After following a beacon signal, Jack makes his way through an abandoned building, tracking the source. At one point he stops by a box on the wall, as he sees a couple of cables coming out from the inside of it, and cautiously opens it.

The repeater

I can’t talk much about interactions on this one given that he does not do much with it. But I guess readers might be interested to know about the actual prop used in the movie, so after zooming in on a screen capture and a bit of help from Google I found the actual radio.

When Jack opens the box he finds the repeater device inside. He realizes that it’s connected to the building structure, using it as an antenna, and over their audio connection asks Vika to decrypt the signal.

The desktop interface

Although this sequence centers around the transmission from the repeater, most of the interactions take place on Vika’s desktop interface. A modal window on the display shows her two slightly different waveforms that overlap one another. But it’s not clear at all why the display shows two signals instead of just one, let aside what the second signal means.

After Jack identifies it as a repeater and asks her to decrypt the signal, Vika touches a DECODE button on her screen. With a flourish of orange and white, the display changes to reveal a new panel of information, providing a LATITUDE INPUT and LONGITUDE INPUT, which eventually resolve to 41.146576 -73.975739. (Which, for the curious, resolves to Stelfer Trading Company in Fairfield, Connecticut here on Earth. Hi, M. Stelfer!) Vika says, “It’s a set of coordinates. Grid 17. It’s a goddamn homing beacon.”

At the control tower Vika was already tracking the signal through her desktop interface. As she hears Jack’s request, she presses the decrypt button at the top of the signal window to start the process.

Continue reading →

The taxi panel has one weak moment. When Korben has the taxi in hiding from the police, he wants to lower the taxi shield to check on Leeloo. To lower the shield, he presses on the “DOCKING LOCK” button on the panel, which doesn’t quite make sense. We saw this button used earlier to actually do what it says. Why does its function change now?

It might be that the button has two modes, i.e. in a garage it anchors the vehicle and elsewhere it lowers the shield. Modal buttons aren’t great. What if Korben is in the garage and needs to lower the shield? Just say no to modal buttons. If the functions can be operated independently, they should have separate buttons.

Additionally, if it’s going to have to be modal and have a secondary function, it should be labeled as such. Even if the shield was aftermarket, the installing mechanic could have taken a sharpie to the button to note which of the dozens of buttons on the dashboard is the one that activates it. Mechanics, you now have no excuse.

Of course leaving behind my New Criticism stance on authorial intent, it’s entirely possible that Willis just pressed the wrong button, or that the prop he was faced with on set didn’t have a button that worked, and he just picked one at hand. But I like Willis, and I like not having to second guess film makers, so I’m going to cut him some slack for this detail that most probably, nobody but me ever noticed. Until, you know, now.