Hackers
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| Reviewed by Marty Busse |
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Hackers was a noble attempt-an attempt to make a movie about crackers with some degree of accuracy. (I refuse to refer to them as hackers. That term has an older pedigree. Some crackers do deserve both labels, but not all. See Eric Raymond's definition for a little more on this) They had real crackers-including Emmanuel Goldstein of 2600 magazine fame, (one of the characters is named after him-the single most annoying one, IMHO, but Goldstein thought he was funny) and Phiber Optik, one of the better known crackers this side of Kevin Mitnick. (To be fair to him and Goldstein, they can be described as being hackers and crackers: something which is manifestly not true of most crackers.) Unfortunately, no one is going to watch a movie consisting of people typing plain text on screens-so most of the computer stuff is totally fake, over the top computing that bears no resemblence to anything done in the real world, although there are some fun in jokes. (The mainframes at the nameless big corporation are called Gibsons-a reference to cyberpunk author William Gibson. The evil virus that Plague plans to blame on the heroes of this film is the Leonardo Da Vinci virus-a reference to the much-ballyhoed Michaelangelo virus.)
Basically, the story starts out with the arrest of Zero Cool-writer of the most destructive computer virus ever. He's 11, and as a consequence he is prohibited from using a computer until he's 18...
Flash to him turning 18, living in a different city and immediately turning back to cracking, (the first leap into unreality in this film-he's supposedly not been touching computers for 7 years, yet he's able to leap right back into things with no problem) with a new nome de crack: Crash Override. He cracks into a tv station's computers, and changes their late night programming to the Outer Limits..until another cracker, Acid Burn, starts duking it out with him for control of that turf.
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This movie really does have some gems-but the phony computing details left me cold. There are some cool bits-the shot of the city that turns into a circuit board is very slick-but most of the stuff is so phony as to be laughable. It's really painful because there are moments with real computing info. The scene showing Crash Override scamming the phone number for a modem from a security guard is a perfect example of social engineering, a method crackers use to scam passwords and other information off of people.
The single worst thing about this film was the heroes putting out a call for help on the internet-by which I assume they either use usenet news groups or internet relay chat. All the crackers in the world help them out-bombarding Plague's gibson with viruses and attacks so as to prevent the execution of the Da Vinci virus. This is laughable for many reasons: most importantly, the response they get, and how quickly they get it. Putting out such a request would be more likely to lead to flame wars than to get any real help, and it would take some time to attack a machine like that. Unless Plague is an idiot (and the movie does not portray him as such) his machines should have some defenses: the movie makes it look as if he doesn't. (Although one of my friends theorized that Plague spends all of his time on his own evil schemes, and doesn't actually do any real work. I didn't buy it-one of the scenes has him referring to memos he's passed out about improving password security. If he just needs the job as cover for his illegal activities, why bother trying to educate users on measures to imporve security? He could just tell them everything's fine, and leave it at that.)
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after an infectious disease to guard your computers may be a bad idea." |
Still, Hackers is one of the better movies made about computers and crackers-Sneakers being the closest competition. It's worth a rental, at least, and you will be entertained. Even if you do this stuff for a living, you'll only squirm a few times, and most of the rest of the time, you'll be entertained. And if you really want to understand how crackers view themselves, this is a good guide. (My one complaint here was that they didn't offer up any kind of defense for virus creation and release-despite the fact that all of the crackers in this film are writing and carrying viruses around, and despite the fact that Crash Override's buddies revere him even more when they find out that he was Zero Cool, the guy who wrote the most destructive computer virus ever.)
And it has Penn Jillette in a minor role as one of Plague's coworkers. That alone is worth one lava lamp. Too bad that the dissapointment I had in this film precludes me from granting it more than one more lava lamp. It was a valiant try, but it just didn't quite make it.
