are thinking of Home Alone 3 which is a cynical money grabbing shadow of the original two films.
Personally small soldiers is my favorite missile chip in toy genre movie.
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.
It appears in the movie Small Soldiers - http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0015025/