The boom of the 90s: cult film "Hackers" with Atmos sound in a home cinema test
Cult feel-good film takes viewers back to the 90s, when data was still crawling through phone lines and Angelina Jolie was leading the FBI around by the nose.
(Image: United Artists / Suftley)
- Timo Wolters
The 1995 comedy “Hackers” was savaged by critics: 33 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 46 points on Metacritic. But what do critics know? Over the years, the film developed into a cult film because everything was just right: British director Ian Softley had put together a congenial soundtrack featuring The Prodigy, Underworld, Leftfield, and Massive Attack, the who's who of the techno and triphop scene at the time. In combination with a light-footed teenage story about a young hacker group, the film captured the attitude to life at the time when the internet was just learning to work.
The 23-year-old lead actor Jonny Lee Miller—who made his big appearance a year later as Sick Boy in Trainspotting—and the then 20-year-old Angelina Jolie were not only sizzling in front of the camera but also behind it. The two married a year later. Matthew Lillard shone as the lovable freak. Some may remember his face from the 1999 Wing Commander film, in which he played the pilot "Maniac."
(Image:Â United Artists / Suftley)
A real feel-good movie for all nerds, which our colleague Nico Ernst already congratulated on its 30th birthday in a commentary. To mark the anniversary, the film has been re-released on Ultra HD Disc (UHD) in Germany. For real fans, there is also a British import UHD that plays the fantastic soundtrack in Dolby Atmos for the first time.
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In this review, we look back at the production and take a close look at the different versions of the film in streaming, on Blu-ray Disc and the two UHDs. We explore the question of why Hackers became a style-defining work of the 90s despite initial criticism and what makes it so fascinating today, in the age of ubiquitous digitalization.
