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| "...and various other crimes, but let's forget about that..." |
A rather drastic change from the Cold War era, parachute
pants, and unintelligible music videos of the 1980s is the 1990s. An era of teenagers fighting stock footage
with preaching morality, of grunge music rising to and falling from prominence,
and an era of major technological revolution in the form of the internet. A film came out in 1995 that capitalized on
the whole craze…and was laughed at by most people who actually knew things
about computers.
That’s right, Hackers,
continuing on from my trend of movies related to gaming technology, and
somebody does actually play a game
during the course of the film. Yes, I’ll
go with that. So, Hackers begins by showing us the life of young Dade Murphy. At the age of eleven, this kid is a computer
whiz who is able to cause 1,507 computer systems to crash. That’s systems,
by the way, not individual computers.
This causes a seven point drop in the New York Stock Exchange and, quite
obviously, makes a lot of very important people very unhappy. So, Dade’s family is fined and he is forbidden
from owning or operating a computer or touchtone phone until his eighteenth
birthday.
Seven years later, at the beginning of the internet age,
Dade is now eighteen and the first thing he does upon moving with his mother to
New York is operate a computer in order to hack a local television station to
play an episode of “The Outer Limits”.
Clearly not a man who cares for his own well-being.
However, in his attempts to watch some good quality
programming, Dade is intercepted by a user by the name of “Acid Burn”, who
demands to know in horrific shorthand who has come into their territory. A short battle ensues in which Dade, taking
the alias of “Crash Override” (rather than his former moniker “Zero Cool”),
actually loses and is bumped off the system by “Acid Burn”…who I’m sure will never get involved in the plot in
anyway.
Dade attends a new high school where he makes friends with a
group of hackers - Ramon "The Fantom Phreak" Sanchez (Renoly
Santiago), Emmanuel "Cereal Killer" Goldstein (Matthew Lillard), and
Joey Pardella (Jesse Bradford), a young hacker without an alias but who
attempts to come up a few that are all denied (and rightly so) – after getting
a prank pulled on him by one Kate Libby (Angelina Jolie), and then hacking into
the school’s computer to get back at her. In a club, some of the finer points
of hacking are discussed and the guys quiz Dade to make certain of the fact
that he is a “Leet”.
Satisfied with that, the plot actually manages to pick up
with Joey hacking his way into a supercomputer for the Ellingson Mineral Company.
He starts downloading a garbage file from the system, and while his mother
comes and disrupts the connection, he is tracked by the company’s IT
department, Hal (played by, of all the bizarre cameos, Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller fame) and Eugene “The
Plague” Belford (played by Fisher Stevens).
And, unfortunately, this is where I have to interrupt the review to rant
about a major issue with this film.
I’m not well versed on the filmography of Fisher Stevens at
the time of this review, so I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and
chalk it up to director/producer/script interference, but any way you slice
it: he’s a terrible villain. Not in
what he’s doing isn’t menacing, because it certainly is that, but the man
himself just has no menace in his
performance whatsoever. He rides around
on a skateboard in his office, and even on street level. This high powered, vitally important facet of
a multimillion dollar company gets around by skateboard (because…it’s extreme,
maybe?).
Besides his main plot, he doesn’t really do anything that’s particularly
villainous or of any note in that vein.
At one point, he threatens the life of Dade’s mother and it just feels
completely empty. Just give this film
one viewing and I’ll be surprised if you can find any point in the story at
which you can take him seriously (which is to say nothing of his meltdown at
the climax of the film). And the most
hilarious part of it all is that if he hadn’t made the attempt to get involved
with the protagonists, he would have succeeded.
Not even really evil…just kind of childish and stupid.
But getting back to the actual plot, “The Plague” ropes the
government into helping him track down the Hackers in order to find out what
Joey learned, even to the point of having him arrested. However, he manages to hide the disk away and
it isn’t located. This plot gets side
winded, however, for Dade to have a duel against Kate – who has been revealed
to be the illustrious “Acid Burn” – for Dade to either win a date with Kate or,
in the event that she wins, perform menial tasks for her. Their target is a man by the name of Richard
Gill, a Secret Service Agent who really hasn’t done anything wrong and is
really only doing his job for his government.
So – clearly to stick it to the man - they cancel his credit cards, get
him in constant trouble with other
branches of the authorities, post false ads in his name that have him contacted
by less than reputable folk, and top it off by falsifying paperwork to make it
appear as though he’s dead.
It’s called Disproportionate Retribution, guys. Look it up.
Later, the actual plot picks up with Joey being released on
parole and passing the disk off to Phreak.
