Hackers has gained a cult following within the 30 years since its debut
Most Movie/Alamy
Tim Boddy
Image editor, London
It’s 1995. Geocities, Yahoo! and Netscape are kings of a burgeoning web. Spending an hour by your screeching dial-up modem on the data superhighway is thrilling. And the movie Hackers is launched, a psychedelic celebration of a burgeoning cyber tradition.
The movie wasn’t successful again then, but it surely has gained a cult following within the 30 years since its debut. Rewatching it just lately, I discovered it isn’t heavy on the realism (utilizing payphones to hack supercomputers appears a shade far-fetched).
It’s, nevertheless, powered by an exhilarating techno soundtrack, a trendy solid (together with a frenetic and deeply entertaining Matthew Lillard), trippy color palettes and supremely quotable one-liners. Its 105-minute working time is a pleasure and a fantastic time-capsule ode to the Nineteen Nineties.
It’s an oddly hopeful story of misfits, tech and activism – versus the arguably dystopian disinformation superhighway we discover ourselves in at present.
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