‘Mess with the best, die like the rest…’
It’s funny that hackers are often portrayed on film as cool outsiders when in reality they are all absolute dorks. That being said, the hacker subculture led to The Matrix and Mr. Robot and other pop culture landmarks and none of that could have been possible without Iain Softley’s Hackers…
Dade (Jonny Lee Miller) is, of course, a cool outsider who bonds with a group of hackers after moving high schools. This leads to all sorts of criminal activity and a plot that is needlessly difficult to decipher. We are talking about a film that has characters named ‘Cereal’ and ‘The Plague’, and those characters are played by Matthew Lillard and Fisher Stevens. How on earth have I not seen this film before?
Aside from the plot and some questionable dialogue, Hackers is mostly a good time. It’s fascinating to see where we thought we were heading as a society in 1995, much of it is spot on, and on that front Softley’s cult film has aged surprisingly well. The visuals, however, place this film firmly in the mid-90s, but there is also a certain charm to the highly pixelated messages flashing on tiny computer screens. Oh, take me back.
Hackers would probably seem utterly preposterous to anyone born after the turn of the millennium but for everyone else, it’s a captivating time capsule of cyber fear at the turn of the 20th century. It also provides Angelina Jolie with one of her most iconic roles (that haircut!) and a formidable soundtrack that boasts tracks from Leftfield, Underworld and The Prodigy. To quote the tagline… boot up or shut up.
