The promise of the unknown embedded within the cutting edge of technology will inevitably lead filmmakers to explore what that technology is capable of. Just look at two of the greatest space-age films you could ask for: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which examined how mankind’s hunger for exploration can lead to either our downfall or transcendence, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, which explores how, maybe, we never truly know the people we love, no matter how cool our leather jackets are. Science fiction allows us to wildly chase our speculations into the unknown, even if the roads it leads us down can take us somewhere very different than we expected.
It’s important to note that while Iain Softley’s 1995 cyberpunk thriller Hackers is not sci-fi, nor is it comparable in quality to 2001 or Solaris, but what all three of these movies have in common is their defiantly unrealistic way of depicting emergent technologies. Softley goes a step further by taking his film into the realms of the gonzo, leading to stories about how the movie’s technical consultant, Emmanuel Goldstein (creator of 2600 Magazine), had purposefully fed everyone some absolute bullshit, just to see what he could get away with. In Hackers, the teen hackers we follow troll oil companies with laptops hooked up to payphones, with laptop screens that flare into life with colors so delicious and vibrant that they project vividly on characters’ faces. It depicts server rooms as full of LED-screened towers, displaying reams and reams of data on every side of them. It’s all cool as hell, but it’s so goofy that you have to wonder what Goldstein was thinking. Real-life hackers may have taken some joy in the accurate details they did have — the inclusion of the multicolored array of Unix and NSA securities guidebooks is a meaningless but nice touch, as is hearing jargon-filled lines like “RISC architecture is gonna change everything!” — but if you want to actually learn anything about hacking or computers, you may want to stick to Mr. Robot.
Then again, this was an era when the general public knew considerably less about personal computers, even though Hackers was released right on the verge of the tech boom reaching every corner of modern life. Our window into the world of hacking is Dade Murphy (Jonny Lee Miller, who would go on to play Sick Boy in Trainspotting within a year of this film). Dade is anything but an average teenager: at 11, his hacking skills compromised roughly 1,500 computer systems and threw the New York Stock Exchange into total disarray in the process. How powerful could he have become if he hadn’t been legally barred from owning or operating a computer or a touchtone phone until his 18th birthday? It’s hard to say. A typical movie would have depicted Dade as a “fish out of water,” learning the ropes of how hacking has changed in the seven years he’s been out of the game (a lifetime in the tech world, especially in the ‘90s), but the moment he turns 18, he’s got a brand-new computer that he uses to break into a small local-access television network. Make no mistake, Dade is a socially inept little weirdo who takes a little while to acclimate to a new school, allowing himself to get pranked by cool girl Kate Libby (Angelina Jolie, in her first major role in a film), but Hackers never once makes us question Dade’s ability to hack that sweet, sweet mainframe.
It doesn’t take long for Dade to make a group of likeminded hacker friends, who all go by names like Phantom Phreak, Lord Nikon and Cereal Killer (the latter of whom is played by Matthew Lillard, who steals every single scene he appears in). Once his new friend Joey uncovers some morally questionable data while dumpster diving in an oil company’s mainframe (think Superman 3, or Office Space), the film begins its shift into a teen power fantasy. Our ragtag bunch of youngsters bounces between cool-ass parties, competing to see who can more comprehensively ruin the life of an FBI agent (Wendell Pierce) who keeps running his mouth about them on the news, and fighting against the Plague (Fisher Stevens), the securities officer of the Ellingson Mineral Corporation, who uses Joey’s hack as cover for potential ecoterrorism and embezzling. This is the most basic aspect of Hackers — these teens save the day with global collectivization and unstoppable teamwork, evading any punishment for the legitimately bad things they did to that FBI agent.
