30 years of "Hackers" – How a movie became a meme par excellence
In 1995, "Hackers" not only flopped at the box office. It also became an object of hatred for computer-savvy people. Today it is cult.
Of course, the hacking takes place at two in the morning, when it's actually already time to brush your teeth. From left: Paul (Laurence Mason), Dade (Jonny Lee Miller), Kate (Angelina Jolie) and Emmanuel (Matthew Lillard).
(Image: Capelight Pictures)
"Dave?" - "Yes, Mom?" "What are you doing?" - "I'm taking over a TV station." "Call it a night, dear, and go to sleep." After seven minutes of rushed and ominously told backstory to Dade's (Jonny Lee Miller) hacking passion, his mother's seems like the most normal thing in the world. Or she doesn't go along with a joke made by her son, who has just turned eighteen.
Which of these is true? I have no idea. Nothing is explained, there is no humor in the scene, as if we were in a European arthouse film. Even at this point thirty years ago, even if you didn't know anything about computers, you had to shout: "Huh?". And if you did, then even more so, more on that soon.
Empfohlener redaktioneller Inhalt
Mit Ihrer Zustimmung wird hier ein externes YouTube-Video (Google Ireland Limited) geladen.
Ich bin damit einverstanden, dass mir externe Inhalte angezeigt werden. Damit können personenbezogene Daten an Drittplattformen (Google Ireland Limited) übermittelt werden. Mehr dazu in unserer Datenschutzerklärung.
Instead of an artistic film in which the connections emerge slowly or not at all, Hackers wants to be an action thriller about the coming-of-age phase of a group of students. And it also fails at this simple narrative cliché. An hour after the scene in the basement of New York, Dade says to his beloved Kate (Angelina Jolie): "I can't afford to get arrested." Purification, classic coming-of-age? Not at all, he has already committed several digital crimes by then. And continues, of course. "Huh?"
What Kate wants from Dade in this scene is to copy a floppy disk. Ten minutes earlier, the student group is admiring Kate's high-tech notebook, which she apparently got from her rich mother and whose fictitious data she knows by heart. Why shouldn't Kate be able to make a copy herself? Hackers is full of such obvious breaks in logic. You could forgive a fast-paced action flick from the mid-1990s if everything wasn't presented so terribly seriously.
Hacker lifestyle Ă la Hollywood
The movie certainly has pace, but even that is just so far over the top that it can't be ticked off as pure popcorn cinema. Everything is so unnecessarily exaggerated that it no longer seems believable. The "Hääs?" pile up right from the start. There's the villain, also a computer genius of course, who rolls into the computer center on a skateboard during a crisis at his employer. In the students' favorite nightclub, of course, they skate around on ramps at high speed. The group changes their cool outfits several times a day and their hair is in perfect style. They often sit in front of their computers at night with sunglasses on. At the same time, a thriller is being told.
Empfohlener redaktioneller Inhalt
Mit Ihrer Zustimmung wird hier ein externes YouTube-Video (Google Ireland Limited) geladen.
Ich bin damit einverstanden, dass mir externe Inhalte angezeigt werden. Damit können personenbezogene Daten an Drittplattformen (Google Ireland Limited) übermittelt werden. Mehr dazu in unserer Datenschutzerklärung.
That would still work if the length of the shrill and serious moments wasn't constantly inappropriate. Hackers lasts almost two hours and is an example of how even an average movie can be turned into an exhausting flick. The rhythm just isn't right. The equally endless number of connection errors can be used as evidence for this thesis. The computer that Dade paints can be seen in this design a day earlier. People change position several times in a scene without it being clear why. Just two examples of even more "Huh?"
The time reference is correct
These are all technical mistakes and the result of a weak script. However, with a budget of 20 million US dollars, Hackers is not an underfunded film. This can be seen in the work of the camera, lighting, costumes, the locations and numerous music licenses, including a live performance by the band "Urban Dance Squad" in the film. And Psygnosis is also unlikely to have made the demo or video of their Playstation game "Wipeout", which will only be released a few months later, available for free.
After all, the minute-long demonstration of the sci-fi racing game could hardly have been intended as a marketing measure: The name of the game does not appear in the movie, and it is not played on the Playstation, which already existed at the time, but on a kind of arcade machine with a projector and two joysticks. However, the first Wipeout could only be controlled with the original Playstation controller when it was released. This has no joysticks.
The Powerbook with "P6 processor"
The mistakes about digital technology in Hackers are really hair-raising, because the film works with actual products from the 1990s, but in some cases describes them completely incorrectly. The best known of these is probably the "P6 processor" in Kate's notebook. However, this is undoubtedly an Apple PowerBook with a 680x0 CPU. Most likely the PowerBook Duo 280c. Perhaps we had already heard about Intel's "P6" at the time, which would later become Pentium Pro and then Pentium II and subsequent CPUs, but none of this was available at the start of the movie. The small glimpse into the future only works if it is credible.
And even with the tricks of the digital underground that have been available for decades, the movie makes mistakes that are all too obvious. In one scene, a telephone connection is manipulated using a blue box – while the operator of the telephone company listens in. So she doesn't know the decades-old trick. "Huh?" Apart from the fact that the refund obtained with the box would not have worked in this way, and later in the movie this very process is explained in an entirely different way. So Hackers not only makes the same mistake twice, but also makes a different one twice in the same matter.
