Hackers (1995)

Simply Perfect

As Good As It Gets

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

This is a very dated movie about technology so immediately that makes it pretty campy. It does star a young Angelina Jolie (who oddly looks like an elf) as well as Matthew Lillard (who is unbearably bad).There's no plot and the effects make no sense. The costumes (including lots of roller blading) and settings are cartoon-ish but I'm not sure that was on purpose. A movie like this shouldn't be judged as a piece of quality film making but instead as an entertaining couple of hours. I get it. However Hackers ends up being one of those movies that's not quite bad enough to be fun and far from good enough to be watchable.My recommendation is see WarGames for a second time and ignore Hackers completely.

What a gem of a 90's movie.Before I start let me say I have built two datacentres and I am currently a domain admin of another in the telco industry so I will not comment on the IT glitches.Hackers is a story about liberation and fighting the man and that us hackers have more morals than the governments and people who control the government who trying to stop them. I did get nostalgic when i heard things like 28k bit per second and PCI bus with direct memory access. I wonder if the actors knew that a modem was short for modulator/ demodulater :) For this story to work it had to have some magic, as someone else highlighted ... "if you really see a real hacker at work it is truly boring stuff" btw computers do zeros and ones at best .... not these mathematical formulas that was blowing past screen but that would be boring. Amazing graphics on these PC screens didn't exist back then which IMHO made it date better than other Computer movies of its day.I liked how some scary facts about the government holding files on its people which you would be amazed today on what they hold on you. And you would be surprised just how many skimming scams are going on .... these issues hold true today.It was a more innocent time when only a select few knew how to do things and I even remember doing the tape digital sounds .... oh those where the days :)Enjoy it for what it was .... oh and you get to see sexy Jolie when she was only 19 .... pretty simple story line and some truism that even today not many people would know. I loved the early days of computers and we all thought it make the world better, safer, provide us with freedom, make it more transparent. Sadly it has made it for the worse and even our civil liberties are all but gone. I was in IT in the 90s and i think my pride back then stopped me from watching it but I am glad to see it as it is worth my time and hopefully your time to watch it.good stuff.

Making a movie about computers is difficult. Even the latest equipment looks ridiculously antique within a few years of release. There is not really anything to see -- just people sitting at keyboards. You must interpret it poetically. There is not much action. The public has no idea what is really going on.The best attempts, like Tron, work at two levels, direct action for the kids, and subtle in-jokes and metaphors for the computer savvy.Hackers has lots of energy, but it is downright silly.For a start, the techno-babble is complete gibberish. The screenwriters did not even know the difference between a modem, a screen and RAM. I think they composed the dialogue by looking up computer jargon in a dictionary and throwing the words into a hat. They make zero attempt at plausibility.This incompetence quickly destroys the illusion we are viewing whiz kids capable of bringing down civilisation as we know if they so chose.Most of the dialogue is theme and variation on "I'm the king of the castle, and you're the dirty rascal". It sounds like something first graders would say. It is so juvenile, it is jarring.Another jarring thing. Dade and his mother stayed in a one-bedroom apartment where mom slept on the couch. Yet Dade had thousands of dollars to spend on clothes and hairstyling.There is a goony character called Cereal. He appears to be brain damaged, perhaps from too many drugs. Yet we are supposed to believe he took over all TV channels of earth.But the main problem with the movie was the lead Dade, played by Johnny Lee Miller. He was badly miscast. His hair was expensively bleached and each curl pressed into place. He wore a leather jacket costing thousands of dollars that Liberace might have coveted. His facial features were so sharp he could cut cheese with them, but he had no sizzle. He came across as soggy as yesterday's waffle, a sort of young Lawrence Welk. His voice was as flat as Houston astronaut ground control.Angelina Jolie did a great job with the atrocious dialogue they handed her. She was like a time bomb about to explode. It is too bad the movie was not written more around her acting skills.A touch I did like was the way the characters got around their city with dazzling speed on roller blades. It added some visual excitement and flash.Some of the CGI visuals to poetically represent hacking into computers were of course completely unrealistic, but at least interesting and metaphorically evocative.A movie is a team. The writers were incompetent though the basic plot was quite clever. Most of the actors were great. The visual effects people were ahead of their time (but of course dated now). A movie is as good as its weakest link.

Hackers is directed by Iain Softley and written by Rafael Moreu. It stars Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Jesse Bradford, Matthew Lillard, Laurence Mason, Renoly Santiago, Fisher Stevens and Lorraine Bracco. Music is scored by Simon Boswell and Guy Pratt and cinematography by Andrzej Sekula. Young Dade Murphy (Miller) gets banned from touching a computer again until his 18th birthday because of a infamous hacking stunt. Moving to New York with his mum, Dade meets like-minded techno heads at his new school. When one of them hacks into a scam masterminded by The Plague (Stevens), the gang find themselves framed and have to not only clear their names, but also avert computer catastrophe.I desperately don't want to be one of this middle aged squares who frowns at teenagers, I consistently worry about the widening generational gap. Yet Hackers is irritating beyond compare, a film that, were I a teenage techno geek, would probably be on my "epic" favourites list. The 90s saw a rush of cyberspace/computer based thrillers, think The Net, Antitrust, The Lawnmower Man et al, none of which had the savvy nous or intelligence of War Games a decade earlier or Sneakers from 92. The main problem with Hackers is that it forgoes plot in favour of bombarding the viewer with techno babble and flashy visuals, it thinks it's being immeasurably cool by having this bunch of genius hacker kids (who conveniently all go to the same school) take on the establishment, but it's desperately shallow and comes off as an excuse to showcase some pretty young things in a world that the writers know nothing about.Computer based crime is very real, now more than ever, and it's frightening, but this never comes to the fore here, the peril is preposterous and pushed to the sidelines. In fact the only thing scary here is Matthew Lillard's pig-tail plats! Softley, who made the rather great Backbeat, is more content with MTV style coolness than making his film stand on its own thematic two feet. It's all very colourful, but even the gorgeous colour only serves to make this teen hacker world seem like a space age cartoon, the fashions more at home in an episode of The Jetsons. If it was Softley and the writer's intention to create an alien teen world, one that the adults are bemused by, then that would be impressive, but I really don't think it's that at all, especially since it rings so false. The young actors are enthusiastic, but that's about it, leaving Fisher's villain to hog the limelight, while Bracco is woeful.I can "dig" fanciful entertainment and spandex, but I'd also like a bit of substance with my eye orgasms too, Mr Softley. Thanks but no thanks, dude. 4/10