Good day, dear Habr readers!
On December 23, 2019, the final episode of one of the most popular series about IT was released - Mr. Robot. After watching the series to the end, I firmly decided to write an article about the series on Habré. The release of this article is timed to coincide with my anniversary on the portal. appeared exactly 2 years ago.
Disclaimer
I understand that Habrahabr readers are people working in the IT industry, experienced users and avid geeks. This article does not contain any important information and is not educational. Here I would like to share my opinion about the series, but not as a film critic, but as a person from the IT world. If you agree or disagree with me on some issues, let's discuss them in the comments. Tell us your opinion. It will be interesting.
If you, the readers of Habrahabr, like this format, I promise to continue working on other films and series, trying to choose the best, in my opinion, works.
Well, let's get down to the analysis of the series.
Carefully! Spoilers.
Key characters
Let's start with the main character of the series. His name Elliot Alderson.
Elliot is a young cybersecurity engineer by day and a hacker activist by night. Elliot is an introvert and socially inept. Due to the constant feeling of anxiety and anxiety, it is difficult for him to communicate with other people. He was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, that is, multiple personality disorder. Elliot can lose control of his body and control goes to him.
Mr. Robot
Mr. Robot is Elliot's second personality. He is his father. The father he deserves. In the future, he will be called the face "Defender". Mr. Robot is the co-founder and leader of the hacker group fsociety ("Fuck Society"), a revolutionary prophet who plans to destroy the world's largest conglomerate. Although he is intelligent and charismatic, Mr. Robot is also emotionally manipulative and can be quick to kill. This led to a comparison with the behavior of militant cult leaders.
Darlene Alderson
Elliot's sister. She is also a hacker activist. Darlene is one of the few people who sees through Elliot and always knows who she's talking to. She can see things that Elliot himself cannot see.
Angela Moss
Angela is the second person who knows Elliot. They grew up together and both lost their parents in a chemical leak. He lost his father, she lost her mother. Angela is Elliot's close friend, with whom he is secretly in love. Love was unrequited.
White Rose
White Rose is a hacker, the mysterious leader of the Dark Army organization. He is a transgender woman originally from China, obsessed with the idea of time management. When they meet with Elliot Alderson, he gives Elliot three minutes to discuss the attack on E-Corp. White Rose's motives defy explanation, and when Elliot asks why he is helping the Fuck Society, he doesn't answer the question because Elliot has exceeded his allotted three minutes.
In public, White Rose appears as a man, Minister Zheng of the Ministry of State Security of China. As him, he accepts FBI agents investigating the hacking of Evil Corporation's electronic reserves.
Secondary Characters
Tyrell Wellick
Yes, yes, you heard right. Tyrell is a minor character (at least that's what Sam Esmail intended). Wellick is Senior Vice President of IT at Evil Corp. He wants the death of the conglomerate no less than Elliot, and for this, he is ready for anything.
Romero
Romero is a cybercriminal engineer and biologist who specializes in phreaking and growing marijuana. Romero is a professional in his field, but his thirst for fame and self-will lead to conflicts with other members of the fsociety group.
Mobley
Sunil Markesh, a hacker nicknamed "Mobley", is a member of the "Fuck Society" group. Mobley is an example of a hacker represented by people outside of IT. He is overweight, always on his nerves, arrogant.
Trenton
Shama Biswas, a hacker also known as Trenton, is a member of the Fuck Society group. Trenton's parents immigrated from Iran to America in search of freedom. Her father works 60 hours a week helping to find ways to evade taxes for a millionaire art dealer. Trenton has a younger brother named Mohammed. The family lives in Brooklyn, and she herself studies at a nearby university. I think it's clear who she represents.
Christa Gordon
Elliot's psychologist. Krista tries to help Elliot sort himself out, but she does it with difficulty.
Dominic Di Piero
Dominic "Dom" DiPierro is an FBI special agent investigating a 5/9 hack (Elliot's attack). Although Dominique is self-confident and assertive at work, she has no personal life, relationships or close friends. Instead, she chats on anonymous sex chats and often talks to Alexa, an Amazon Echo smart speaker.