What sets Hackers apart from every other movie in which a gaggle of teens take on the Man and save the world (or a ski resort, or the record store they all work in) is that, for all its tech inaccuracies that border on magical realism, its sometimes-clunky dialogue and the winningly wooden acting of Miller, this movie is just cool. This is maybe the most sci-fi thing about the movie: it treats reality as a starting point to be embellished upon with a heady blend of grimy cyberpunk and LED-embedded plexiglass, showing hackers competing atop skyscrapers and hanging out at a club that’s part skatepark, part arcade, part cyber cafe. Have you ever encountered a spinning bank of phonebooths in a New York train station before? Did you ever explore the files on your computer in a VR environment or view deleted data as psychedelic fractals? You absolutely did not, and neither did anyone else, but Hackers doesn’t care — it’s just going to go back to match-cutting between aerial footage of Manhattan and “aerial” footage of a motherboard and the data flowing through it. This movie is goofy, but for 1995, this stuff is pretty cool to see, especially since this technology was still a few years away from being widely understood.
And god, the music — while Hackers is the sort of film that you grow to appreciate through ironic viewing with your friends, its soundtrack is absolutely bulletproof. Jam-packed with the likes of Kruder & Dorfmeister, Orbital, Underworld and the Prodigy (whose song “Voodoo People” is all over this movie), the Hackers soundtrack was good enough to spawn two additional mixes of music “inspired by” the original soundtrack. (Worth reading: The Grammys released an oral history of the soundtrack in honor of its 25th anniversary, which is a treasure trove for any lover of ‘90s EDM/IDM.) Then there’s the film’s wardrobe, which is tied with the soundtrack for its most iconic aspect. Every single person’s fashion is a bizarre cyberpunk streetwear fever dream as much indebted to New York’s punk scene as it is to the ‘80s drag ball scene — every single character has a style all their own. This, too, was pretty far from accurate: costume designer Roger Burton told Dazed that the real hackers he’d met were black-clad older dudes. “It didn’t quite have the glamour or the persona that I really wanted to create so we had to create our own, basically.”
At the time, audiences and critics were simultaneously split and unified on the film’s qualities. Commercially, it was a bust — it made $7.2 million in its original theatrical run, forced to contend with Mortal Kombat, The Usual Suspects, Dangerous Minds and a rerelease of Braveheart. While many critics agreed that Hackers is a gorgeous, eye-watering film on the visual level, they were split on whether the stylishness was enough to make up for the aspects that kept it firmly in the realm of the B-movie. Roger Ebert (who counteracted Gene Siskel’s mighty thumbs-down with his own thumbs-up) summed it up perfectly: “The movie is smart and entertaining … as long as you don’t take the computer stuff very seriously. … I took it approximately as seriously as the archaeology in Indiana Jones.”
Ebert had the right idea — if you want realism or high drama, you may want to look elsewhere. Realism isn’t why Hackers (or Raiders of the Lost Ark, for that matter) is still beloved nearly 30 years later — its style and its personality are. It’s the kind of movie where Penn Jillette can play an inept cybersecurity guard, Felicity Huffman can prosecute an 11-year-old and a party at Angelina Jolie’s house can be infiltrated by an undercover FBI agent played by Marc Anthony. It’s the kind of movie where a woman wearing a full chandelier headdress dancing at a club isn’t even the most eye-catching aspect of the scene. It’s full of dialogue like “My BLT drive on my computer just went AWOL, and I’ve got this big project due tomorrow for Mr. Kawasaki, and if I don’t get it in, he’s gonna ask me to commit hari-kari!” as well as “We are samurai. The keyboard cowboys. And all those other people out there who have no idea what’s going on are the cattle. Mooo!”
Over the last 30 years, that style and personality have transformed Hackers into a bona fide cult classic. It’s not perfect, and maybe it isn’t even all that good, but its extravagant panache demands the kind of repeat viewing that convert you from “so-bad-it’s-good” to “actually, this is unironically awesome.” Before long, you’ll be looking for any opportunity to scream “HACK THE PLANET!!!” out of a car window and dreaming about your own city’s skyline as a neon-lit motherboard. Just make sure to check your hunger for realism at the door.
The post Revisit: Hackers appeared first on Spectrum Culture.