I never saw Hackers (1995) when it came out in cinemas. The first time I properly watched it was with friends to make fun of it, a studio picture that tried to market one sub culture (internet hackers) to another (teens). To represent hacking as cool and punk seemed naff and silly, particularly with attractive movie stars Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie as your “keyboard cowboys”. On his eighteenth birthday, new kid in town Dade (Miller) aka Crash Override flies into NYC with his single mother, hiding a secret past as a notorious kid hacker named Zero Cool. While at high school, Dade befriends others who are into hacking including the stylish Kate (Jolie) aka Acid Burn. Meanwhile, one of their brethren is blamed for a corporate breach that could unveil an embezzlement plot by security expert The Plague (Fisher Stevens) and a PR executive (Lorraine Bracco). With the Secret Service on their tail (Wendell B Pierce from The Wire and Marc Anthony), the hackers have to work together to clear their names, stop corporate espionage and “hack the planet!” In a cyberpunk frame of mind at the moment, watching it again now, I appreciate Hackers more than I used to, particularly its distinctive fashions (motorcycle jackets, straps, a Quicksliver rashie at one point) and awesome electronica soundtrack (pump up the Halycon ‘On and On’!), and its attempts to make hacking cinematic. Director Iain Softley uses illuminated projection against character’s faces when they’re looking at the computer screens, and there are model cities of electronic data that the camera glides through, intercut with Koyaanisqatsi style footage of trains and cities. There are also dissolves of a bird’s eye view of NYC dissolving into the data flow; it is endearing how these techno vistas are intercut with the hacker characters using quaint apple macintosh interfaces. I wish there was more high style, and a better hook to the story with more ‘action’; aside from the rollerblade chase set to Prodigy’s ‘Voodoo People’, the climatic ‘hack’ is strangley subdued, content with slowly spinning phone booths rather than any CGI avatars battling it out or at least a Sneakers-style physical heist. I do enjoy watching Fisher Stevens and Lorraine Bracco in this, but they remain the least effective movie villains of all time; they should be funnier or more heightened, like they’re the cartoon villains in a comedy like Mannequin. The young cast are very good – Renoly Santiago, Laurence Mason, a cigarette smoking Jesse Bradford – and particularly the manic energy that Matthew Lillard was bringing to his part, blissfully in his own universe. Hackers has a charm, a pre-social media snapshot of a net culture that may never have existed yet inevitably became an influential cult movie that set the style for later subcultures. The notion of the internet as a space for teens to hang out and change the world is quite utopian compared to the ongoing hellscape social media has become. Recommended
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