MEMORIES:
Nuke67 remembers...I really enjoyed this movie, though it kinda put a good light on hacking, which for all purposes isn't something ... More »
Posted on 08/04/08
CATCH PHRASE:
“Trust your techno lust.”
But the significance of Hackers didn’t begin and end with computers. The film marked the major screen debut of future Academy Award winner Angelina Jolie, who would go on to a remarkably long career as tabloid fodder. It also introduced her to her first husband, co-star Johnny Lee Miller (blood type unknown) as the two were married shortly after production. Matthew Lillard also got his start in Hackers in a role that would propel him into even more cult films for years to come.
The film follows the exploits of Dade Murphy (Miller), who, at the age of eleven and under the hacker alias Zero Cool, caused a seven point drop in the stock market by crashing over fifteen hundred systems. After a seven year probation, the government finally restores Dade’s computer using privileges on his eighteenth birthday. Concurrently, Dade enrolls at a prestigious New York high school where he makes the acquaintance of Kate Libby (Jolie) and a whole pack of hackers.
The plot thickens when one of the aforementioned hackers decides to prove his mettle by breaking into the supercomputer of a major petroleum company. When he downloads a garbage file as proof, he unwittingly complicates the scheme being carried out by Eugene Belford, a.k.a. The Plague, a.k.a. the slimy computer security expert who’s been embezzling from the company. The Plague quickly turns the tables and manufactures a virus to cover his tracks. More importantly, he manipulates events in order to have the young Hacker arrested and his property seized. Now, the hackers must outwit the world’s greatest cyber-thief, as well as the Secret Service, in order to help their friend and save themselves.
Hackers had a less-than-spectacular showing at theaters, but has since become a cult classic, in spite of (or perhaps because of) its glaring technical inaccuracies. With its graphic and metaphoric allusions to both the technology and the culture surrounding it, Hackers remains the first and arguably best filmic entry into the enigmatic and ever-growing subculture of computer hacking.
