by Richard Seltzer, B&R Samizdat Express
This movie review is scheduled for publication in Media Wave magazine. For information on that publication, contact the editor, John Shinnick. Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim electronic copies of this article for non-commercial purposes provided this permission notice is preserved on all copies. All other rights reserved.
I have to admit that I didn't see the entire movie Hackers. I walked out about two-thirds of the way through -- which is something I never do. So in fairness, my comments should be taken with a grain of salt -- there may have been some redeeming social or entertainment value in the final third. But I saw no foreshadowing of anything of the kind. It was simply too painfully bad -- like having to sit through a two-hour episode of Lost in Space. Basically, if you love computers and the Internet and what they can do for people, you'll hate this move. The Net was right on. Hackers is right off.
The central "hacker" (handle = Zero Cool) gets in trouble with the Feds at the age of 11 and is prohibited by the court from getting near a computer until age 18. What story there is starts when he has just turned 18, has just moved to a new city with his divorced mother, and is a newcomer at the public high school, where he gets involved with other "hackers."
Their "hacking" is mainly telephone-based pranks. The technology is reminiscent of the Three Days of the Condor -- twenty years old. They use cassette recorders to capture the sounds of money being deposited in a touchtone pay phone, and play it back to get money refunded when they never made a deposit. They use modems to access and change school grades and class registration. One of them breaks into a supercomputer -- guessing that the password for the system manager would be GOD (as if a major, security-sensitive computing site these days would allow anyone to have a three-letter password, much less a common noun). To prove he was there to his buddies, he tries to download a "garbage" file. The owner of that file in fact had stored there some sensitive information related to a personal nefarious scheme. To get the Feds involved to help him get the file back, he sets loose a virus that he designed himself and claims the "hacker" did it. The Feds are creepy imbeciles. The pranksters are more interested in one-upping one another than in foiling the bad guy or getting away from the Feds (and their pranks are like playing their equivalent of scavengerhunt videogames using phone lines to break into systems). And the bad guy, with his convoluted motivation is simply pathetic. Hence, there's no central conflict -- just a string of episodes.
Technology-wise, there was hardly any mention of the Internet -- it was all direct-dialup to a modem at the target site. (For instance, they make a phone call to a security guard and trick him into telling them the dialup number for the top secret computer -- real high tech).
Worst of all, whenever they show a computer in action, they put ludicrous graphics on the screen, apparently to show that it's "doing something." It's like a 1950's sci-fi movie notion of what a computer is and how it works.
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