In this edition, we’re shaking things up a bit. Usually, we dust off the VHS tapes of the dial-up era, looking for prophecies in the pixels of WarGames or Sneakers. But sometimes, a film arrives that feels less like entertainment and more like a dispatch from the immediate future — a thriller that doesn’t look back with nostalgia, but stares forward with unblinking, terrifying clarity.
The film we’re featuring this month is Netflix’s “Leave the World Behind.”
Breaking Down the Exposition
Released in late 2023, the film carries a unique provenance that lends it a terrifying weight: The Obamas produced it. When the script notes came from a man who spent eight years reading the President’s Daily Brief, the suspension of disbelief became a suspension of breath.
While former President Obama provided extensive notes on character development and empathy, his feedback on the disaster scenario itself unsettled director Sam Esmail. As Esmail told Vanity Fair, Obama was able to ground him on how a crisis might unfold. “And to hear an ex-president say you’re off by a few details…I thought I was off by a lot! The fact that he said that scared the f#*$ out of me.”1
The story follows the Sandford family — parents Amanda (Julia Roberts) and Clay (Ethan Hawke), along with teenagers Archie (Charlie Evans) and Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) on vacation. Their getaway to a glass-walled Airbnb on Long Island is interrupted when the homeowners return with news of a blackout in Manhattan. As the movie unfolds, we discover the film’s antagonist isn’t a specific country, militia or sect, but rather a three-stage playbook executed by an anonymous force designed to dismantle a nation from within.
Let’s audit the film by walking through those stages — both for what they get right about cybersecurity (which is frighteningly accurate) and what they tell us about the fog of war in the age of the algorithm.
Stage 1: Isolation — The Kinetic Breach
The film’s opening gambit is a masterclass in visualizing the invisible. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, the first sign of trouble might have been a hacking screen full of green text. In this film, it’s a massive oil tanker plowing through the sand of a public beach.
This scene evokes feelings of terror like the film “Jaws.” But, here, the shark is a 200,000-ton vessel whose navigation systems have been severed from connectivity — the kinetic consequence of an operational technology (OT) attack. We often talk about cybersecurity in the abstract, for example, referring to data exfiltration and ransomware notes. This film correctly identifies that, in a hyperconnected world, code has physical weight.
When the navigational satellites go dark and the automated helms fail, the digital attack becomes a physical weapon. This shift mirrors the reality of incidents like the Colonial Pipeline attack, where a digital breach dried up fuel pumps along the East Coast.
The scene here acts as a plot device, representing an urgent reality. Research from Unit 42 consistently validates the plausibility of this exact scenario. As operational technology converges with IT, these once-air-gapped systems have become the new frontline. Securing them, as the film brutally demonstrates, is a national security imperative.
Stage 2: Synchronized Chaos — The Tesla Metaphor
Ok, let’s get into it. Here is where the critics — and many security experts — cried “Hollywood Delusion.”
In the film’s most arresting set piece, a massive pile-up of self-driving Teslas blocks the protagonists’ escape. The cars, white and pristine, careen into the pile one by one, driven by a compromised autopilot feature.
Technically? Yes, hacking a fleet of vehicles simultaneously is improbable today. It requires a specific cocktail of vulnerabilities that is vanishingly rare. In short, this is the Stephen King version of cybersecurity.
The scene relies on the “Master Key Myth” — the idea that a single, god-mode command can turn a decentralized fleet of vehicles into a hive mind. In reality, modern EVs do not operate with the mindless obedience of lemmings. They are, in fact, individual nodes with stubborn survival instincts. Even if you tricked the GPS, the onboard collision avoidance systems (LIDAR, radar and cameras) would be screaming to brake. The car’s primary directive is not hitting the large solid object. Overriding that on a generic fleet level, simultaneously, is less hacking and more magic.
However, if we stop nitpicking (which, truthfully, isn’t our style) the mechanics and look at the metaphor, the scene is brilliant. It visualizes the CISO’s ultimate nightmare — the weaponization of our own convenience.
While we likely won’t see a pile-up of this magnitude, the underlying threat is valid, representing a supply chain attack on the logic of transportation. It asks a haunting question: What happens when the internet of things becomes a physical blockade? This scene creates a visual vocabulary for a DDoS attack. Only, instead of bad packets clogging a server, it has two tons of steel and glass clogging an evacuation route. It forces us to ask if we have built kill switches for the same systems we rely on to escape.
Stage 3: Collapse — The Human Firewall Crumbles
The film’s true villain isn’t a hacker in a hoodie or nefarious code slipping past a black screen in green text. The villain, in this instance, is sheer silence.
As G.H. (played with weary gravitation by Mahershala Ali) explains, the final stage is designed to happen on its own. “Without a clear enemy or motive, people would start turning on each other.”
This is the ultimate zero trust failure. In our industry, we preach zero trust regarding digital packets — verify everything and trust nothing. But the film shows the inverse. When we have implicit trust in our devices and those devices fail, we are left with zero trust in each other.
Deprived of information and flooded with conflicting propaganda, the societal firewall crumbles. The hack didn’t destroy the country. It just turned off the lights so the country could destroy itself.
Director’s Cut: Rewriting the Movie with AI
The tragedy of “Leave the World Behind” is the characters’ inability to understand it. They are trapped in a state of disconnected panic — seeing disparate, terrifying clips of tankers, planes and deer — without a central nervous system to correlate them.
This fog of war is the adversary’s greatest ally in the real world. A GPS glitch here, a slow server there, a weird email log — individually, they are just noise. Together, they are a campaign. Manually correlating these events across a massive infrastructure in real time is a monumental, if not impossible, task for human defenders.
This problem is the exact one that modern, AI-driven security platforms are designed to solve.
We are building the Editor. Platforms like Cortex XSIAM are designed to ingest this synchronized chaos across the entire digital enterprise. They see the tanker on the beach, the anomalous login that preceded it, the network scan that targeted the satellite, and the malware beaconing from the endpoint.
They stitch these weak signals into a coherent timeline. In a modern SOC, the synchronized chaos of stage 2 is identified, correlated and blocked before stage 3 can ever begin. It’s about turning a potential catastrophe into a single, actionable incident.
Final Frame
“Leave the World Behind” is a discomforting watch. The movie denies us a happy ending and a hero. But, it serves a vital purpose. It strips away the abstraction of cyberwarfare and shows us the human cost of a fragile system, reminding us that resilience is about firewalls and patches, as well as maintaining the integrity of the truth.
The film ends with Rose finding a DVD of the sitcom “Friends,” desperate to watch the final episode. It’s a bleak joke of a character seeking comfort in a sitcom while the world burns. Maybe there’s a defiant lesson there, too. Rose is looking for continuity, while refusing to let the static win.
That’s Palo Alto Networks mandate as defenders. We protect the network to preserve our collective memory, not for the sake of the servers. Plus, we secure the signal so we can keep telling our own stories and ensure that the screen stays bright, no matter how dark the room gets.
Curious about what else Ben has to say? Check out his other articles on Perspectives.
1Zach Sharf. “Barack Obama Sent Script Notes for Netflix’s New Disaster Film With Julia Roberts and ‘Scared the F— Out’ of Its Director, Told Him: ‘You’re Off By a Few Details’.” Vanity Fair, September 27, 2023.
