Trailer Park: Hackers

Movie
Hackers, released September 15 1995

Trailer Synopsis
A group of high school kids (led by Angelina Jolie and Johnny Lee Miller) who can “get inside any system” toss a bunch of code around in the name of tomfoolery until the get embroiled in a scheme involving a computer virus, oil tankers, and evil Fisher Stevens. There’s a lot of quick cutting, sexual tension, and banding together in the name of hacking.  

Does It Honestly Represent the Movie?
Absolutely. When I think about old complaints about the short attention spans of the MTV generation, Hackers is the visual in my mind’s eye. It’s a busy, frenetic movie with a lot of music video-style visual panache and a ton of fast-talking characters tossing around slang that was probably already outdated by the time the film opened. The story follows Dade Murphy (Miller), a sort of wunderkind hacker who was arrested as a tween for taking down a bunch of different computer systems. Now 18, he and his mother have relocated to New York so they can both get something of a fresh start. (Dade even changes his nom-de-computer from “Zero Cool” to “Crash Override.”)

He quickly bonds with the other keyboard cowboys at his school: The Phantom Phreak (Renoly Santiago), Cereal Killa (Matthew Lillard), Joey (Jesse Bradford), Lord Nikon (Laurence Mason), and Kate “Acid Burn” Libby (Jolie). Joey manages to sneak into the server stack of an oil company and hijacks a sensitive file that would reveal an embezzlement scheme set up by the company’s IT head The Plague (Stevens) in collaboration with an executive named Margo (Lorraine Bracco). The first chunk of Hackers is largely a hangout movie that brings you into the subculture (or at least an invented version of hacker subculture), and the back half is the cat and mouse game between the teen crew and Plague.

Hackers was part of a very strange year in Hollywood that saw a bunch of major studios try to reckon with the newly emergent fascination with the Internet. In addition to Hackers, 1995 saw the release of the Sandra Bullock floppy disk thriller The Net, the pre-Matrix Keanu Reeves cyberpunk vehicle Johnny Mnemonic, the apocalyptic VR caper Strange Days and the paranoid digital serial killer drama Virtuosity. None of those movies are necessarily good, but they are a fascinating window into the fears and possibilities of an entirely online world at the dawn of universal connectivity, and Hackers is by far the most fun of that lot.

What’s Weird About It?
For all the strange over-explaining in the first few seconds, the trailer never actually states what a hacker is. We can tell from context clues they work with computers, but what are they actually doing? A Secret Service agent played by Wendell Pierce has that one line about infiltrating systems or whatever, but to what end? The ironic thing is the movie never actually comes to a conclusion about these questions either. They do it because it’s fun, I guess?

I know this kind of narrative phrasing used to be pretty common, but I still chuckle at the line “United Artists welcomes you to the new world.” A studio is welcoming me! Cool! Nice to be welcomed. But also how is this the new world? Despite the fact that it deals in a lot of computer mumbo jumbo, the movie takes place in contemporary Manhattan.

There are a handful of shots of oil tankers that make it seem like a portion of the movie takes place at sea, but those are just illustrative inserts in the actual movie.

There’s no mention of the soundtrack, which became a hit on its own and spawned two sequels. As you can maybe tell from the trailer, it’s wall-to-wall underground electronic music and would act as a very fine entry point into the digital masters of the moment that include Orbital, The Prodigy, Underworld, Kruder & Dorfmeister and of course Stereo MCs immortal “Connected.”

Does It Spoil The Movie?
This is one of those trailers that spells out just about every beat of the plot, and the hacker team doesn’t actually realize they’re being set up until pretty late in the movie. So yes, the trailer does probably give too much away. But at the same time, the plot is like the seventh most important aspect of Hackers, and I think the trailer makes the film that much more intriguing because it throws so much at you that you can’t help but be curious how it all fits together.

Final Analysis
Hackers was an unqualified bomb. Critics couldn’t stand it and audiences did not show up (it opened fourth, just behind the sixth week of Dangerous Minds). But I have to imagine it ultimately made back its $20 million budget because the tail on this thing has been so long. It caught fire on video largely after Jolie broke out as a major movie star, and it’s had a bunch of anniversary re-releases and re-assessments. It is absolutely a movie of its time, but as a time capsule of how we might have perceived ourselves circa the Fall of ’95, it’s hard to beat it. The trailer is an almost ideal hand-in-glove, not only capturing the spirit of the movie itself but also the energy of a subculture and the moviegoing experience so close to the end of the millennium. 9/10