Oh boy!
Hackers was released in 1995 and it is certainly very much a film of its time.
I’m going to try and keep this as a review of the film and not start shouting that that’s not how technology works and laugh at the fact the titular hackers get excited over a modem but misspeak the speed (He’s says it’s 28.8 BPS modem when he should have said either it was a 28,000 BPS modem or a 28.8 KBPS modem – yes I am that sort of computer nerd).
I am also going to try to stay away from the male gaze and objectification of Kate (Angelina Jolie in her first major film role) as that was very much acceptable in the 1990s/early 2000s and while it’s super-obvious now it wouldn’t have been an issue back when the film was released (sadly).
So, putting rampant sexism and the writer’s complete lack of computer knowledge aside, let’s take a look at the 1995 film “Hackers”.
What’s Hackers About?
Dade Murphy (Jonny Lee Miller, also in his first major film role) is a computer genius nicknamed “Zero Cool” who at the age of around 10 is found guilty of hacking into a computer system and bringing down over 1500 machines. He’s banned from accessing a computer or a touchtone phone (do people under the age of 30 even know they were a thing?) until his 18th birthday. His family are also fined $45,000 which it would appear that they cannot afford.
Fast-forward 8 (ish) years and Dade has moved with his Mum to New York and he’s not too happy about it as he’s had to swap high schools in his final year.
As he’s now over 18, Dade is able to access a computer and he’s back to his old hacking ways this time targeting a TV station. He takes over the station’s programming computer which controls a robot arm that loads video tapes in order to broadcast shows (yes, a robot arm to load video cassette tapes I kid you not).
While he’s poking around in the system another hacker, who identifies themselves as “Acid Burn” asks who Dade is and what he’s doing in “their” system. Dade calls himself “Crash Override” hiding his hacking heritage and Acid Burn boots him out of the system.
At his new high school Dade meets up with some fellow computer hackers Ramon Sanchez (Renoly Santiago – Daylight (1996), Con Air (1997)) whose handle is “The Phantom Phreak”, Emmanuel Goldstein (Matthew Lillard – Scream (1996), Scooby-Doo (2002)) aka “Cereal Killer”, Paul Cook (Laurence Mason – The Crow (1994), Prison Break (2007)) aka “Lord Nikon” and Joey Pardella (Jesse Bradford – Bring It On (2000), The West Wing (2003)) who, as he’s a baby hacker, does not have a handle.
Dade also meets Kate Libby (Angelina Jolie – Girl Interrupted (1999), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)) and discovers that she’s “Acid Burn”. He tries to get to know her but she’s stand-offish (she also has a boyfriend which makes his interactions with her rather creepy) so he hacks into the school computer to make sure he’s put into her classes (again, totally normal and not stalker behaviour at all).
In order to prove himself to his fellow hackers, Joey decides to hack into what the team call a “Gibson” (a type of ficiticious supercomputer) owned by the Ellingson Mineral Corporation that is supposed to be extremely difficult to get in to – well not for Joey!
While he’s poking around, Joey comes across a garbage file (what we’d call a file in the recycling bin in Windows or Trash on MacOSX these days) and he starts downloading it. Before the download is complete, Joey’s Mum pulls the modem cable out and he’s left with a a portion of the whole file.
Kids these days will never know the annoyance of a parent disconnecting the phone line while you’re downloading something just so they can make a phone call.
The chief computer security officer at Ellingson, Eugene Belford (Fisher Stevens – Lost (2007), Damages (2011), The Blacklist (2015)) – a former hacker nicknamed “The Plague”, realises that there has been a security breach and worse still, the hacker gained access to a program he thought he’d deleted.
The program was a worm that Belford had programmed to siphon off money from Ellingson in small amounts so that the accounts department wouldn’t notice.
This plot line has in no way, shape, or form been ripped from the 1983 Superman III film at all which sees Gus Gorman (Richard Pryor) write a program that siphons off small amounts of money from a company.
And it doesn’t involve the threat an oil spill like Superman III does….
Oh, hang on a minute.
Anyway I’m getting ahead of myself.
Belford tracks down Joey – but not before he’s been able to stash the disk that contains the portion of the worm program he was able to download.
Yes, you read that right. A disk. As in a floppy disk that can hold a maximum of 1.44 megabytes of information.
To put that in context for you youngsters out there: if you have an iPhone with 128 GB of storage space, it would take 91,022 floppy disks to hold the same amount of information.
Anyway, I’m getting off topic again.
Dade and Kate have a competition to see who can annoy Joey’s arresting Secret Service officer the most and they cancel his credit cards, create a rather dubious advert which in today’s lens is extremely transphobic and also register him as dead – what fun!
Joey is released and manages to hand over the disk to the team where they examine it and discover the theft. When Belford realises they will have figured out he’s been embezzling money, he adds in more code into the worm program which will destabilise five random tankers and sink them – with the blame being pointed squarely at the hacker group.
See! That’s nothing like Superman III at all!
Belford approaches Dade and threatens to get Dade’s mother arrested if he does not help him retrieve the disk but Dade double crosses him and the team recruit a crew of hackers to stop Belford’s plan and prove he is the real culprit.
Will they be able to hack the hacker or will Belford get away with millions of dollars and cause an environmental catastrophe in the process?
The Good
The film is shot extremely stylistically and while the effects aren’t brilliant, for the time they’re exceptional.
