Hackers (film)

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Hackers
Directed by	Iain Softley
Produced by	Michael Peyser
Written by	Rafael Moreu
Starring	Jonny Lee Miller Angelina Jolie Jesse Bradford Matthew Lillard Fisher Stevens Renoly Santiago Laurence Mason
Music by	Simon Boswell
Cinematography	Andrzej Sekula
Distributed by	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release date(s)	September 15, 1995 (USA)
Running time	107 min.
Country	United States
Language	English Italian Japanese Russian

Hackers is a 1995 American thriller film, directed by Iain Softley and starring Angelina Jolie, Jonny Lee Miller, and Matthew Lillard. The screenplay, written by Rafael Moreu, is highly influenced by the hacker and cyberpunk subcultures. The film follows the exploits of a group of gifted high school hackers and their involvement in a corporate extortion conspiracy.

Contents 1 Plot summary 2 Cast 3 Production 4 Cultural Influences 5 Soundtrack 6 See also 7 References 8 External links

[edit] Plot summary

In 1988, Seattle youth Dade "Zero Cool" Murphy (Jonny Lee Miller) is arrested and charged, at the age of 11, with crashing 1,507 systems in one day and causing a single-day 7-point drop in the New York Stock Exchange. Upon conviction, he is banned from owning or operating computers or touch-tone telephones until his 18th birthday.

Shortly before Dade turns 18, his mother (now divorced) takes a new job in New York City. Upon turning 18, Dade calls a local television station, dupes the security guard into giving him the modem's phone number (using a tactic known as social engineering) and successfully hacks into the station's computer network, changing the current tv program to an episode of The Outer Limits. However, Dade is "attacked" by a hacker on the same network, (who goes by the handle "Acid Burn") and is eventually kicked off. During the conversation, Dade identifies himself by the new alias, Crash Override.

Dade enrolls in the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, where he meets the beautiful Kate Libby (Angelina Jolie), who is responsible for taking him on a tour of the school. After being told of a "pool on the roof" (which results in Dade and several other students being locked on the roof during a rainstorm) a feud erupts between Dade and Kate. Their duel, which spans most of the movie, is umpired by Kate and Dade's mutual friends in the hacking community, including Cereal Killer and Lord Nikon.

The real trouble erupts when Joey Pardella (Jesse Bradford), the younger, novice hacker of the group, successfully breaks into an oil company supercomputer to prove to the rest of the group that he is an elite hacker. In order to validate this feat, he downloads part of a garbage file. Unfortunately, the company's IT staff detects this unauthorized entry into their systems and summons computer security officer Eugene "The Plague" Belford (Fisher Stevens) to deal with the problem. He realizes that the file that is being downloaded can prove that The Plague is stealing money from the company via salami slicing. The Plague enlists the US Secret Service to recover the file by claiming that it is the code to a computer virus that will capsize the company's oil tanker fleet.

What follows is a frantic race against The Plague and the Secret Service to exonerate the hackers before Belford can unleash the virus causing a worldwide ecological disaster.

[edit] Cast

Hackers was the first major film to star future Academy Award winner Angelina Jolie, and also helped to launch the career of Matthew Lillard. The cast included:

• Johnny Lee Miller as Dade Murphy a.k.a. Zero Cool / Crash Override
• Angelina Jolie as Kate Libby a.k.a. Acid Burn
• Renoly Santiago as Ramόn Sánchez a.k.a. The Phantom Phreak
• Matthew Lillard as Emmanuel Goldstein a.k.a. Cereal Killer The real name of Matthew Lillard's character, Emmanuel Goldstein, is taken from George Orwell's novel 1984, which Goldstein mentions at one point during the movie; the fact is also alluded to in a dream sequence when an image of Agent Richard Gill tells The Phantom Phreak (also known as Ramon Sanchez) that "I'm watching you." Emmanuel Goldstein is also the pseudonym of Eric Corley, who was a technical consultant for the film. A copy of Corley's 2600: The Hacker Quarterly also appears briefly hanging on a wall during the movie.
• Laurence Mason as Paul Cook a.k.a. Lord Nikon Laurence Mason's character Lord Nikon was given the name because of his photographic memory. Also, logos and design similar to those of Nikon are displayed at various points in the movie.
• Jesse Bradford as Joey Pardella
• Fisher Stevens as Eugene "The Plague" Belford
• Penn Jillette as Hal

[edit] Production

Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page. (March 2009)

The protagonist, Zero Cool \ Crash Override, is based on Robert Tappan Morris.^[1] The school scenes are filmed in Stuyvesant High School and the surrounding area in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Manhattan.^[2]

The film quotes the Hacker Manifesto (written by Loyd Blankenship, also known as The Mentor) from Phrack magazine, issue 07, file 03 in 1986. In the film, the character reading the manifesto was holding a copy of 2600 magazine, not Phrack. Also, the name of one character, Emmanuel Goldstein ("Cereal Killer"), is borrowed from the pseudonym of Eric Corley, one of the editors of 2600 (Corley got the name from George Orwell's 1984). Corley helped advise the filmmakers on the hacker subculture, but remains a critic of the film's accuracy.

The film also makes a brief allusion to the Macintosh's launch phrase as Phreak exclaims "Yo...this is 'insanely great,' it's got a 28.8 bps [sic] modem!" upon seeing Kate's new laptop during the party. The racing game briefly featured in the movie was a video prototype created during development of Wipeout. The movie also includes a fictional pirate television show called Hack the Planet.

The quote written by Dade in his Advanced English class is from Allen Ginsberg's famous poem, Howl.

[edit] Cultural Influences

• The English tagline (Their Crime is Curiosity) is taken from a line of the Hacker Manifesto ("My crime is that of curiosity"), published in Phrack magazine, issue 07, file 03 in 1986.^[3]
• The Plague's given name Eugene Belford is inspired by that of real-life Unix security expert Eugene Spafford, a controversial figure to the hacking community.
• Hacker Bill From RNOC, also known as Dave Buchwald, worked as a technical hacker consultant on set and behind the scenes, coaching the cast and assisting the crew during pre-production and filming. ^[4]

[edit] Soundtrack

The music soundtrack was released in 3 separate volumes over a number of years.^[5] The first volume was composed entirely of music featured in the film (with the exception of Carl Cox's "Phoebus Apollo"), while the second and third are a mix of music "inspired by the film" as well as music actually in the film. Among others, the song "Protection", by Massive Attack, plays during the scene where Angelina Jolie's character is on a balcony during the party setting, and the song does not appear on any of the three soundtracks.

[edit] See also

• Cyberpunk
• Sneakers (film)
• Antitrust (film)

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Hackers at the Internet Movie Database
• Hackers transcript
• Original MGM/UA website (on Archive.org)
• Hacked website - Original MGM/UA website after defacement by the Internet Liberation Front (on Archive.org)

v • d • e Films directed by Iain Softley Backbeat (1994) · Hackers (1995) · The Wings of the Dove (1997) · K-PAX (2001) · The Skeleton Key (2005) · Inkheart (2008)