Irving
Irving is a high-level member of the Dark Army. The character himself is extremely colorful and personifies a successful mercenary who will do anything to satisfy the employer.
Leon
On the surface, Leon is a friend of Elliot Alderson, with whom he sometimes has lunch or plays basketball with. He is laid-back, likes to chat, and often talks about TV shows. Secretly, he is an agent of the Dark Army, which is supposed to protect Elliot during his imprisonment. Leon has many connections in prison circles and smugglers such as pornography and drugs.
In many series, secondary characters are not thought out, but not in the series "Mr. Robot". Each character is thought out so that people see familiar faces in them and ask to leave the characters they love. So, for example, Tyrell "got" right up to the fourth season, although the author of the series, Sam Esmail, wanted to remove him already in the second.
For such a detailed study of secondary characters, one can only applaud the authors.
Producer, Director, Screenwriter
Sam Esmail got his first computer when he was nine years old. The boy began to learn programming and write his own code a few years later. When Sam attended New York University, he worked in a computer lab. This continued until he was put on academic probation for "a stupid act."
In the film, he showed not just a third-party hacker, but himself (to some extent). He understood who Elliot was and how to organize a hack in real life. That is why hacking looks very realistic and spectacular.
2 interesting facts.
- Sem Esmail gave Elliot his date of birth.
- In the fourth season, it is he who injects the poison into Elliot with the phrase "Bye, friend."
In general, the picture was in good hands. The author knew the whole side from the inside, and even was a screenwriter, and a director, and a producer, which helped by saving the picture from the disputes of "money", "brains" and "eyes".
Plot
The plot of the series is as simple as a faceted glass. Elliot wants to hack the company "Z", which he calls the "Evil Company" (in the original we see the company's name as the English letter "E", and Elliot called its company "Evil" - evil). Hacking is necessary to him in order to destroy the company of evil and free society from oppression. He wants to rid people of debts, loans and credits, thereby giving people freedom.
I won't talk about what happened inside the movie. You yourself know this, and if not, look better for yourself and draw your own conclusions. I'll talk about the final.
The end we deserve
The very case when the finale changed the whole attitude towards the series, and the media hurried.
Firstly, fortunately, the ending is not in the style of the Lost series, where what is happening is a dog's dream.
Secondly, Mr. Robot did a great job of creating catharsis in the last episode. In addition, however, as always, brilliant camera work, directing and acting, the ending "rolls" the viewer along the "emotional rollercoaster". As strange as it may sound, the ending turns everything we knew about the plot on its head, but at the same time puts everything in its place. The viewer is breathtaking, he admires, rejoices, grabs his head, nostalgia covers him - a storm of emotions, and all in one hour.
Few series managed to say goodbye to the audience with dignity. Walter White at the end of Breaking Bad walks nostalgically around the lab, remembering his journey with the audience. And even looks directly into the camera, saying goodbye. In the finale of "Mr. Robot" the viewer was given a special role. In a scene clearly inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, we are also asked to leave, as the show won't end while we watch. Emma Garland of Vice called the series "defining the 2010s" even before the finale aired. And her words became prophetic: "Mr. Robot" perfectly ends the decade in which the serial industry has entered a new "golden age", paying tribute to us, the audience, without whom it would not have come.
6 personalities
Elliot has 6 personalities. Think six!
I'll go through them all:
- host. The real Elliot we didn't see in the movie not once.
- Organizer (mastermind). Elliot, who we see 98% of the time.
- Defender. Mr Robot.
- Prosecutor. The image of Elliot's mother, who was very strict with him throughout his childhood.
- Child. Little Elliot, who reminds him of who he is.
- Observer. Friend. All viewers
The fourth wall has been razed to the ground. Just amazing work!
Soundtrack
I decided to split this section into 2 parts - ambient and third-party soundtrack.
Ambient
Ambient is the background music that sets the tone for the film. All ambient was written by Mac Quail, who did an excellent job. The film has 7 original soundtrack albums. Each melody subtly conveys the atmosphere in the film. There were practically no misses.
I took 3 of the most popular songs in Russia from each album. Happy listening.
Other artists
The film has a huge number of performers and the music is just perfect. All music "jumps" from one style to another, just like the main character tries to adapt to the situation. I have selected 6 compositions by which you can understand the degree of diversity of the selected soundtrack. Listen for yourself.