Where there are shots of people hacking into machines, you’re almost pulled in to the machine with them with the circuit boards turning in to city streets and packets of data becoming traffic.
There’s also a clever (if slightly overused) effect that sees people spinning around or having bright colour overlays on them when they’re on their computer hacking into things, this has the effect of showing how focussed they are on the task at hand and allows you to be drawn in to the hacking process as well.
The acting is also pretty solid, especially when you consider this was Miller and Jolie’s first major feature film. Before this Miller was more known for small bit parts on UK TV shows and Jolie had primarily starred in music videos.
The rest of the cast is great too and while we get brief backstories they still seem relatively fleshed out considering the small amount of screen time each of them have compared to Miller and Jolie.
The films run time at 1 hour 45 minutes is brisk and keeps the plot moving along but it could have been extended by 15-20 minutes to give the supporting cast a bit more screen time and that would also allow the friendships to develop more naturally as they just seem to meet and immediately all become best friends.
The direction is also pretty solid considering it’s only director Iain Softley’s second outing in the position.
I also like the editing style used by Chris Blunden and Martin Walsh which was tight-paced and snappy which really fit in with the cyberpunk “digital realm” feel of the film.
But, I have to say that the most outstanding part of this film to me was the soundtrack – it was epic! Okay, I will admit when this film came out in 1995 it was around the time I would have just started really getting into music and going out clubbing so there was a lot of nostalgia surrounding the tracks used but every one of them (apart from maybe “Heaven Knows” by Squeeze) is so appropriate for this film it’s like they were written especially for it.
I enjoyed it so much I put together a YouTube playlist of all the songs I could find and you can listen to it here:
The Bad
As I said at the start of this review, this is a film very much of its time so some of the attitudes are, “sus” shall we say.
Firstly we have the relationship with Dade and Kate. She has a boyfriend to begin with (and he’s kind of gross too) but that doesn’t stop Dade being like a puppy dog around her, not taking “no” for an answer and following her around.
These days she’d have the police have a word with him for borderline harassment.
And while the film isn’t outright sexist in the way it portrays Kate as a hacker – she’s seen to be just as competent as the guys (if not more so), she is very much seen as an object of desire for Dade which somehow pushes her hacking achievements to the back of the queue when it comes to what the audience is supposed to think of her (and it gets worse, but more about that in the next section).
Then there’s the portrayal of the youngsters in general.
I was the same age as them when this film came out. To be honest I can’t remember if I went to see this at the cinema (or rented it later) but if I did I would not have seen any form of culture or attitudes I recognised.
The writer, Rafael Moreu (The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999)) was (as near as I can make out), in his early thirties when he wrote the script and it’s obvious he didn’t have input from anyone of the age he was writing for which I think explains the creepy relationship between Dade and Kate and some rather strange dialogue choices.
It’s also apparent that he didn’t have much technical input on some of the more “hackeresque” concepts of the film – the issue with the modem being one of them but also the way that the characters generally converse regarding the technology and what they were doing (it was almost as bad as The Net – almost. I might review that horror soon too, let me know if you’re interested in the comments).
I get that you needed to make the dialogue accessible to a lay audience but they could have done that by having a character as an audience analogue.
Also, as I mentioned in the plot breakdown, the story is not original and is almost a dead rip-off of the plot from Superman III which was filmed ten years before this and yet the only addition I could see to the computer storyline was they used laptops in Hackers whereas Gus had to log in to a mainframe computer in Superman III.
The Ugly
As I mentioned earlier, this film is extremely transphobic by todays standards.
I get referring to someone as a “transvestite” in 1995 was technically the term used but it’s what they do in regards to the trans community that’s problematic.
In the scenes where Dade and Kate are having a competition to wind up Secret Service Agent Dick Gill (Wendell Pierce – The Wire (2002)) they create a classified advert stating that he’s looking for love and that “Transvestites are welcome”. Gill then proceeds to get voicemails from deep voiced men (that we hear) which is supposed to be HILLARIOUS and yes, it was 30 years ago (oh my god I feel old) but today it’s just gives me the ick.
There’s also the objectification of Kate/Angelina Jolie.
I get she’s the “love interest”/”sex symbol” draw for the film but sometimes the way they film/edit her scenes is just dead creepy.
There’s a scene at the end of the film where Dade and Kate go on their date and end up (fully clothed for a while) in a swimming pool. Because Kate is in a very short dress, this floats up around her and the camera shows us her exposed crotch. She’s wearing underpants, stockings and suspenders and this sexual in-and-of itself, but they hold the shot for at least 30 seconds which is both unnecessary and disturbing when you consider her character is still in High School.
I know, I know, the 1990s were a different time and basically a lifetime ago but to see someone who is openly a school-aged teen having their crotch flashed on screen – how was that ever acceptable?
Final Thoughts
You might think that from all my moaning in this review I found Hackers to be a bad film – that’s not the case at all.
If you view it as a film of its time (for those who lived through those times), or a look back at it as a sort of cultural bubble if you’re under 30, then it’s actually a fun film.
It’s probably even more fun if you know nothing about computers and can just take all the hacking stuff at face value.
It’s also worth a look if you want to see how far Angelina Jolie has come in her acting career as it was just 5 years later she won a best supporting actress Oscar for Girl, Interrupted.
So yes, I’d recommend this film if you can get past the issues I’ve highlighted above. It’s a fun romp even if it is let down in a few key areas.
Watch this film if you struggle to turn on a computer and would press Alt + F4 if someone told you too.
