Hackers1995

I think if I hadn’t just watched SLC Punk, I would be all over this. But that movie is so real, and this just feels so manufactured and disingenuous. This should be a real look at hacker culture in the 90s; it’s literally called Hackers, which is pretty definitive, but instead, it takes computers and turns them into magical relics that can peer into other rooms miles away and cause impossible cataclysms around the world.  While the Secret Service is shown as bumbling idiots (as they should), the real villain being a cartoonish caricature effectively depicting him as some mystical master of dark arts but also a fucking nerd in one fell swoop delegitimizes and humorizes hacker culture while also mystifying and vilifying it.  The shit that these computers can do is so ridiculous, and it really throws me for a loop and draws me out of the movie. If they said it was 2030, I could buy into it because that’s like the future, and anything is technically possible, but it’s supposed to be 1995, and these computers are doing things that can’t even do today.  I think the actual stories of yippies, hackers, and the Secret Service are interesting enough that it really doesn’t need all this weird embellishment to be entertaining.  Just like SLC Punk, this movie has a great visual language, which is undoubtedly its greatest strength. But there is nothing real here, man. These characters are cartoons. And there’s no connection to actual reality.  Obviously, not every movie can be SLC Punk, obviously when this movie came out 3 years before. But I do think if this was more genuine, it would be a truly great film.