It’s that time again, time for another in the Cult Classics series. Today I thought I’d talk about the 1995 movie Hackers, featuring Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie and Matthew Lillard. Since it’s a subject a little more near and dear to my heart, don’t expect me to go as easy on this one as I’ve gone on previous movies.

Yes, the biggest argument I’ve heard against this movie is that the hardware descriptions are vastly outdated. I completely agree, you wouldn’t be able to hack your way into a Chuck-E-Cheese automatic door system now on a 28.8kbps modem but that was what they had back in the mid to late 90’s. I don’t expect them to predict the future and start talking about gigabit ethernet and quad-core processors. My biggest complaints were varied and many, so I’ll be tackling them one at a time.

First off, the graphic rendering of what is supposed to be happening inside your computer. Software and hardware activity, apparently, looks a lot like Tron. There are bits of light shooting across circuitry, chipsets towering over the motherboard like the Sears Tower, and algebraic equations whizzing by on tie-dyed backgrounds at obtuse angles. This is what the inside of your computer looks like, or at least that’s what it looks like when you’re in Hollywood or blitzed out of your mind on crack cocaine.

In truth, as almost all of our readers can tell you, software running is usually a lot more mundane. Input some information and the result it more information spat back out at you, plain and simple. What this movie did is what we like to call severely abuse dramatic license. If you want closer to reality look at War Games, green screens and no frills.

I’m not going to get into the phreaking commentary as Way of the Geek does not condone such activity and it was only partially true anyway. Most of it is no longer valid, so it’s a bit of a moot point anyway.

My next point of contention about this movie is that high school kids can read hexadecimal code and algebraic expressions like they’re reading a children’s book. They automatically know what the code does, who wrote it, and when it’s supposed to be initiated. This, of course, is total crap. It’s like saying that someone could see a copy of the Gettysburg Address in binary and be able to recognize it, recite it, and correct any punctuation problems therein all at a glance. It’s not going to happen, no matter how good you think you are at hex, binary, or math.

Okay, those were my biggest complaints and the others aren’t really big problems, just little things. Things like the fashion, the fact that the two hackers all other hackers looked up to resembled a couple of Japanese homosexual mimes, or the fact that the villain in this movie kept referring to hackers as samurai and independent countries. The list could go one, so I’ll stop it here.

Now we’ll focus on some of the better points of this flick. Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller are both pretty good in this movie, although you can definitely tell they’re pretty young and still have a way to go to become the actors that we know today.

If you remember those days then this movie will definitely strike some chord of nostalgia with you, even if it’s just a little one. Talk of tripling your piddly amount of RAM (by todays standards), 28.8kbps modems, and dialing into a server through phone lines are all things that old skoolers will remember fondly, although you’d never go back to dial-up unless the threat of bodily harm were thrust on you.

The story is a little weak, but it’s your standard kids get in trouble for doing something they shouldn’t, kids uncover secret plan, kids foil secret plan and redeem themselves in the process. This is all pretty typical for the 90s, as is the hormone-driven bond between Miller and Jolie’s characters. It’s not fine cinema, but it’s good to laugh at the dated information and specs or to just shut your mind off and enjoy a movie from when you were growing up.

Sadly, this movie makes no distinction between hacker groups. This movie shows all hackers as being out for information for their own personal means and nothing more, portraying them all as black hats. They forget to mention that there is much more to it, not to mention the ethical areas of hacking. Black hats, grey hats, white hats, script kiddies, and phreaks are all forms of hackers, all with their own codes of ethics and conduct. Don’t take this movie as a de facto standard for hackers, some of them are super nice folks and some are, well…not.

At any rate, this movie is worth a rent if for no other reason than it’s good to get nostalgic…or at least to get a chuckle. The fashion is date, the tech is dated, but it can still be entertaining. And for some reason it has stayed on as a cult classic among a small group since it came out.

If you liked that, try...

1. Cult Classics: The Monster Squad
2. Cult Classics: The Goonies
3. Cult Classics: The Princess Bride
4. Cult Classics: Six-String Samurai
5. Sam & Max Due Back October 17th

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