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| All Images Courtesy: MGM/Shout! Factory |
A strong argument can be made that Hackers is not only one of the most fun cult-classics of the 1990s, it is one of the most quintessentially-1990s films there is, period. It is a wonderfully fun time-capsule of its era, and on top of that is a very unique, deceptively clever mash-up of cyberpunk techno-thriller and teen dramedy with style to burn. While not everyone might consider it a masterpiece (I kind of do, but I understand why others might lump it into more of a guilty-pleasure camp), there are not many films quite like it. If I’m honest, I have probably watched Hackers more times than any other movie – it’s just that kind of endlessly-rewatchable comfort-movie favorite for me. 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 and felt like an artifact of the past by 2005, but it has now transcended being dated and has entered the realm of retro-cool time-capsule camp spectacle. Almost three decades later, Hackers is easily the most entertaining it has ever been – in ways both intentional and unintentional – and it is no surprise that it has become an enduring and beloved cult-classic, both among those who were there in the 90s, and even among Gen Z who have somewhat unexpectedly discovered and fallen in love with the film.
Shout! Factory helped propel the critical and popular reevaluation of Hackers with its 20th Anniversary Edition blu-ray in 2015, for which they produced a very impressive and very thorough multi-part documentary about the film, its production, its reception, and its place within hacker culture. However, that disc was held back from being a definitive release because it lacked a new HD restoration of the film: it used a several-years-old off-the-shelf master provided to them by MGM, which looked good but far from perfect in 2015, and eight years later looks visibly dated, with bits of print damage and colors that are not as vibrant as we are accustomed to on modern blu-rays. So it is very welcome (and maybe even overdue) that Shout! Factory has upgraded Hackers with a brand-new 4K restoration from the original camera negative, in a UHD/blu-ray combo pack through their Shout! Select line.
THE FILM:
Nostalgia watch, comfort movie, guilty pleasure, or simply cult classic: Hackers fits the bill for all of these terms, depending on your point of view and how you vibe with its particular odd and over-the-top sensibility. It is very willfully campy and maximalist in places, genuinely really cool in others, and massively entertaining and purely enjoyable in all aspects, both for the things director Iain Softley got right, and for the things about it that are deeply silly in just the right way. It really is the most 90s 90s-movie imaginable, especially as a techno-thriller. 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 concept 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, and the future would be a technological dystopia in so many ways. Essentially a high-tech spin on the classic “misunderstood teenagers fight the corrupt system that doesn't understand them” story (it would make one hell of a double-feature with Empire Records), 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.
Half of the appeal of the film, both as camp and as thriller, is the way in which it is sci-fi masquerading as reality; Gibson-esque cyberpunk wearing the clothes of a high school dramedy. 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 can freely mix cyberpunk tropes and sci-fi aesthetics in with the more grounded hacking and audiences wouldn’t mind. The script directly engages with how the average viewer would have no clue what the characters were talking about, which is used for intentional humor but has become only campier with time (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. It is on its face incredibly silly and absurd, and many people over the years have written this off as proof that Moreau and Softley knew nothing about computers.
However, as they discuss at great length in the documentary on this disc, they actually knew a lot about computers, and had a team of computer and hacking consultants there to make sure the film was accurate where it mattered; the goofy and obviously-unrealistic animated portrayals of computers being used was a narrative choice. As they say in the extras, if they had shown hacking as it actually works – ie, people typing code on a Windows 95 or Linux interface – it would have been deathly boring, and would never work as a thriller, or convey the appeal of hacking. So instead they decided to portray hacking not as it is, but as it FEELS: the stylized animations are meant to capture the fun and the rush and the power and the coolness of actually carrying out a successful hack. Still undeniably silly, but a choice made with sound reasoning, and not proof of the film’s dumbness; indeed, the movie is deceptively very tech-literate, and Moreau and his hacking consultants clearly knew their stuff when it really mattered, and were just playing fast and loose with reality for fun. Far more accurate is the portrayal of the real-world half of hacking: social engineering to manipulate their way into an office, phishing and phreaking, and dumpster-diving to find documents revealing corporate information. Hackers honestly portrays all of that just as effectively (if not more so) as the mandatory cybersecurity training videos that everyone has to watch at my job, and it’s way more fun. Still, 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 (I speak from experience).
