Hackers

Ok, so with this movie forget about the plot.  It involves some usual crap like a love story, new kid in town/fish out of water shenanigans, a bad guy hacker (Fisher Stevens (Short Circuits, Super Mario Bros.)), Angelina Jolie trying to be a sexy badass, Mathew Lillard trying to be funny, cops trying to catch the hacker kids but being embarrassed and hoodwinked at every turn, blah blah blah.  What you watch this one for is the all the 90’s computer shit.

One of my favorite parts is there’s this whole room filled with glass columns that have glowing and twinkling numbers and equations on them (it’s run by Penn from Penn and Teller, yeah weird right?  Latin sensation Marc Anthony plays a cop too.).  Like this is supposed to be the actual computer exposed and you can physically walk through it and see the activity that’s occurring in it.  Fucking badass man.

This brings me to a staple of 90’s computer films.  They sorta take on this idea that computers are living things but kind of in the vein of Toy Story.  In that picture the toys only come alive when humans aren’t around (unless they absolutely must defend themselves).  Computers were treated a similar way with the thought that if we could see inside of a computer it would be this incredible world of floating symbols, blocky human type related objects (like skyscrapers) and slick animations.  Computers have this understandable and translatable universe that’s full of color but they also always have secrets locked away somewhere.  Everything is animated.  Everything has a sign or a way of telling you, human, exactly what it is.  It’s a living place that we’re getting a very special peak into.  This is what the insides of computers are like folks.  Mystery solved.

Now this is what makes this movie so interesting.  We know better today.  The public has become so computer savvy that you couldn’t pull this wacky dream world that computers live in shit.  We know that it’s all just a mess of wires, circuit boards, electricity and 0’s and 1’s.  There isn’t any magic in it like there had been.  That belief is long gone.  The nerds won right?  We’ve got our iphones, tablets, comic book movies, Big Bang Theories, comic cons, video games and etc these days.  Geeks are fucking in man. 

This other idea that technology rules our lives in a negative way doesn’t really play in modern times either.  We’re over it.  Look at The Net and the message that that movie was delivering.  It said that it’s at our peril that we’re so intertwined with computers and the internet (even though at that time it was in its infancy).  It’s so easy to just change identities, wipe someone out completely, put someone in jail, give someone the wrong prescription thereby killing them, totally ruin someone’s life…essentially change whatever you want in the entire world with only a couple of clicks.  This idea didn’t take hold.  There wasn’t a backlash against technological progress.  Today our lives are integrated with technology more than ever before.  We pretty much like it like that and don’t think about how it could potentially be mankind’s downfall.

I don’t think a picture like Hackers could ever be made again.  The time for naïve computer movies is definitely over.  Just look at the last Mission Impossible, the latest Bourne, or any comic book film.  We’ve come a long way in understanding computers and how they operate or maybe at the very least get that computers are depicted in a more realistic way than what was being pitched to us years ago.  And I want to be clear that I’m not shitting on what is done with computers in Hackers.  Setting off the sprinklers in a school, changing police records, messing with phone lines, screwing with traffic lights, basically fucking hacking into a fucking computer can be accomplished.  I’m not disputing what someone can achieve with a computer in these movies (except The Lawnmower Man, I’m pretty sure computers can’t give you Jedi-like powers…oh shit, can they?).  What I think is so funny and dated is the world that supposedly exists inside the computer.  That’s the thing that you’ll never see again in a future movie.  And I don’t mean in a Tron way with humans duking it out and racing around on flashy motorcycles.  I mean stylized text, an animation for every action, a clear and flamboyant human world type visual for every object, traveling at a super fast speed through wording, signs, lights, colors, circuitry ‘n shit. 

If you dig 90’s computer shit then you’ll probably like this.  I can see a lot of people just fucking hating it though so I recommend this one cautiously.

And does anyone use the word “hacker” anymore?  I feel like I haven’t heard that term in a very long time (probably since the 90’s).  I want to say no one uses it these days.  Clue me in if I’m wrong though.