However, they’re tracked and manage to escape…temporarily, anyway. Phreak manages to hide the disk before he,
too, is arrested. After declining to
help Kate and Lillard in their work, Dade is later visited by The Plague. Insert “I am a shadowy reflection of you…” or
“Join me and I will complete your training…” speech here as he attempts to
convince Dade to join him in bringing down the Hackers. Then, a bit later, he threatens Dade’s mother
in what is one of the very few rather humanizing moments for Dade that makes
him seem like something other than a
lazy sociopath.
It is after this that Dade actually hands over Kate’s copy
of the disk to him. When he informs the
others of this as they’re attempting to discern the contents of it, they’re
shocked at the betrayal…until the beans get spilled that he’s “Zero Cool” and
that seems to smooth everything over. I
mean it, as soon as that happens, everybody seems to forget about all of that. So, needless to say, the group hatches a
wicked scheme to save their bacon and defeat the Plague.
Through a montage, the team gets together memos, passwords,
and the like that they’ll need to get a hold of in order to once more hack into
the Ellingson computer systems and download that garbage file on the “DaVinci
virus”, a virus that will capsize several tankers belonging to Ellingson the
following day. And so, Gondor Calls For
Aid, and the hackers get together with two prominent hackers named Razor and
Blade in order to get dozens of hackers from all across the world in on the
job.
In the end, they manage to outhack the Plague, get the files,
and crash the supercomputer…before being promptly arrested. However, it is too little too late to expect
any of them to actually pay for the
crimes they’ve committed on this job alone.
Dade hides the disk away in a trash can in Grand Central Station and
Lillard recovers it, using the resources of Razor and Blade to broadcast a
message of The Plague’s plot to anyone and everyone all over the world. The
conclusion comes with The Plague being arrested on a plane to Japan, the
hackers apparently having had all charges against them dropped for the
literally hundreds of violations of cyber security laws, and Dade and Kate
finally go on their date. The end.
I’ll go ahead and say it, this movie isn’t bad. It’s not a masterpiece by any stretch of the
imagination, but it surely isn’t bad. It’s
a popcorn movie, one of those that you’re not really supposed to think about
and just enjoy the ride. To an extent, I
can do that, but some burning questions remain and plot holes that I could fit
a CGI worm through do as well.
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| This phrase serves for some awesome bookending... |
I will say as strong points in its favor, the cast apart
from Stevens bring very believable performances to the table. I really believed in Jonny Lee Miller’s portrayal
of a barely relatable sociopathic slacker.
I really believed that Matthew Lillard was an escaped mental ward
patient. Again, only Fisher Stevens’ “The
Plague” didn’t really seem believable.
He has a single note and it’s just evil laughter that seems almost
wooden and hollow. Stevens’ performance
almost seems phoned in for how not intimidating
he is. We’re given no real insight into
or development of his character, and I think the film really suffers from
that. What were his motivations for
turning against his employers? Simple greed?
Well, it’s a 90s film and he’s just part of the corrupt and
decadent system, so it works…for 1995.
I can’t really point to any one of the main cast that I can
say I identified with or even liked. No
one is really “good”, not even the good guys we’re supposed to root for. They violate even more laws than Stevens does
in order to point out the very obvious fact that he, himself, is breaking the
law. And this somehow gets them acquitted
of this because…karma? Except none of
them have really done anything “good”.
Even the scam involving the tankers capsizing feels like it was tacked
on as an afterthought, and it fails at what I could only assume is the purpose
for its existence: to make the “heroes”
seem better than the man they’re trying to stop.
So, in the end.
Someone who is slightly worse than the rest of them gets arrested, and
they get to live their merry little lives.
Umm…yay?
Another thing I could
rag on is the shots within cyberspace and various other examples of how hacking
does not actually work (though, truth be told, that would be very boring to watch). However, I will give special praise to the special
effects team, as I’ve learned that all of the shots that are supposedly done
within cyberspace do not ever actually use CGI.
It’s all done by a combination of rotoscoping, animation, motion
control, and models, something which shocked me when I found it out. And for the time, it looks pretty impressive,
something that really speaks to how well practical effects can be better than
CGI when they’re implemented correctly.
So, decent acting, a plot that tries to over explain or
incorrectly show what computers can do, and pretty good effect shots for the
aforementioned thing. However, kind of a
lame plot, a flat villain, and “heroic” characters we really can’t relate to,
as well as preaching a philosophy that doesn’t really work here and kind of has
a “everybody in the government stopped caring” ending. And yet, for some reason, I like this
movie. I’ll break it out every so often
to watch. Not in any frequent manner,
but once in a while, it’s a rather entertaining aside.
Hackers is the property
of United Artists and is available everywhere movies are sold.
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