This doesn't appear to be so much a curated list of much-watch movies so much as a list of all movies about hacking ever.
Here is my curated list of movies ever hacker and cyberpunk enthusiast must watch:
* Sneakers
* Ghost in the Shell
* Tron
Why is Tron there? Because the screenwriter loosely based the character around her husband. Who was her husband? Alan Kay. Tron's protagonist is Alan Kay.
I think WarGames really should be on the list. It's old, yes, but it did influence a lot of us that were in that first generation of kids growing up with computers at home (though not many homes). It definitely captures a moment of time worth thinking about.
Blackhat should probably be on there for being about only one to get hacking right in recent times.
"Because the screenwriter loosely based the character around her husband. Who was her husband? Alan Kay. Tron's protagonist is Alan Kay."
Had no clue his wife wrote it or portrayed him. That's neat! Brings in some irony given Tron character is fighting the slavery of MCP but Kay told me here on HN he loved Burroughs B5000. Also implied its lead creator, Bob Barton, was a genius and revolutionary overturning all the bad software, hardware, and engineering that came before it in one fell swoop. As in, the movie could've just as easily had MCP as the hero. ;)
And Sneakers, asides from the magic, encryption-breaking MacGuffin, is some of the most realistic hacking in movies. What's the preferred tactic of these tech geniuses? Basic social engineering. Sure, they know a lot of other tricks, but why figure out a clever way through the badge system if a cake and some birthday balloons will work just as well?
Patlabor is fun, and has some cool hacker-relevant stuff, but isn't a great and serious movie like Ghost in the Shell. I do recommend watching it, but with suitable expectations!
It has "Enemy of the State", its spiritual sequel (with Gene Hackman playing an almost identical character). But I agree, The Conversation should be on there, too; I have to admit it's a better movie, even though I love Will Smith.
Seeing this list inspired me to write about the list I keep for the books I read, many of them cyberpunk/scifi. After reading so many of these types of books, you can't help notice their elements in other media.
It's interesting in seeing the print inspirations for many of these movies. The term "The Matrix" was first coined in William Gibson's Neuromancer and considered to be the seminal Cyberpunk novel, even predating Ghost in the Shell.
Just read Neuromancer this summer. One of the benefits of renting random people's places are the libraries you run across; that was a great read (though somehow disturbing, mystical/mind blowing, and hollow inducing all at the same time).
You might like Vernor Vinge's 'True Names', too. There was a PDF of the story on the web a while back; I'm not sure of its legality so I won't link to it.
And for newer stuff, Richard K Morgan's Altered Carbon (2003) and 2 sequels really hit the spot. It's hard to find good gritty cyberpunk these days.
And it's not that old works are bad, just that some of the tech misses distract and take you out of the atmosphere sometimes. Like on Star Trek, when they have to physically deliver email to people on holodiscs.
I'd also note that Asimov's Robot series are great if you like hardboiled type stuff - not cyberpunk, but has a slightly similar ambiance.
I was very pleased to see The Italian Job make the list.
Hacking is about understanding, optimizing, and manipulating systems. One real-world analogue of a system is a Rube Goldberg machine; the dramatic analogue of a Rube Goldberg machine is a heist flick.
I'd add the Ocean's Eleven remake as an approachable introduction to the genre, and Kubrick's The Killing for vintage noir awesomeness. And maybe The Last Seduction as a curveball.
Black Mirror is missing here too, unfortunately. Several episodes revolve quite intelligently around AI, dystopian technological future, cognitive science.
I'm going to go against the grain and say: don't watch these.
Or rather, don't prioritize watching these. Try to balance out movies and books related to your profession or hobby with those outside of it.
The world already has enough stereotypical geeks loving Ghost in the Shell, Star Wars and Star Trek, it needs more geeks having an interest in what "regular people" do and like.
Not to mention, a lot of these movies are awful. For instance, the first movie on the list is, inexplicably, "WarGames: The Dead Code". Not the classic "WarGames", but a horrible direct-to-video sequel released in 2008.
That is rather offensively narrow-minded to think that "regular people" don't also enjoy those those movies. That simply having a job or hobby related to STEM somehow does not make you a regular person.
I'm not saying regular people don't enjoy these. I'm saying that people in our field have a rather unhealthy fascination with a rather narrow set of topics.
Instead of having a laser focus even for our hobbies I'd advocate a wider range of hobbies.
You don't know any actual "regular people", do you? (Edit: I don't mean to put your friends down, I just mean that the people you know are probably smart, interesting people, sadly unlike a large portion of humanity.) I don't mean 'person working outside of tech'. I mean the kind of people who think Big Bang Theory is 'a show for smart people'.
If you're adding (the excellent) Equilibrium, I'd say V for Vendetta too due to its influence on "Anonymous". And Fight Club because of what their end goal is.
That said, I can still remember seeing eXistenZ in the cinema:
The plot doesn't really have much to do with computers? It was perhaps the first anime to make a splash in the US, and it is worth seeing, but I don't think I'd use "hacker" or "cyberpunk" to describe it.
Not for the hacker or cyberpunk genre but I do think that 'Primer' needs to be in this list. Haven't seen more realistic time travel movie than this yet.
The forward-only time machine in Futurama is probably the only paradox-free time travel premise that's possible. Even that had a giant plot hole re: the motion of the planet, solar system, etc.
This list should have been posted weeks ago, when the StackOverflow's 2017 survey asked us about fictional characters and I wasn't able to recall any particular title...
The social network is nothIng for hackers. Most of the facts and characters are in reality not as portrayed. And itS one of the weakest movies of Fincher.
Are you talking about the book? My wife read it and said it wasn't very good. The movie was great but I wouldn't call its gritty, near-future dystopian setting very cyberpunk either. Cyberpunk is generally "high tech, low life" but 'Children of Men' doesn't really have high tech. 'Minority Report' is more cyberpunk than 'Children of Men' (but still not that cyberpunk).
"An internet posts a 'movies for hackers' list on Git instead of using other reasonable publishing services as any human being. Hackernews spend hours complaining about how their favorite obscure movie that nobody knows or cares about wasn't included in the list"
Here is my curated list of movies ever hacker and cyberpunk enthusiast must watch:
* Sneakers
* Ghost in the Shell
* Tron
Why is Tron there? Because the screenwriter loosely based the character around her husband. Who was her husband? Alan Kay. Tron's protagonist is Alan Kay.