Since Hackers was the selected movie for the Café Movie Club, what a better occasion to get myself re-acquainted with probably one of the most fun movies of the 90s? When Jolt Cola was the preferred beverage of the hacker elite. Before the advent of high-speed Internet and when Cyberspace seemed way much smaller than it does now.
It’s cheesy, it’s unrealistic (not like it’s a documentary or something), but what a great movie experience it is. Also, it also boasts a great pop electronic soundtrack, including music by Orbital, Massive Attack, The Prodigy, Leftfield, Underworld and the Stereo MCs. For all the fans of computers or cyberpunk writing, I highly recommend this film. And given that I’m an certified expert when it comes to things that make you feel cool, I can safely say that Iain Softley’s Hackers is the only movie to boast excessive computer usage that will make you feel cool afterward.
FYI man, alright. You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like 17 computers a day. 1984? Yeah right, man. That’s a typo. Orwell is here now. He’s livin’ large. We have no names, man. No names. We are nameless!
If you haven’t read The Mentor’s Hackers’ Manifesto yet, you have no idea what you are losing.
The arcade in the film where the protagonists hang out came out of research that the filmmakers did. Their aim was to make it part nightclub, part clubhouse, just a place where hackers came to share information, scope out the latest gear and challenge each other on cutting edge video games. The arcade was built from scratch in an abandoned indoor swimming pool on the edges of London. The video game that Dade and Kate play was called WipeOut and was produced by English developer Psygnosis for the forthcoming Sony PlayStation videogames console.
You wanted to know who I am, Zero Cool? Well, let me explain the New World Order. Governments and corporations need people like you and me. We are Samurai… the Keyboard Cowboys… and all those other people who have no idea what’s going on are the cattle… Moooo.
You won’t learn a thing about hacking from this movie, or maybe don’t hack the government servers from a computer in your house, but you will catch a glimpse of the true hacker ethos, and finally understand that hacking is more than just a crime, it’s a survival trait and maybe a way of life.
In the end, Hackers is a movie that embellished the world of hacking to create a visually interesting story for the time, and in my opinion this has made the film, even more fun to watch today.
Long live Phiber Optik, ioerror, Knight Lightning, The Mentor, Dark Dante, Terminus, Anakata, Mendax, Captain Crunch, Lord Digital, Romanpoet, and in memoriam Boris Floricic, Adrian Lamo and Kevin Mitnick.
HACK THE PLANET!!!
