UNTRACEABLE - Sony Pictures Just Gives Up on Research

This weekend amidst the cold Boston weather I saw the trailer for Untraceable produced by Sony Pictures staring Diane Lane & Colin Hanks (Tom Hanks son) . The premise according to Sony Pictures website description tag (kudos to my SEO brethren at Sony for using Metatags on a 100% flash site) is:

“Within the FBI, there exists a division dedicated to investigating and prosecuting criminals on the internet. Welcome to the front lines of the war on cybercrime, where Special Agent Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane) has seen it all until now. A tech-savvy internet predator is displaying his graphic murders on his own website“ and the fate of each of his tormented captives is left in the hands of the public: the more hits his site gets, the faster his victims die. When this game of cat and mouse becomes personal, Marsh and her team must race against the clock to track down this technical mastermind who is virtually untraceable.

Now UNTRACEABLE is a horror flick so I can understand if the films budget could not hire a copyeditor, but there are a few things that just bother me about the premise of this film:

1. The metric that the “killer” is using to kill his victims is Hits.

Anyone who has any involvement with web metrics knows that Hits are “so 8 years ago”. Hits are How Idiots Track Success. The killer in this film would clearly care about the correct measurement if he built a site getting millions of page views per hour. At minimum the killer would use Google Analytics.

2. Millions of people looking at Live Video and your not using akamai?

Akamai during the Live Earth worldwide concert help stream over 15 million live video streams. Now if the killer in this film was to have millions of page views perhour he would likely need some help from a Streaming Media Service. A single server just could not handle the load.

Now I understand this movie is a Horror film, but the plot seems to take place in reality. As such the killer’s device of murder should not be so inaccurate. People crave details, look at ER, CSI, and House they are only good because you believe the detailed jargon. It’s almost as if an exec at Sony Pictures dusted off an old script from the late 90’s and gave it a “green light” to fill the post-award movie season.