The soundtrack is awesome. Go ahead!
Break
Separately, it is necessary to mention how the hack was filmed. It's just a masterpiece. How was it possible to remove the ticker and fingers hitting the keyboard, as it was done in the series "Mr. Robot". Rate it yourself.
Of course, hacking was shown in many films and TV shows, but it was either something completely fantastic (remember at least The Matrix) or extremely dull (as, for example, in the movie Swordfish Password, where hacking was furnished with pretentious effects on the sides, but it was not the code that was beautiful, but the shell).
Rami Malek
The game of this actor cannot be called less than "brilliant", he understood the role itself. He got used to the image in a way that not everyone could, but he played a deeply sick person.
Esmail answered questions about the difficulties he faced during the casting for the role of Elliot Alderson / May 2016
Rami Malek was on the verge of a nervous breakdown - he was shaking, Esmail told THR, recalling Malek's audition. - When he read the text, he literally gave rise to anxiety, and it was impossible to look at it, because the spectacle acted on the nerves. I then seriously thought about how he even decided to come to the audition in such a state. Before him, we saw about a hundred candidates, but none of them turned out to be suitable. It was supposed to be read from the face of "To hell with society", but it sounded so preachy that I was horrified and was ready to call the USA Network and cancel everything, because it was going badly. But then Rami just did it. I still don't know if it was all just part of his character's image.
Style
The style is perfectly matched.
Elliot - modern day hacker. Closed, inconspicuous opponent of social rules. His weapons are stealth and ingenuity. Everything he does in the film, he does remotely and with the help of a PC.
Mister Robot - 80s hacker. Remember the TV series "Halt and Catch Fire" ("Stop and burn"). Elliot's father looks the same. Stylish, strong, independent, courageous person who knows more than others. His strength is iron. There is no hack, but fixing computers with a smile in the laboratory of electronic circuits speaks for itself.
Plausibility
Each attack looks as realistic as it is legal to show.
Do not believe? I'll prove it to you.
Hacker tools from Mr. Robot
deep sound
Why would a person who throws memory blocks into the microwave, CDs on which he stores stolen information about people. Elliot uses DeepSound, an audio conversion tool, saving all the people files in WAV and FLAC files. Simply put, DeepSound is a modern example of steganography, the art of keeping information in plain sight.
Encryption is the most common and one of the most reliable ways to make your personal files inaccessible to other users. But besides encryption, there is such a cool feature as steganography, the essence of which is to disguise a file inside another.
Steganography is a method of storing and transmitting information that masks the very fact of its existence, in contrast to cryptography, which hides the contents of a secret message. Typically, this method is used in conjunction with the cryptography method, i.e. First, the file is encrypted, and then it is masked. The concept of steganography stems from the time of the Roman Empire, when a slave was chosen to deliver a message, whose head was shaved, and then text was applied with a tattoo. After the hair grew back, the slave was sent on his way. The recipient of the message would shave off the slave's head again and read the message. The modern world has moved on and now there are many ways to hide important data. One of the easiest ways is to mask sensitive information in ordinary files like a picture, video or audio recording.
Protonmail
This is a browser-based mail service created by researchers at CERN. One of the advantages of ProtonMail is that no one except you and the recipient knows about the contents of the letters, in addition, there are no IP address logs. Users can set the lifetime of letters, after which they self-destruct.
Raspberry Pi
A small and cheap computer that allows you to create a lot of exciting things. In the case of Mr. Robot this micro-computer was connected to a thermostat to control the temperature in an Evil Corp. vault.
RSA SecureID
A two-level authentication system that adds a second layer of security when trying to log in. The password is generated at a time and only works for 60 seconds - which is why Elliot had to go for a very bold plan.
Kali Linux
A version of Linux based on Debian and designed specifically for hack testing and security auditing, used in a number of episodes of Mr. robot. Kali Linux is free and open source, with hundreds of pre-installed programs for testing. If you are interested in the topic of network security, download it for yourself and start trying. Of course, for educational purposes only.