The other half of its nostalgia/camp appeal is how over-the-top 1990s everything is. 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 flashes of neon lights, anime, and vintage movies 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 our 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. 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, Crash Override and Acid Burn, while their motley crew including Laurence Mason (The Crow) as Lord Nikon, Renoly Santiago (Con Air) as Phantom Phreak, and Matthew Lillard (in possibly his most over-the-top role of all) as Cereal Killer 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 the 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.
Moreu's script can be a bit meandering and very silly, but the enthusiasm of the cast and Softley's stylized MTV-ish direction transforms it into something irresistibly fun. The script is loaded with highly quotable dialogue and great one-liners, and when you have moments like Cereal Killer’s “we have no names – no names, man, we are NAMELESS” monologue 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 dramedies like Pump Up The Volume 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' rewatchability, and the added layers of camp and stylized high-tech coolness just make it more fun. It is candy for your eyes and ears and brain, and it is delicious.
THE SHOUT FACTORY 4K EDITION:
And as eye and ear candy, it is definitely a treat to see it on this new 4K restoration, which – in the words of Cereal Killer – “looks crispy in the dark.” As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, Shout! Factory’s 20th Anniversary blu-ray of Hackers was excellent when it came to the extras and the overall package, but most unfortunate in how it was stuck with a decent-but-far-from-great off-the-shelf transfer from MGM that was a little dated at the time, and very dated now. This new 4K remaster from the original camera negative is a MASSIVE improvement.
Even on the blu-ray, let alone the UHD, the colors are much richer and more vibrant, and the contrast is very strong. The intense neon color palette of the film, contrasted with the deep shadows of the many night-time scenes, really pops and looks beautiful, while the 2015 disc looked a bit drab and undersaturated by comparison. The detail is much, much stronger, and the image looks very crispy indeed. It is a major upgrade in terms of picture quality, whether you’re watching the blu-ray or the UHD.
My one complaint is that it does look as though there is some DNR applied to the image, as there is strikingly little to no film grain present. However, the DNR is not problematically used: the detail on the image is sharp and is not harmed by it, and the actors do not appear waxy or anything like that; fear not, this is certainly no Predator situation, and not a reason to avoid the disc. It just looks like a low to moderate level of DNR has been used to minimize what was probably already a pretty fine grain to begin with. Not a choice that I love, but it’s hard to criticize the end result too much, since even with this minor complaint, the image still looks absolutely beautiful. The pros more than outweigh this one small con: with detail this strong, and colors and contrast this good, Hackers has never looked so beautiful, and this is such a major upgrade that I would easily recommend a double-dip for fans of the film.
The disc also sounds incredible: it boasts a new 5.1 surround mix, which is phenomenal. The audio sounds cleaner on this mix than it did previously, and the mix is very robust, giving plenty of volume to the dialogue while also really letting the music shine. Considering how much the music is part of the soul and personality of Hackers – both the excellent Simon Boswell score and the licensed music from the likes of The Prodigy, Orbital, and Massive Attack – a very good new audio mix is definitely an important feature.
I adore Hackers, and I genuinely cannot recommend it enough. Its particular blend of 90s nostalgia, camp, and teen-drama techno-thriller craziness may not be for everyone, but if this review makes it sound remotely fun to you, then I think you can be pretty sure that you’ll have a great time in its wacky, colorful world. And this disc truly is the way to see it. Slight DNR-related gripes aside, this restoration looks stunningly good – by far the best the film has ever looked – and I am more than happy with the upgrade. If you’re a fan, it is definitely worth the double-dip for the far better picture quality, and if you’ve been waiting to see it, this gorgeous presentation is definitely the way to. It truly does look crispy in the dark. It’s elite.
HACK THE PLANET!
Score for the film:
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Score for the disc:
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- Christopher S. Jordan
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