Hackers finally comes home in a proper Shout Factory 20th anniversary blu-ray release.
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| "I wear my sunglasses at night... so I can....so I can. |
This Tuesday, Shout! Factory gives their special edition
treatment to the 1995 cyberpunk-ish teen thriller Hackers, in honor of
the film's twentieth anniversary. Not only its blu-ray debut, but also the
first time the film has gotten any special features at all, Shout!'s release
makes the case for why Hackers deserves to be embraced as a cult
classic. In a way, this is a movie that has only gotten better with time: it is
so firmly entrenched in the mid-1990s (in every way imaginable) that it dated
itself fairly quickly, but it has now transcended simply being dated and has
entered the realm of retro-cool camp spectacle. Two decades later, Hackers is
easily the most entertaining it has ever been – in ways both intentional and
unintentional – and is ready for rediscovery.
This is the quintessential guilty-pleasure movie: it isn't
really “good,” but it is massively entertaining and purely enjoyable, both for
the things director Iain Softley got right, and for his inspired missteps. It's
the cinematic equivalent of downing a Jolt Cola and playing some F-Zero or Mega
Man X with the chip tunes turned up really loud: a glorious time-capsule of a
decade when the image of “high-tech” was cool and edgy, but in hindsight also
quite naïve. A time when a generation raised on William Gibson and Blade
Runner thought that computers and virtual reality would make our cyberpunk
dreams come true before Y2K hit, not knowing that all this cool technology
would be as commonplace and taken for granted as indoor plumbing in just a few
years. Essentially a high-tech spin on the classic “misunderstood teenagers
fight the corrupt system that doesn't understand them” story, Hackers
takes the cultural hopes and anxieties everyone had about computers in the '90s
and runs with them like crazy, without letting reality get in the way of its
fun.
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| "This lighting you look even more like Ozzy. Evil, man, evil." |
Half of the camp appeal of the film is the way in which it is
sci-fi masquerading as reality. 1995 was a time when everyone had enough casual
computer knowledge for a film like this to have mainstream appeal, but limited
enough knowledge that Rafael Moreu's script could basically make up whatever
fictional stuff it wanted and no one would ever know, just as long as the
technobabble sounded real. The script fully exploits the fact that the average
viewer would have no clue what the characters were talking about (actual
dialogue exchange from the movie: Cop 1 - “We found an uncorrupted hard drive.”
Cop 2 - “In English, please?”). Computers in the world of Hackers often
blatantly do not work the way real computers do, with their screens showing
wildly over-the-top CGI cyberscapes, and with the internet being depicted as a
literal realm reminiscent of The Circuits of Time in Bill and Ted's
Excellent Adventure. But to be fair, this was a better dramatic decision
than just showing Windows 95 screens the whole time, and while it gives the
film an inescapable air of silliness, that's all part of its charm. As our
cultural awareness of how computers actually work has increased, so has Hackers'
camp appeal: watching it with a bunch of programmers or IT professionals is
a great time.
The other half of its camp appeal is how over-the-top 1990s
everything is; this may in fact be the most '90s movie of that decade. Everyone
dresses in the loudest counterculture fashions, everyone travels by skateboard
or rollerblade, and the film is edited in rapid-fire vintage-MTV style, with
random flashes of neon lights cut to the pounding beat of music by The Prodigy,
Orbital, and Massive Attack. There's a '90s-kid-dream-come-true arcade/indoor
skate park where characters settle disputes on a Wipeout machine, and the main
character has a poster for the anime Wicked City on the wall of his
room. Another character enthusiastically describes them as “the Nintendo generation;”
and being part of the Nintendo generation myself, the trip back in time is
richly nostalgic, all the more so because it is so overstated.
Speaking of overstated, there's our cast of characters:
poster-children for high-tech teen angst who relish their roles as rebels with
a righteous cause, and who chew just the right amount of scenery while bringing
some great personality to the parts. This is where the camp elements of the
film are clearly not accidental: Softley and his cast know exactly the tone to
take with these characters and their journey, and bring genuine enthusiasm and
a great sense of humor to the tale of kids taking on The Man. Jonny Lee Miller
and Angelina Jolie take themselves just seriously enough as our cool and moody
hacker heroes, while their motley crew including Laurence Mason (Tin Tin from The
Crow) and Matthew Lillard (in possibly his most over-the-top role of all)
provide personality and comic relief. As the villain, Fisher Stevens gives an
oddly stilted performance that seems to suggest a huge nerd trying to convince
everyone else that he's a dark and serious, super-cool evil mastermind. How
much of this was intended by the script and how much of it was just him having
fun with a one-dimensional part has never been entirely clear to me, but it
works, and the idea of an awkward geek trying to be a Bond villain is pretty
appropriate.
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| "So, I'm thinking about some cosmetic surgery? And after that, I'm gonna make out with my brother. What do you think?" |
Moreu's script isn't very good – it's really dumb – but the
enthusiasm of the cast and Softley's stylized MTV-ish direction transforms it
into something irresistibly fun. When you have characters with names like Crash
Override, Acid Burn, and Lord Nikon delivering lines like “If you wanna be
elite, you gotta do a righteous hack!” it's near-impossible not to smile. If
you strip away the cyberpunk-inspired trappings, the central themes and
conflict are largely the same as other misunderstood-teens-fight-the-system
dramas like Pump Up The Volume (another Movie Sleuth favorite in serious
need of a blu-ray release), which have always been a staple of both genuinely
good movies and fun guilty-pleasure ones, and with good reason. When you're a
teenager, the appeal is cathartic; when you're an adult, the appeal is
nostalgic. That is the core of Hackers' watchability, and the added
layers of camp and stylized high-tech coolness just make it more fun. It's a
very dumb, silly movie, but as eye and brain candy it's delicious.
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| Click to purchase |
Unless this disc is wildly successful beyond all
expectations, though, this is likely the best release that a minor cult classic
like Hackers is likely to get, so we should enjoy it. And regardless, it
is a huge upgrade over MGM's lazy and bare-bones 1998 flip-disc DVD, which is
the last stand-alone release that it received. If you're at all interested in
the cyber-camp spectacle that this film provides, it is easily worth picking
up. It may not be a good movie, but it is an awesome one.
HACK THE PLANET!
-Christopher S. Jordan
