Angelia Jolie's best 1990s movies and also stars Jonny Lee Miller, Laurence Mason, and Matthew Lillard.

Hackers is about a group of high school students who use their tech skills to stop an evil corporation from taking over the world using a computer virus. It is one of the earliest movies to explore the potential behind modern computers, for better or worse. While Hackers contains many examples of things movies get wrong about hacking, its themes around privacy are still highly relevant today. Many of its ideas, like the concept of online anonymity, are now part of everyday life, but for a modern audience, Hackers is a nostalgic look into 1990s culture.

Hackers Oddly Encapsulates The Culture Of The 1990s

The Ideas In Hackers Are Common Knowledge Now, But They Were New In The 1990s

Virtually every aspect of Hackers serves as a homage to the 1990s, from its fashion to its music. The soundtrack features huge techno artists of the 1990s, and the main characters wear tiny sunglasses, tank tops, and neon punk accessories with an extra futuristic twist. The visuals might be outdated today, but they were cutting-edge at the time and represented the glamorized view of hacking that was popular in the 1990s. However, Hackers doesn't just encapsulate the 1990s aesthetic; it also reflects the mindset concerning the use of computers.

Hackers characters use 1990s-sounding screen names, but the computer mainframe is called Gibson as a tribute to cyberpunk author William Gibson, who coined the term "cyberspace."

Hackers proposes ideas that were groundbreaking at the time it was made but are considered common knowledge today. This is especially true when The Hacker Manifesto is quoted: "This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch... We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias..." The idea that people could create an entirely new online identity was new and fascinating in the 1990s, while it is an accepted truth now. From its philosophies to its aesthetics, it is not surprising that Hackers is a cult classic for perfectly capturing the 1990s.

Why Hackers Wasn't More Appreciated Upon Release

Hackers May Have Been Better Received If It Had Been Released A Few Years Later

At the time of release, Hackers featured no big names; one of the reasons it draws attention today is the early appearances of major stars. It might be considered a great 1990s sci-fi movie now, but the sci-fi genre looked very different back then, with action movies like The Terminator and Jurassic Park reigning supreme. A movie like Hackers, aimed at young adults and with fewer big-budget action scenes, did not fit in with other popular 1990s sci-fi movies. Hackers is extremely dated but remains a cult classic as the 1990s aesthetic has become popular.

Hackers is not an accurate representation of hacking, and many of the ideas it presents about the role that computers would later play in our lives are simply wrong. Yet it is still extremely entertaining, and the movie serves as a time capsule from the 1990s. While Hackers has a 33% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it is much more popular with audiences, who have given it a 68% rating. A few years later, the 1990s sci-fi movies The Matrix and Existenz were released to critical acclaim, suggesting that Hackers' problem is that it was simply released too early.