Hackers

I really wanted to like this movie. This was recommended to me by a few people in Indieweb when it was October '25 movie of the month for their Indieweb Movie Club blog carnival, hosted by the estimable Benji.

So, it is with some degree of disappointment that I found, not being a child of the '90s and having no sentimental attachment to the excesses of that era (I have the '70s for that, thank you, although I generally don't steer unwitting friends of other generations towards it with any promise that the cheese I happen to love is going to hold any reward for them) that I found this to be an vapid and unredeemable pile of glossy Hollywood garbage.

This movie appears to have been written by a screenwriter who read an article about "hacking" in Newsweek and ran with what they thought they understood from it, without any further research, probably as one of a number of pitches, hoping one would get some traction. Inspired, it's not. All the gorgeous "hackers" look like models and rollerblade like olympic skaters, the computers all seem to work like video games, the bad guy is all leers and smirks and greasy overconfidence, and even the ordinarily wonderful Lorraine Bracco ("Goodfellas", "The Sopranos") somehow can't marshal up more than a two-dimensional cardboard cutout of a performance here. It's not even the triumph of style over substance that next year's "Trainspotting" would finally perfect by mixing in a certain amount of dirt and grit.

And of course, because it has a gorgeous female lead hacker—her nails are as perfect as her arcade high scores—she falls for the gorgeous male lead hacker in the end solely by virtue, it seems, of them having spent an entire movie bickering. Because, it just wouldn't be Hollywood if the female wasn't the prize the hero wins, would it.

I suppose in the age before Hollywood realized they could do shitty remakes of comics, TV shows, and classic movie franchizes, they were casting about for something, anything, to "hook" an audience, and in 1995 the internet had become au courant. But this movie played to me as an actual hacker (and, I might add, someone who was many years ago threatened with becoming the first person in the country to be prosecuted under the real-life 1986 federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that the sinister government agents threaten the hacker with here, in this movie's sole nod to anything having remotely to do with reality) very much as I imagine "28 Days Later" must have played to an epidemiologist... except "28 Days Later" had Danny Boyle and a several-hundred-year-long British storytelling tradition backing it up, whereas this had trendy hair & fashion, a cliched plot with wholly predictable beats, and a godawful '90s soundtrack. (This final point must be underscored. It has rap rock in it—making it a rare artifact from that brief period when pop culture hadn't yet realized Rage Against The Machine was a unique success that wasn't ever going to be replicated by anyone else, and a lot of people were still embarrassing themselves trying.) I honestly wouldn't have been surprised if an MTV VJ had showed up.

There's a plot, teen hackers, government agents, etc., but it doesn't really matter. This ain't "Wargames".

Several people had previously told me this was a surprisingly good movie. I cannot fathom why. It's big-budget, so it has excellent production values, but that's all. I can't think of anything more positive than that to say about it. This isn't even as cool as Wargames, Tron, or Evilspeak, and it's about as close to subversive as geek chic was to the original geeks the people who embraced that loathesome fad cruelly ostracized in junior high. Which is to say: don't be fooled by appearances, honey. This is Hollywood capital-'P' Product. These people aren't your friends.

Now, maybe I'm being a bit harsh, given my own questionable cultural preferences. Maybe those who recommended it love it the same way I love cheezy soft rock... because it was what was around during what was for them a more innocent time, when they were just beginning to suspect how much there was in this big, beautiful world; but hadn't really begin to discover it all yet, and had no standards yet upon which to discriminate. But, I'm not out here telling people they should check out Gerry Rafferty. So, I dunno.

Reluctantly submitted. Sorry, Indieweb folks.