Hackers (1995) is a film I somehow never saw until now—wild, considering I lived through the real events it riffs on. Only 30 years later did I finally sit down to watch it.
This is a film I should’ve been more familiar with, seeing how it really cuts close to home. And I know some of you might find it unlikely that Hackers has real-world connections, but I’m telling you the truth.
The whole thing about free long distance was real. Back then we called it blue boxing. And in 1988, a young university student released what wasn’t exactly a virus but came to be known as the Morris Worm. It shut down a big chunk of the early internet. So while the movie exaggerates with a 12-year-old wunderkind, the inspiration was there.
Several characters were analogues to real people. Joey was based on a guy known as Fry Guy. And I’m pretty sure Nikon, the Black hacker in the movie, was based on John Threat—who in the 80s and 90s went by the handle Corrupt. I actually know John—great guy.
And yes, a lot of cybercrime investigations were really handled by the Secret Service. People forget their original purview was financial crime. Protecting the president came later.
So I’m shocked it took me until yesterday to actually see this movie. I remember it being a big deal—it touched youth culture and fashion. But let me tell you, hackers didn’t dress like that. Not before the movie came out. We were computer science nerds in labs. Nobody thought hacking or phreaking was cool.
Then overnight, with the movie’s leopard prints, fur, and pink neon side holsters, suddenly computer nerds were “the coolest kids in school.” Angelina Jolie helped with that one—plenty of girls suddenly wanted to get into computer science.
The plot is simple. A bunch of teenagers access file systems remotely, one stumbles onto something bigger, and suddenly they’re caught in a cyber-security conspiracy. The tagline nailed it: “Their only crime was curiosity.”
But the bad guy? Come on. A multimillion-dollar corporation hires as its CSO a dude who insists on being called “The Plague”? And the Secret Service wants to work with him instead of arrest him? No CSO walks into a boardroom with a skateboard and demands everyone call him by his hacker handle. That is the most unbelievable part of the movie.
Well, that and the hacking itself. Real hacking is just terminals and text. In Hackers, it’s skyscraper file systems and sci-fi UIs. Fun to look at, but nothing like reality. Same with the VR headset The Plague uses. VR existed in the 90s, but it sucked. Cool as an idea, but nobody was actually doing anything with it.
Same goes for the laptops. In 1995, laptops didn’t have the horsepower or fast built-in modems for serious hacking—if they had modems at all. They were impractical bricks.
What the movie did predict, though, were translucent machines. Those became all the rage later with Apple’s iMacs. In the 90s, our machines were beige or sometimes black—never cool, never translucent. So that influence stuck.
Other details are hilarious in retrospect. At the end, all the kids run to phone booths to hack. Why? Anonymity? Not really—now people can see you standing in a booth, typing furiously.
I used to mess with phone booths as a kid, routing calls around the world just because I could. That was phreaking. And one of the characters even goes by “Phreak”—spelled with a PH—which is a nod to that world. But almost never did I bring a laptop into a phone booth, not with them being so heavy and lacking battery power.
I realize I’m not treating this as just a movie. Hard to do, because this was my life. I’ve been in the tech industry for decades, and watching this is like a cop watching Bad Boys or a doctor watching House. It’s a story first, accuracy second. They wanted hacking to look cool.
My life wasn’t that cool. I didn’t have Angelina Jolie hanging off my arm. No woman has ever been impressed with my technical skills. Trivia skills once got me laid—technical skills, never.
I can’t believe I waited 30 years to finally watch this film. I watched it with my kid. She liked it. Then she asked me if that’s really what the 90s were like. I had to tell her no. Sorry to disappoint you, kid. But yeah—what a trip.
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