Computer technology continues to advance so rapidly that those old dinosaur desktops now seem like relics of a long-gone past. In the same vein, all those ’80s and ’90s films about computer culture could just as easily be relegated to relics, especially if they got it wrong to begin with. In the case of Ian Softley’s Hackers, the computer aspects of the film were questionable then and laughable now, yet it maintains a cult appeal. That’s because Hackers is hardly a film about computer hacking. Its gang of teenage hackers out to flex their egos and save the world from corporate greed are incomprehensible amalgamations of all things underground and counterculture circa 1995. That includes everything from hacking to, yes, extreme rollerblading. Hackers, like countless films before and since, exists purely to perpetuate the mystique of the cool rebellious teen. It just happens to feature a lot of computers and someone’s idea of “cool computer-speak.”
An atrociously bleached-blond Johnny Lee Miller is our hero Dade Murphy, aka Zero Cool. Responsible for crashing 1507 systems at the age of twelve, he is just coming up on his 18th birthday and the day when he can once again legally access the internet. On his first day at a new high school, Dade just happens to fall in with a pre-fab hacker gang in Phreak (Renoly Santiago), Cereal Killer (Matthew Lillard), Acid Burn (Angelina Jolie), Lord Nikon (Laurence Mason) and…Joey (Jesse Bradford). Aspiring, alias-less hacker Joey recklessly hacks into the Ellingson Mineral Company’s supercomputer (dubbed “The Gibson”), downloads a partial file that could reveal a penny shaving scheme and invokes the wrath of Ellingson’s computer security officer and former-hacker, The Plague (Fisher Stevens).
Hackers goes a long way to distinguish who is cool and who isn’t, who is in the know and who is an unsuspecting pawn in this technological brave new world. How? Chiefly, by choice of transportation. Normal people walk. Hackers roll. Every cool hacker teen in this movie hits the streets wearing inline skates. How else could they make it out to hacker-themed night clubs every night? Even The Plague – ostensibly an old has-been whose greed snuffed out his hacker moral code – busts out his skateboard. That’s right, he wheels himself around on the job and shows up at secret a rendezvous riding his board while holding onto the side of a black limo. All the cool people do it.
The only way audiences might believe that hacking involves such an incredibly social lifestyle is if the film itself looks like the coolest thing this side of ’94, with some trippy visuals that have since inspired countless technologically-focused films. Unlike its contemporary, The Net, which staked its vast computer conspiracy on a color-by-numbers suspense thriller setup, Hackers attempts to take audiences, very literally, inside the Net. Softley employs a combination of animation and rotoscope techniques to bring motherboards to life. Aerial shots show specific information located in skyscraper-like structures. Pulses on the grid become like taxis on the streets of New York. The result is a visual correlation between informational pathways in the technology and the real world city. If our teen hackers are less than kings of the streets (despite their uber-cool carnival freak clothing), they definitely live up to the moniker Keyboard Cowboys.
Appreciating Hackers for its accurate portrayal of computer technology would be like appreciating The Room for its grasp of normal human behavior. It just isn’t there. In the handful of hacking sequences, the film depicts hacking as an intense and vigorous typing exercise accompanied by mathematical symbols swirling around characters’ concentrated faces. That image, however, is not metaphorical. Those swirling equations are actually what Zero Cool and Acid Burn see on their computer screens. And when The Plague launches a counter attack, he really does use the phrase “head ’em off at the pass,” as if this were a Western and a hacker virus could be quashed with one push of a button.
Revisiting 20-year-old films with an eye toward how well they hold up now will certainly pinpoint films that are perfect cultural time capsules, but Hackers is fascinating because it can’t even manage that. The culture and the lifestyle on display is a complete farce. It oozes terrible fad combinations like a contemporary parody of ’90s subculture. Hackers is quintessentially ’90s without accurately depicting one single cultural touchstone. Softley exaggerates all things counterculture and cyberpunk in his film to create a look, to give a recognizable and much cooler face to hacking. But even the so-called uninitiated now have a better idea of what hacking is and who, in this day and age, does the hacking. For that reason, Hackers exists more in the realm of outlandish fantasy than in any would-be reality.