(some nessecary context: the VoidDweller Discord Server is doing a bit of a media club, like a book club but for shit that's not books, and hackers is the janurary entry. I'm going to attempt to write something for each piece of media but we will see how it goes. pls join us in talking shit about shit. ty)
This film is an integral part of my fucking personality and if I had to put money on it, I'd bet i've seen it about 40 times now. The first time I ever laid eyes on that transcendent birds eye view shot of a circuit board city flying underneath while halcyon & on & on graces us with it's dulcet tones was on a UMD in one of those thick chunky PSP-1000 when I was like 15 or 16. Hard telling if it was my first or second or third psp, because I somehow kept breaking those fuckers and exchanging them at walmart for functional models. The fact that anecdote takes place during the PSP's active retail tenure should date it enough.
I often think of this movie when people call art "timeless" because this movie is the exact opposite of timeless. Everything in this movie reeks of 1995, The fashion, the music, the """hacking""". I heard someone on some corner of the internet say "the hacking in hackers is like the archeology in indiana jones". It's not even close to being accurate but I don't think anybody is here for the accuracy of the hacking sections, they're here for the fucking vibes. I'd check this fact if i gave a shit about accuracy but i do not give a shit about accuracy so i will not check this fact, but i'm pretty sure that at the time most people did not own or understand computers like we do now. Although we've somehow looped back around to people not owning computers again and the general public just doing everything on their phones, but at least people know when they open the garbage on their phone a bunch of numbers and equations and shit don't swirl around at their face.
Sometimes I think now about how the youths are nostalgic for like 2017 or something, and as somebody who lived through a bunch of those "end of history" type years where nothing fucking went on I wonder what they look back on so fondly. I think it's got to just be some incredibly niche marketing sort of thing, like a manipulated and hyperreal version of maybe one or two peoples real experience, at most. Hackers is that exact same sort of psychological trap but specifically made for my stupid ass. There's definitely other reasons as to why I can quote this entire movie front to back besides the nostalgia for a version of a time that didn't actually exist (angelina jolie mostly), but I can't act like that's not one of the angles. Because I know in 1995 people were not dressing like that, especially not the people that spent a lot of time on the passing fad of the time called "the internet". I know computer server systems were not, and still aren't, rooms full of glass towers with the file directory engraved on them or whatever, even though they should be because it looks sick as fuck. Nobody rollerbladed everywhere either, but god damn it, maybe they fuckin should.
Real life isn't like the movies but that's probably why we like the movies.
