Summer Wars

Summer Wars. Dir. Hosoda Mamoru, 2009.

Summer Wars tells the story of Kenji, a young math geek who takes a part-time job pretending to be his older classmate Natsuki's boyfriend for her grandmother's 90th birthday party and accompanies her out to the family seat in Nagano prefecture (significant because the Jinnouchi family descends from people who backed the wrong side in Japan's wars of unification, and the losers had to decamp to some pretty remote places; Nagano's actually comparatively central). Kenji's other part-time job is as a code monkey for OZ, the global massively multi-person online environment which has grown to include over one-sixth of the world population. It's Google's cloud Chromium, with a few more amenities and better accessibiilty. When Kenji decrypts OZ's 2056-bit encryption key unknowingly, by hand, he comes under suspicion as the person behind a hacker A.I. that swiftly mounts a coup d'etat in OZ.

( The Wired is real.  )