90s Hacker Movies

The decade Hollywood learned the internet existed and decided it was mostly neon.

Entries
10
Category
Film
Updated
  1. A shattered glass VR pod leaking glowing blue liquid onto a lab floor beside a pair of handcuffs.

    10. Virtuosity

    Brett Leonard · 1995

    Denzel Washington hunts SID 6.7, a virtual killer stitched together from serial killer profiles who escapes into the real world. He's played by a pre-fame Russell Crowe, who looks like he's having the time of his life. Same director as The Lawnmower Man. He had a type.

  2. A red riding lawnmower parked in a grassy yard, wired up to a virtual reality headset and a glowing computer.

    09. The Lawnmower Man

    Brett Leonard · 1992

    A scientist uses VR and drugs to supercharge a gardener, who decides to become pure energy inside the mainframe. Stephen King sued to get his name off it and won, plus $2.5 million. Still the highest-grossing independent film of 1992. The CGI was genuinely ahead of its time.

  3. A bulky metal data cable plugged into a glowing aquarium tank where a dolphin swims among circuit boards.

    08. Johnny Mnemonic

    Robert Longo · 1995

    Keanu Reeves stores too much data in his head and needs a hacker to get it out. The hacker is a dolphin, formerly of the Navy. William Gibson wrote it and said the studio chopped it unsuccessfully into something mainstream. Four years later Keanu got the upgrade.

  4. A garage workbench with a wooden computer case, a beige floppy drive and a pirate flag pinned to the wall.

    07. Pirates of Silicon Valley

    Martyn Burke · 1999

    A TNT movie with Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs and Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates. Jobs called it mean-spirited but told Wyle he looked like him, then brought him onstage at Macworld as a fake Jobs. Wozniak said every incident happened. Five Emmy nominations, zero lawsuits.

  5. A floppy disk with a small pi symbol glowing on its label, next to a pizza box and a CRT monitor.

    06. The Net

    Irwin Winkler · 1995

    Sandra Bullock is a systems analyst who finds a backdoor marked with a pi symbol, and a cabal called the Praetorians erases her identity. It made $110 million on a $22 million budget and spawned a TV series. She orders pizza online, which in 1995 counted as science fiction.

  6. A shopping bag with a tiny tracking chip glowing inside it under a wall of surveillance monitors.

    05. Enemy of the State

    Tony Scott · 1998

    Will Smith as a lawyer who accidentally receives proof of an NSA murder and becomes the most surveilled man in Baltimore. Gene Hackman's file photo is from The Conversation, on purpose. After Snowden, it started looking less like a thriller and more like a brochure.

  7. A tangle of cables plugging into a sleek cybernetic port on a rain-streaked neon rooftop over a futuristic Asian city.

    04. Ghost in the Shell

    Mamoru Oshii · 1995

    A cyborg cop hunts a hacker called the Puppet Master and finds out it's an AI that wants to merge with her. The Wachowskis screened it for their producer and said they wanted to do it for real. James Cameron called it the first truly adult animated film. He was right.

  8. A pair of rollerblades and a translucent laptop on a Manhattan rooftop at night, the city lit up with neon behind.

    03. Hackers

    Iain Softley · 1995

    Teens called Zero Cool and Acid Burn rollerblade around Manhattan and expose an embezzler called The Plague. Cost $20 million, made $7.6 million here, then became a cult object. Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie married after filming. The computers are translucent. Correct.

  9. A pair of tiny black sunglasses resting beside a red pill and a blue pill on a cracked leather chair, green light falling like rain behind.

    02. The Matrix

    The Wachowskis · 1999

    A cubicle worker who hacks at night as Neo learns the world is a simulation run by machines. Bullet time, four Oscars, $473 million. The falling green code was built from mirrored Japanese kana. It beat The Phantom Menace for visual effects, which felt like justice.

  10. A small black electronic box on a cluttered workbench surrounded by scattered blank wooden game tiles, a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a rotary phone.

    01. Sneakers

    Phil Alden Robinson · 1992

    Redford, Poitier, Aykroyd, River Phoenix and David Strathairn as a blind phone phreak, chasing a black box that can break any code. The writers of WarGames dreamed it up in 1981, and RSA co-inventor Leonard Adleman did the math. Setec Astronomy is an anagram. Do the work.

Honorable mentions

  • A 90s computer terminal showing a 3D grid of floating blocks, a dinosaur claw scratch across the control room door behind it.

    Jurassic Park

    Steven Spielberg · 1993

    Not a hacker movie, but a disgruntled programmer sabotages the park's systems and a 12-year-old has to fix it, declaring it a Unix system and flying through a 3D file browser that was real Silicon Graphics software. Nerds have been defending that scene ever since.

Dishonorable mentions

  • A gray 90s laptop glowing on a dashboard of a fighter jet, with an enormous alien mothership filling the window.

    Independence Day

    Roland Emmerich · 1996

    Jeff Goldblum uploads a virus from a PowerBook 5300 into an alien mothership and takes down its shields. Apple ran tie-in ads called The Power to Save the World. It was the biggest movie of 1996. Nobody has ever explained the file format.

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