Do you have one of those movies that you feel compelled to watch every time that it's on? Tonight I was flipping through the channels and stumbled across Hackers. I'd consider watching this movie a guilty pleasure, except that I'm proud of loving it. I'm not sure what initially attracted me to this film back in '95. Maybe it was the (over)glorified references to hacker culture. Maybe it was the exessive (mis)use of the word "elite". Who am I kidding, it was probably Angelina Jolie, you know, before she went crazy.
One of my favorite scenes in the movie is where Phreak, Nikon, Cereal and Crash sneak into Burn's room to check out her new laptop. In what was possibly one of the first onscreen Apple Fanboy moments, they drool over the "active matrix display" and "28.8 bps modem". Hey, I remember drooling over the first modem upgrade I bought: I went from 200 to 2400 baud! I am really quite glad that there are as many hardware spec references as there are throughout the film. Now, a decade later, it really hits the nostalgia factor - forever anchoring the movie in time. Can you believe that just over 10 years ago 28.8k modems were considered top of the line?
Sure there are references that just don't make sense, like the cheesy graphics used to visualize hacking the Gibson and navigation of a 3d filesystem. But compared to other cyber-flicks of the era, like The Net and Sneakers, Hackers is somehow timeless in how the movie dates itself. Perhaps the truly ageless part of this movie is the very apropos soundtrack: with songs like "Voodoo People" by The Prodigy and "Connected" by Stereo MC's, this album remains a regular on my iPod.Hack the planet!
Rating: ** 1/2
4 comments:
Believe it or not, I've never seen it, probably because for some reason I repeatedly mistake it for Sneakers. How would you say it stacks up against War Games?
Grr... I actually just did exactly the same thing when I added the movie to my wishlist: there's Sneakers right where Hackers should have been.
I think it's hard to compare the two... I mean, War Games actually got Oscars where Hackers wasn't even profitable in the box office.
War Games is clearly the better movie. If you can overlook Robert Redford, Sneakers is a reasonable flick as well, on par with Hackers. If I had to chose one of the three to watch, I'd likely chose Hackers each time though - it has a fun factor that neither of the others have, IMO, in a Empire Records kind of way.
I also confuse it for Sneakers a lot. Don't think I've ever actually seen Hackers!
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