Zoom-in Online

When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up - a police officer?  A movie director?  A professional wrestler?  A Nintendo game counselor?  At one point or another, all these occupations crossed through my juvenile, TV-saturated brain as suitable future employment.  During a brief period in middle school though, I laid all those aspirations aside as being too uncool, too inside the box.  I wanted to be something no one else would be.  I wanted to make money without leaving the comfort of my own room.  I wanted to hold ultimate power over friend and foe alike without having to lift a single weight.  After watching Hackers at a friend's house, I made up my mind that I wanted to be a computer hacker.  To a fifth grader, the cyberpunks punks depicted in Hackers were demigods: they dressed cutting edge, they had their own lingo, they hung out in exclusive clubs, and they could ruin your entire life with a few simple keystrokes. 

For weeks after watching, Hackers inspired me and the friends with whom I watched it to adopt an automatic air of intellectual superiority over other friends because of the exclusive insiders look we'd gotten at this misunderstood, counter-cultural niche.  Fooling ourselves, we believed that at any moment, we could hack the shit out of someone's computer if they pissed us off, blissfully avoiding the fact that the only "hacking" tactic we knew was how to flick that little black switch on the bottom of AOL 3.5 discs to turn off the right protection and re-purpose them for our own use.  Good or bad, it was probably Hackers that shook me out of my stupor of wanting to be an aggressive skater, induced from watching Airborne too many times.

What People Are Saying:

IMDB Score: 5.8 stars out of 10
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 37% - Rotten

"Not only is this action/crime stuff amazingly dumb, but it steals screen time from better aspects of the film. It also leads to an ending every bit as hard to swallow as that of another recent teen- related release, Angus. Neither film apparently thinks much of its audience's intelligence."
- James Berardinelli of Reel Views

"All this is courtesy of the short-circuited imagination of Rafael Moreu, making his feature screenwriting debut, and director Iain Softley, who hopes that if he piles on the attitude and stylized visuals, no one will notice just how empty and uninvolving the story really is. All the sound and fury in the world can't disguise the fact that yowling music, typing montages and computer animation do not a gripping finale make. This movie megabytes."
- David Kronke of the Los Angeles Times

"HACKERS is certainly the worst movie I have seen in years and will rank in infamy for me as one of the worst I have ever seen. HACKERS makes you leave the theater angry at everyone associated with the show for stealing your money and your time with a movie that insults the audience's intelligence with complete garbage."
- Steve Rhodes, random guy

Years later when I was older and (marginally) wiser, I realized Hackers had lied to me.  Yes, the world of computer hackers is an exclusive, counter-cultural niche (they even have their own hacker manifesto) and yes, really good hackers could badly screw up your life if they got a hold of your credit report or social security number.  But computer hackers are not elevated to a level of coolness of which the vast majority of us can only hope to reach.  While Hackers would have us believe that computer hackers look like this:

And that the Internet looks like this:

Real computer hackers more closely resemble this:

And have to stare at this for hours every day:

Computer hackers lead boring lives, most often caused by overdeveloped brains, inefficient socializing skills, and a barren wasteland of athletic ability.  Some hackers make up for their intimidating intellects with their intimidating hygiene (or lack thereof).  But it's precisely because Hackers takes this harsh reality and makes it cool - or at least, makes it seem like it doesn't suck - that the movie has some credence.  How much do you think people knew about hackers and the potential held within the Internet back in the 1990's?  How much do you think people know about it now?  Writer Rafael Moreu seemed to have been somewhat aware of this fact and jumped on board.  However, unlike films like The Net or Sneakers that had come out previously, Moreu attempted to approach the proliferation of computer technology from the perspective of a genuinely interested, if not legitimately informed, insider. 

Taking a peak at the Hackers Wikipedia page will reveal to you a plethora of references and homages to real-life hacking icons and procedures.  The fact that they hired hacker Dave Buchwald as a consultant - a man whose hacking skills gave him unlimited access to AT&T and Bell telephone systems - shows that the filmmakers were at least trying to add some credibility to the project they were creating, even if there were some critiques about accuracy.  Did it work?  Not entirely, but that's not because the script was terrible.  Most of the fault, I believe, comes from curious choices by director Iain Softley - choices like casting the far from intimidating Fisher Stevens as the lead villain and trying - and failing - to cast a Mean Streets-like grime on a film about characters who are clearly upper-crust.  Still, though the script isn't Chinatown, it's competently put together structurally and actually includes some pretty clever banter between the cast.  Take, for instance, Kate Libby's (Angelina Jolie) tough girl talk - "I hope you don't screw like you type" - or Dade's (Johnny Lee Miller) exchange with Ramon (Renoly Santiago):

• Ramon: So what's your interest in Kate Libby, eh?  Academic?  Purely sexual?
• Dade: Homicidal.

 Another factor working against the movie is that only a couple of years after its release, it had already become dated.  The things that were hip and cutting edge in 1995 (in particular, a great deal of enthusiasm for a laptop with a 28.8k modem) were already desperately out of date less than five years later.  Because of this, a lot of elements that strike audiences as tacky and lame today are simply victims of the ever evolving organism of technology.  This is by no means the fault of the filmmakers and actually sort of adds charm to it.  Oddly, there's a charm to the movie specifically because it's dated, almost as though it's a period piece for the 1990's, or a time capsule.  Even if you weren't familiar with hacker culture, you can watch Hackers and chuckle and smile at the little bits of nostalgia with that "remember when we thought that was cool?" humor prevelant in a show like I Love the 90's.  Just picture Michael Ian Black or Scott Ian bringing Hackers up between snap bracelets and grunge music in regards to 3.5 discs and dial-up modems.  So what if it's cheesy; so was the entire decade of the 80's and look at how fondly people think of it now.

Also, it's got a boob shot from Angelina Jolie and to some people, that's worth more than gold.