The world of Hackers is therefore not coherent in itself. And certainly not the way the culture of hacking and hackers is portrayed. These are simply high school kids who have the same problems as all high school kids in all high school movies. They're just much richer, they party all the time and they're always hacking something. On the other hand, almost every device has changing colorful interfaces that have nothing to do with actual software from 1995. And, of course, simple 3D animations that the servers and clients just spit out. "Huh?"
Hacking in the movie works – only not here
Of course, actual hacking is not exactly easy to portray on film. Then as now, the intruder sits in front of the computer for hours, looking at data, programming, taking notes, reading documentaries or chatting with like-minded people. No matter how much music, panning shots and zooms are used in a movie, it is not possible to portray all of this excitingly. However, "Wargames" in 1983, with its sparing use of actual hacking, and even before that "Tron" in 1982, with a colorful fantasy world complete with human-like creatures as programs and users, already showed how computers can be opened up illegally better than in Hackers. Once realism, once abstraction. Hackers tries to reconcile the two, but doesn't do either of them so well that they fit together.
Although it is made clear from the start – at least that is true – that some hacking was already punishable in the USA at the time, there is no secret society. On his first day at the new school, Dade becomes part of the group that openly brags about its abilities. Everyone else, including the law enforcement officers, are extras when it comes to technology; there is only one big baddie. He is also a hacker, of course. And the most criminal of them all, of course. It's also cheeky for all science fiction fans that the young hackers' targets are some big machine called "Gibson". An obvious allusion to William Gibson, who introduced the concepts of hacking and cyberspace to the general public in a convincing literary way with the novels of the Neuromancer trilogy from 1984 onwards.
The third hacker film in the same year
All this may have resulted in a flop of 7.5 million at the US box office in 1995 at a production cost of 20 million. But not only that. The same year saw the release of "Johnny Mnemonic", based on a science fiction short story by William Gibson, and "The Net" with a story from the present day. Both were more successful than Hackers.
And that was despite Keanu Reeves delivering one of his worse performances as Johnny and the movie only scratching the surface of Gibson's world and its complexity. And "The Net" with Sandra Bullock, like Hackers, is neither a good thriller nor a good technology film, but not as over-the-top. A particular irony: the two leading actors Reeves and Bullock had enjoyed considerably more success together in "Speed" a year earlier than with their hacker films alone.
Videos by heise
The fact that Hackers was released in Germany as "Hackers – Im Netz des FBI" is probably a reference to "Das Netz". And that the distributor in this country most likely didn't dare to use just this ominous term "Hackers" on its own. Although the film was only released on German screens in mid-1996.
By 1995, however, computing, the Internet and games were no longer just for nerds. Shortly before the US release of Hackers, Windows 95 was released, bringing colorful, easy-to-understand graphic interfaces to previously boring PCs. And a few weeks after the film, the first Playstation was launched in the USA, with games aimed at an adult audience. Many people must have quickly realized that Hackers simply misrepresented the culture surrounding digital technology. Although there are set pieces from the hacker ethic of the time, such as "We demand free access to all information" or "Hack the planet", these phrases are left hanging in the air in the story.
Forcing pop culture doesn't work
The worst accusation that can be leveled at Hackers is not this mixture of various sci-fi elements and real technology culture. It's that it screams every second: "Me! Am! Pop culture!" – just like the commercials for expensive telephone numbers on private television late at night. An all-round good movie that describes a culture that is new to the audience in a coherent and credible way can afford to do that. But not such a collage that fails in terms of facts and story.
Nevertheless, the movie is worth seeing, especially today. And that's why the whole, sparse story is not revealed here. When planning this retrospective, a colleague from the editorial team said that she thought Hackers was "sooo cool" back then. And if you just let the flood of images and the soundtrack have their effect, that's true. From the perspective of the 2020s, Hackers is easy to endure with the thought: "Look how they imagined hacking back then". In combination with music by Carl Cox, Chicane, The Prodigy, Stereo MCs, Moby and Orbital, among others, Hackers is like an MTV clip with electronic music from the 1990s.
Turn it up anyway!
Therefore, assuming you have a good sound system, you should prefer the English soundtrack with Dolby Digital 5.1 mix, not the German one with 2.0 and Dolby Prologic. This certainly applies to the version in the Amazon Prime Video flat rate that we used. The UHD and Blu-ray versions available from Capelight Productions should sound even better – also with DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 for the German and English sound.
Despite this conciliatory verdict, Hackers will probably remain controversial for all time, especially among tech-savvy people. It was only at the end of 2023 that the great tech YouTuber Linus Sebastian (LTT) argued about Hackers for half an hour with his friend and colleague Luke Lafreniere in his podcast "WAN Show". And that's something a movie that flopped at the time has to achieve almost 30 years later. Under the conditions outlined in the previous paragraph, Hackers can confidently be considered a cult film today. But only if you forget about your own nerdiness and only expect entertainment from a bygone era.
(nie)
