
Real Hackers Tell Us Why They Love the Movie 'Hackers' - vinnyglennon
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kzvqx9/real-hackers-tell-us-why-they-love-the-movie-hackers
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headcanon
Hackers makes the top of my list of "Hacker" movies, not for any kind of
technical/realistic chops, which they deliberately eschew, but purely for its
artistic direction.

Reasons why I love this movie:

\- Has the best costumes: Leather, Spandex, cheetah print, that fluffy cat
tshirt Phreak wears in one scene. They contribute to a colorful portrayal of a
90's New York overrun by Club Kids, which no other movie except Party Monster
really touches. It reminds me a lot of the Fifth Element in some ways.

\- Has the most memorable characters and talent. Acid Burn, Zero Cool, The
Phreak, Cereal Killer, and Joey, not to mention Agent Gills, Razor and Blade,
and of course still-dressing-in-the-dark Eugene (Don't call me Eugene)

\- Has the best soundtrack: Massive Attack, Prodigy, Underworld, Stereo MC's,
and more. This movie served as a gateway to high-school-aged me to a whole
world of 90's trip-hop and electronica that I still enjoy.

\- No other hackers movie can claim to have a "Hack the Gibson" level
influence for its one-liners and references, except maybe War Games.

\- Hilariously corny lines and delivery. Perfectly toes the line between being
funny-bad and just bad-bad. No matter how many times I see this movie I die
every time Gills says "You are floating, and I'm about to flush yo ass!"

You can probably tell I've seen this movie way too many times, but I'll never
get tired of watching it.

~~~
nvarsj
Don't forget Orbital! This is one of my favorite movies as well, for similar
reasons. I grew up in the 90s with BBSs, and I think the film captured the
subculture pretty well.

I also remember reading the detonate.net parody of Hackers at the time, and
thinking it was one of the most hilarious things ever.

~~~
headcanon
How the hell did I forget about Orbital

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fuzz4lyfe
Sneakers is the best hacker film ever made. Hackers was maybe number 2 in my
book.

~~~
malvosenior
Wargames is #1 in my book. Sneakers was great though. I think I was too old to
like Hackers, it seemed very forced to me.

~~~
caymanjim
I think Sneakers is more realistic and captures the essence better, but
WarGames is the one that impacted me the most and holds a special place in my
heart.

I was about ten years old when WarGames came out, and I got a Commodore 64 for
Christmas that year. About a year later, I got a modem, and about a year after
that I started "wardialing" my entire local calling area (and also
accidentally some non-local calling areas; I spent the whole summer mowing
laws to pay my parents for the giant phone bill that resulted).

War dialing led to random "login" prompts, which led to me teaching myself
Unix, VMS, and PrimeOS. It led to Tymnet and Telenet (X.25 packet switching
networks). That eventually got me, through many complicated jumps, to MIT's
free Unix systems (anyone who could access it could get an account).

Between MIT's free Unix systems, and a lot of commercial systems that I--ahem
--borrowed access to, by the time I was 15 years old, I was already a Unix, C,
and Internet expert, years before Linux and even years before any local ISPs
existed. When my friend's dad, who worked at AT&T's Bell Labs, found out that
I was hacking into systems just to teach myself Unix, he gave me surplus AT&T
3b1 and 3b2 Unix machines.

By the time I got to college in 1990, I already knew more about Unix than any
of the professors. While that led to me abandoning my courses, it also led to
a full-time sysadmin job at the college, and when the Internet exploded a few
years later, I was already a decade ahead of my peers, and my career took off
from there.

So I have WarGames to thank for all of it. I'm sure glad I never got caught
hacking into anything; even though I was at worst a grey hat, I had friends
who were criminally prosecuted. I was in the same systems that Kevin Mitnick
went to jail for five years for accessing.

~~~
supergeek133
That's a great story, thanks for taking the time!

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rurban
Other real hackers tell you why they love the movie "Startup.com".
[https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/startupcom](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/startupcom)