FlexiSPY
Tyrell secretly installs monitoring software on an Android device. After gaining root access using SuperSU, he installs FlexiSPY, a tool that allows you to monitor the activity on the device using a network portal. FlexiSPY does not give access to past data, but it can show everything that is in the phone's memory. Also hides SuperSU.
Netscape Navigator
Windows 95 and Netscape Navigator are mentioned in the series when the protagonist remembers his first steps as a cracker. The screenshot shows how the user views the HTML source ... And if someone looks at the source, he is clearly a dangerous hacker! A humble web browser can indeed be a useful tool for attackers, whether they're using web applications to do their job or exploring LinkedIn for social engineering attacks.
Pwn Phone
In season 2, Elliot takes the "Pwn Phone" which he uses to hack into other devices. He calls it "a hacker's dream device" and it really is. The phones were created by Pwnie Express, although the company has since removed them from the market.
Elliot uses Pwn Phone as a mobile platform to run his own CrackSIM script he wrote. The goal of Crack Sim is to find vulnerable SIM cards and then crack that card's DES encryption. Elliot then downloads a malicious payload onto the SIM card to connect the phone.
recon-ng
Perhaps one of the most popular tools for collecting information about the goal. After all, before you hack anything, you must first collect all the necessary information, about 90 percent is killed only to collect information, draw up an attack vector, etc. Such a cool tool as recon-ng will help us with this, it will help you collect such information from an object as: a list of employees, their emails, first and last names, information about the object's domain, etc. This is only a small part of what this utility can do. Not surprisingly, recon-ng appeared in the TV series Mr Robot, in season 4, episode 9.
John the Ripper
Tool used by Elliot in Episode XNUMX to crack Tyrell's password. The main task is to determine weak Unix passwords. The tool can pick up a weak password in a few hundred thousand or millions of attempts per second. John the Ripper is available on Kali Linux.
John the Ripper is designed to be feature rich and fast. It combines multiple hacking modes in one program and is fully customizable to your specific needs (you can even define custom hacking modes using the native C subset compiler support).
MagSpoof
If you don't know Sami Kamkar, then you've at least heard of one of his hacks. For example, the Samy computer worm that hacked into MySpace, his compressed air trick that opens security doors, or the Master Combination lockpick calculator.
In episode 6 of the second season, Angela visits one of the FBI's floors in the Evil Corp offices to install a femtonet, a low power cell phone base station, with an exploit on it. But before she can, Darlene breaks into a hotel room next to the Evil Corp building using some kind of hack. To securely connect to the femto network from afar, a cantenna (antenna-bank) was required.
To get inside, she clones the maid's hotel key, which has a magnetic strip on it. But because it takes too long to clone a physical card, it uses a device called MagSpoof.
MagSpoof is Samy's creation. Basically, it uses an electromagnet to copy the same pattern as the maid's key card to a card reader, then transmits that data to the lock. The stronger the electromagnet, the further it will work.
Social Engineer Toolkit
The Social-Engineer Toolkit is an open source penetration testing framework designed specifically to simulate social engineering attacks such as phishing emails, fake websites and wireless hotspots, all of which can be launched from the system menu.
Elliot uses this tool in one episode to pose as a tech support worker and, under the pretext of verifying his identity, get answers to the victim's personal questions in order to enrich his password dictionary.
Сonclusion
Let me reiterate my conclusions:
- The colors of the characters
- Literacy of authors
- Great storyline
- Mind blowing finale
- Breaking the fourth wall
- Well-chosen soundtrack
- Operator skill
- Cast
- Chic style
- Plausibility
The show simply has no cons. He may like it, he may not, but such I have not seen a competent work for a long time (if I have ever seen it at all).
If you liked this format of articles, I can continue my reviews, but for other paintings. In the near future - "Halt and Catch Fire" ("Stop and burn") and "Silicon Valley" ("Silicon Valley"). I promise to analyze the next series no worse and take into account your wishes.
I would like to express special gratitude .
Only registered users can participate in the survey. , you are welcome.
How do you like the series?
-
57,6%Liked341
-
16,9%Disliked100
-
7,4%Haven't watched and won't
-
18,1%I'll definitely look 107
592 users voted. 94 users abstained.
Source: habr.com