Ha Ha Ha Ha Hackers

Let’s go back in time, to a year called 1995. The DVD was announced, eBay and Yahoo were founded, Toy Story, the first feature-length computer-animated film was released and a Hollywood movie about cyber culture hits theatres. The title: Hackers. The tagline: “Boot up or shut up.” The concept: “United Artists welcomes you to the new world.” The dialogue: “Hack the planet,” “It’s too much machine for you” and “You wanna be an elite? You gotta do a seriously righteous hack!” This was Hollywood taking a subculture and sexing it up while reducing it to a series of catchphrases. And a decade-and-a-half later, it’s utterly hilarious. After all, nothing dates a film worse than technology, so a film about new technology is going to retain all the hipness of pogs, Crystal Pepsi or Hypercolor T-shirts.

Johnny Lee Miller – still best known as Sick Boy in Trainspotting – stars as Dade Murphey, a hacker whose handle is “Crash Override” (which sounds a little too much like the Playstation game Crash Bandicoot, released the next year). We meet Dade when he’s an eleven-year-old on trial for – what else?!? – hacking, under the pseudonym “Zero Cool.”

We now know that this kid is a serious hotshot – awesome!

Flash forward and eighteen-year-old Dade is up to his old tricks, hacking into a television station and changing its programming for kicks. He’s also moved to New York City, where he meets a bunch of other hackers at his school who also like to rollerblade, play videogames (at a sort-of cyber café that looks like a cross between a video arcade, a funhouse and a Tron-themed flea market), pose with various Coke products and dress like they were kicked out of Oingo Boingo because they couldn’t “tone it down.” Among them is Kate (a.k.a. “Acid Burn”) a pouty girl hacker in a boy’s world played by a very fresh-faced Angelina Jolie, and Emmanual Goldstein (a.k.a. “Cereal Killer”), played by Mathew Lillard as one of the most irritating comic relief characters ever laid to film. He looks like a guy who’d get beat up at Burning Man Festival for drinking glow sticks, and he rattles off one liners such as, “This is a wake-up call to the Nintendo Generation!”)

When one of the hackers with something to prove because “I don’t have an identity because I don’t have a handle” breaks into a corporate computer and steals a “garbage” file that actually contains an incriminating virus meant to siphon money from the company, the entire group is pursued by “The Plague.” He’s the Jolt Cola drinkin’, skateboard ridin’, trenchcoat wearin’ bad guy, the hacker responsible for the malicious software – which will also cause oil tankers to spill, creating an ecological disaster. But, he’s also the company’s computer security guy and will stop at nothing to protect his secret, even sending the Feds after the group. Now the raver nerd Scooby gang must go on the run and unite other hackers in order to launch a group hack in order to clear their names. Group hack – yeah!

The movie was trying so, so very hard to be cool and cutting edge, including having characters drool over a 28bps modem, dig through reams of dot matrix printer paper while looking for evidence, and receive instructions such as, “Turn on your laptop; set it to receive a file.” But of all the hilariously dated cyber shenanigans cluttering this film’s desktop, the funniest is the way in which director Iain Softley (K-Pax, Inkheart) decided to visualize all this rogue computing. He actually shows flying numbers and spinning equations flying around in monitors, and even the past characters’ heads. While the current cliché is to show a scroll of green 1’s and 0’s, this was before The Matrix, so “hacking” in Hackers still consists of the good old spinning and flying digital digits. So nostalgic… . Makes you wonder what the future of cinematic “computing” will look like – personally, I’m hoping that abacus holograms catch on and become de rigeur.

Of course, in another fifteen years someone will be writing a similar article about a cyber culture movie that hilariously has characters using Blackberries and listening to “Mp3s” on – ha ha ha! – iPods. Therefore, it’s our job to laugh if up as much as possible in the meantime, while we still can.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to find a way to make my laptop computer interface with a phone line so I can hack into a bank machine and prove to everyone on the Information Superhighway who’s really elite.

 

-Dave Alexander

Comments

I re-watched this about five years ago, and it was utterly hilarious even then. Poor Matthew Lillard; without Freddy Prinze Jr., he might as well just get it over with and hang himself.

I'm surprised you didn't reveal that the villain of the movie was played by none other than, Fisher Stevens! This is the man who co-built Johnny 5; Steve Guttenberg the obvious other "co" of the two. And isn't Penn (of Penn & Teller) in this as well, playing a security guard or something?