Comment by ear7h

6 hours ago

> At least it is a lot more realistic than silly 3D animation approach used in many previous movies (e.g. "hacking the Gibson" on Hackers, or the much worse portrayals on Swordfish)

One of the things I love about Hackers is that it portrays the feeling of hacking and programming to someone who might not have done it. Yea I think a lot of people have the green text hackerman image when they think about hacking but it hardly conveys what's happening inside the head of the hacker, it's just something cryptic magic that solves a problem and advances the plot. In Hackers, the Gibson is a space, somepeople live there and oversee it, other's have to transport themselves (there's a montage with fast shots of a subway, then computer circuit boards, then the "buildings" of the gibson that work really well imo). Not every film has to convey all of this but I really appreciate that Hackers does.

6 comments

ear7h

Reply
NitpickLawyer  5 hours ago

> but it hardly conveys what's happening inside the head of the hacker

Mr Robot is another great one at that. It has layers of trippy stuff, but the hacking stuff is both real-ish and pretty well explained by the main character's monologues.

elcapitan  1 hour ago

One of the odd things about Hackers is how it created a cultural feedback loop. When it came out, the style it showed was pretty weird and kind of campy, but I think it got integrated into actual hacker culture over time (e.g. visible in hacker spaces, conferences, online culture etc), and because of that today the movie as a whole seems less weird than originally.

Sharlin  6 hours ago

I mean, it was a solid interpretation of cyberspace as envisioned by one W. Gibson (the name of the system not being a coincidence, obviously). As it was meant to be. You (hopefully) wouldn't see boring nmap terminals in a hypothetical Neuromancer filmization, either!