Hackers: Cool Digitalism, Teen Paranoia, and Cyberpunk Sex Symbols

Hackers is poorly written, feels like it was directed by an amateur, and it's badly acted. It's mediocre, at best. It came out in 1995 and was nowhere near the best sci-fi film of that year (Ghost in the Shell), the best coming-of-age movie (Kids), or the best action movie (Toy Story). In fact, I'm pretty sure Hackers is a romance –and even at that, it's no better than Clueless, from the same calendar year. I mean: it's not even the best movie Iain Softley ever made, an inconsequential director whose "magnum opus" might be the unintentionally hilarious K-PAX. And yet –against all odds, with so little going for it– Hackers is one of the most iconic movies I've ever seen.

Seattle, 1988. An 11-year-old boy sits down at his computer and, with just a couple commands, executes 1,507 perfect cyberattacks. The New York Stock Exchange drops seven points. It's the definitive hack. The scale is mythological. Zero Cool becomes a legend, but he still can't cook on the stove without his mom supervising. And, on top of that, they bust him.

New York, 1995. The kid is now 18 –Dade Murphy– and he's just moved to town, still under his mom's wing. For years he's been forbidden to touch a computer or a phone. At his new high school, Stuyvesant, he meets a girl: Kate Libby. She hacks too –her handle is Acid Burn– her friends are hackers too, and together they spend the next hour and a half doing supposedly "hacker stuff" until they manage to dodge the police and stop the evil plans of that string bean, The Plague, and somehow save the world from some terrible villain going to ground so he can pull something even worse.

Nothing else really matters, because the one undeniably memorable thing is Kate's first appearance –asking Dade for his transfer papers and showing him around school. It's Angelina Jolie in 1995, with the most extraordinary haircut she ever had. And for me –an unsuspecting 9-year-old kid from Buenos Aires–, that was the birth of screen beauty. It unlocked a new sense: a new way of looking at a face, something I simply didn't have before. I can't recall any earlier obsession like that with a person's face –not even the first girl I liked in my neighborhood.

Jolie had already done a sci-fi movie a couple years earlier, in 1993: Cyborg 2, the sequel to Cyborg –the late-'80s Van Damme movie. She was 20 when Hackers came out. She was four years away from her famous role in Girl, Interrupted, and two more from squeezing into Lara Croft's shorts for Tomb Raider. The beauty she radiates in Softley's movie feels psychedelic, because it hits like something unknown and untamed.

Johnny Lee Miller is also in the cast, right in the middle of an inexplicable, unrepeatable little golden season that kept going a few months later with the release of Trainspotting, where he played Sick Boy. Here, Miller is Dade Murphy –Zero Cool– the protagonist hacker, now rebranded Crash Override, and totally obsessed with Kate Libby / Acid Burn. Maybe the best thing Miller ever put on screen comes near the end, when they're hauling him away and he's shouting: "HACK THE PLANET!"

The dumbest moment in the whole movie also falls on Crash: when he ends up handing over a copy of the blessed 3.5-inch floppy disk to the cretin The Plague. The scene can't be more than a minute long, but it feels endless –Crash waiting in the middle of the night, until a limousine shows up… and The Plague arrives not inside it, but holding onto it, on rollerblades, skating alongside. Random as hell.

Another awful scene is when the sextet finally decides to go all-in and starts reaching out to hackers around the world. It's that beyond-clichéd "racial spectrum" montage –Benetton / Johnson & Johnson ad energy– inside a movie that already had a cast of main and supporting characters fully typed: the Black guy Lord Nikon, the Latino Phantom Phreak, the Viking Cereal Killer, the e-girl Acid Burn, the pirate boy Crash Override, and the dumb kid who redeems himself at the end –just Joey. Still: cardboard doesn't always disappoint. After all, acid comes on paper too.

The rest of the crew –the party, the sextet, the gang– has one standout: Matthew Lillard, the gangly actor from the Scream saga and the live-action Scooby-Doo movies' Shaggy. Not long ago, Lillard made the news because Quentin Tarantino took a swipe at him in an interview, saying he was an actor he couldn't stand. Whatever. In Hackers, Lillard is perfect: witty, expressive, and his Cereal Killer might be the most memorable character of them all.

The cult around Hackers –mega marginal and increasingly residual, worse than Tron in the '90s– was helped by a few accessory elements that popped because they were novel, weird, or just effective. Facing a shitty script and a frequently ridiculous mise-en-scène, what rises to the surface is the killer soundtrack (The Prodigy, Underworld, Bowie, Massive Attack), the wardrobe that isn't cyberpunk so much as cyber + punk, the fact they're on rollerblades, the nicknames. Acid Burn, Crash Override, Phantom Phreak, Cereal Killer, Lord Nikon, and Joey –oh Joey, Joey, Joey.

The vibe comes together mostly through the school setting, the idea of "navigating" systems and computer circuits as if they were cities –blocks, streets, digital buildings; the kitschy concept of the hacker the film is selling; and the underground atmosphere built around those techno dives with people on rollerblades between tables, drinks in glass tumblers, videogames on a giant screen, and computer nerds hacking the planet.

But how much real hacking is there in Hackers? About as much as there was in El Hacker, the 2001 Telefe series with Carlín Calvo. Meaning: none. How much is it a sci-fi fable about modern cities and modern relationships? None of that, man. How much is it a coming-of-age movie –young people stepping into adulthood at the edge of a new world? Yeah: there's a little of that. And the rest? The rest is a mid-'90s romance novel for preteens –who, it turns out, were kind of the first generation to use the internet as social life.

Hackers is a heavily over-aestheticized movie, centered on the constant I love you / I hate you / give me more between Crash Override and Acid Burn –between Johnny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie– who ended up getting married. Decades later, Angelina would push that same on-screen energy to the limit with another husband, Brad Pitt, in Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Cinema. No regrets.

Hackers came out in the year the web really boomed: websites jumped from a few thousand to around 25,000 –roughly a 10x growth in just months. Still, I don't think Hackers anticipated anything or predicted anything. Watching it today makes you realize not only that nobody ever "hacked" like that in real life, but also that not even in 200 years will people use computers the way these kids do. It isn't speculative fiction –it's fiction that speculated badly. And yet, it's irresistible.