Hackers

what the film does

in 1988, eleven-year-old dade murphy crashes 1,507 computer systems and causes a drop in the new york stock exchange. the secret service fines his family and bans him from using computers or telephones until his eighteenth birthday. years later, dade has moved to new york city, taken the name crash override, and returned to the networks.

he joins a group of teenage hackers that includes kate libby, known online as acid burn, along with cereal killer, lord nikon, the phantom phreak, and joey, the youngest member. joey breaks into the gibson, a supercomputer owned by ellington mineral corporation, and accidentally downloads part of a file that looks like a computer virus. the company’s security officer, eugene the plague belford, claims the file can capsize ellington’s oil tankers, then uses the secret service to hunt the teenagers while hiding his own theft.

dade and the others discover that the file is actually a worm designed to steal twenty-five million dollars from ellington transactions. the da vinci virus is a distraction, meant to cover the theft by threatening the company’s tanker fleet. with the secret service closing in, the group joins forces with hackers around the world for one final assault on the gibson. their attack exposes the plague’s scheme and clears their names.

why it is in the canon

hackers is a movie about the internet before the internet became ordinary. its version of online life is all neon windows, public payphones, acoustic couplers, rollerblades, aliases, and secret societies, but the exaggeration is the point. the film treats curiosity as a moral position and turns a group of teenagers into a counterculture with its own clothes, music, language, and code.

iain softley directs the whole thing like a comic book that has been plugged into a modem. the hacking scenes become abstract blue spaces, the camera moves with the music, and every room is full of screens, cables, and colored light. none of the computer details need to be accurate for the fantasy to work. the movie believes that information can still feel dangerous, that a kid with a laptop can still embarrass a corporation, and that a group of friends can make a world of their own inside the machinery built to control them.

angelina jolie’s acid burn is the center of the film’s magnetism, but the ensemble gives it its pulse. matthew lillard turns cereal killer into a walking manifesto, while fisher stevens plays the plague as a villain who understands that the teenagers are not just criminals, but a rival culture. the result is too loud, too earnest, too dressed up, and completely itself. that combination is why it lasts.

on hand

the dvd is the copy in the canon.