What does ‘modern’ Sherlock, Lara Croft and Shaggy from Scooby-Doo all have in common? Well, they technically starred in a movie together. Hackers is a 1995 movie directed by Iain Softley, starring blonde Jonny Lee Miller, short-hair Angelina Jolie and quirky Matthew Lillard. It is yet again a movie that in 2025 reached its 30-year anniversary.
It is pretty obvious what Hackers is about considering its name, but it is interesting to note that it was made mid-nineties, as such the aesthetic and hacking methods are different from what we could expect today. Let me just say that most movie, especially more recent ones, give a depiction of what hacking is that is very different from reality – but you can’t expect to have a movie with scenes where a hacker is coding, debugging or verifying the code and then testing it. The hacking scene is usually a strange or quirky character who fast-types a couple of things on his keyboard, monitors depicting lines of spaghetti nonsensical code and then the sentence ‘I’m in’. We have all seen that trope. Hackers concentrates mainly on a group of high school seniors, kids in other words, who are tech geniuses; the trope of them being dressed with flashy or absurd clothes is still there, as well as with the habits of consuming mainly sweets, energy drinks and junk food. The aesthetic however is a bit different and the screen that depicts the hacking process is in some scenes more reminiscent of the cyberspace from Tron, or even the envisioned space from Gibson’s Burning Chrome and The Neuromancer (which inspirations for The Matrix after all).
Regardless, 30 years is a lot of time in the fast-paced and constantly evolving world of technology. I imagine it could be strange for a newer generation to watch such a movie and see strange devices such as what they might recognize as the icon for saving a file (floppy disks have become obsolete after all). Another interesting thing is the use of a landline for internet – today we are always connected but once upon a time it wasn’t as immediate. One last thing that is interesting to note is the typing speed; while the protagonists were perceived as fast and skilled typers, they are nothing if compared to today’s average of keystrokes per minute.
Halfway through the movie, the plot becomes more concentrated on the underdog trope since the protagonist are being framed as scapegoats by another hacker who is seemingly working for a big corporation. The antagonist’s true agenda however is reminiscent of Superman III (1983) where one of the characters uses a computer to direct the pennies that are lost in bank transactions to a single account and become rich; in Hackers this is achieved through a worm that does a similar thing but with more malice.
In order to defeat the antagonist, the group will have to hack into a supercomputer and find the file containing the worm and proof of their innocence; to do this they will enlist the help of hackers from around the world and flood the security system. This approach, a common goal against a greedy macro-corporation where people around the world will fight against a bigger power, is something that has been seen in real life as well (think for instance of Anonymous).
I would give this movie a 7 out of 10 Hacker Manifestos