Every now and again, a film arrives that encapsulates a
moment in the zeitgeist so specific, so right on that very moment, that even a
few years later, it gets rendered utterly hilarious. There’s the likes of
Wayne’s World, Road House, every propaganda film ever, and now, the delightful,
the deliciously garish, the so incredibly nineties
masterpiece, that is Hackers.
Let’s go back to 1995—the internet was still largely this
upcoming but tumultuous ‘information superhighway’ that mostly made funny
noises over the phone. Desktop computers proliferated and advanced, with Apple
and Microsoft leading the way as older companies like Commodore bit the dust.
In the midst of all this fear and excitement leading up to the New Millennium,
anything to do with all this computer magic was naturally of interest to a
public still trying to get past DOS no longer being a thing. If you were there,
you know exactly what I’m talking about. Modems might as well have been magic,
techno-laden 3D graphics were orgasmically futuristic, and in that time,
director Iain Softley gave us what was then a cutting-edge thriller that tapped
into all of this. And it was indeed amazingly cutting edge. For about ten minutes.
The actual story is about a high school outcast ‘Zero Cool’
Dade, who is more interested in monkeying around on his laptop, which looks
like some sort of kitchen appliance by today’s standards. Around the beginning
of the film we get the only part that resembles actual hacking, when he tricks
a guard over the phone to give up a modem number. And then the tone is set when
he gains total access to a network’s channels, fighting over tape selection with
a rival hacker to the tunes of the Prodigy. Dear god is it glorious.
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| Yeah, I had about the same look when I saw those clothes. |
After that, we get introduced to ‘Zero Cool’s cadre of fellow
keyboard warriors, who, you see, all have their own super-special titles called
‘usernames’! Unthinkable, what these strange deviants do behind a screen! They
even have their own nightclub, complete with a bizarrely elaborate arcade
machine setup. As the film bombards us with garish fashion and CGI animation of
the time, you’ll either get a guilty pleasure wash of nostalgia, or a big
laugh, or most likely both. Either way, there’s lots of fun to be had.
Oh yeah, there’s also a story. It’s all about some shit to
do with eeeeevil hacker Eugene ‘The Plague’, played by Fisher Stephens, is
planning to do with a computer virus that comes complete with an incredibly
intricate and responsive GIF animation. Our heroes go back and forth trying to
expose him and his worm while avoiding totally uncool and un-gnarly
authorities, and in the midst of all this, there’s some boring romance between
Zero Cool and a 19-year old Angelina Jolie, no doubt totally unsuspecting that she'd star in even stupider films when she decided to play Lara Croft.
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| "Dude, once we wait like sixteen hours for this image to download, we could, like, see a blob of pixels that looks like a hot chick. Nyeheheh, heheh, heheh." |
These days, they’d just sit on their asses and steal wifi
from Starbucks. And they’d mostly be wearing stained plain T-shirts. And they’d
probably be Russian. Or launching spam against random websites. Or something.
Either way, in all honesty, despite my jokes, this film is worth it just as a
perfect sort of time capsule. It’s all played so gloriously straight, but had
it come a little later, by the time the internet was finally making headway and
everyone now had their own goofy user title, it simply couldn’t have been done
like that.
Instead, they did it by having our hacker heroes wear black
and dodge bullets. Ultimately, oddball pseudo-cyberpunk films like this all
lead to something that really did impact cinema and still gets discussed today.
Before long, we’ll be talking about the Matrix—but before we get there, there’s
a fair few delightful pieces of computer-fused nineties crap to talk about.
Grab your floppies, boot up Netscape, turn off your landline, and hold on…
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