What Happened to Hackers? 

As someone with a background in IT, I can't even begin to explain how much easier my professional life became once I started wearing rollerskates, fingerless gloves, and sunglasses

This movie is pure kino. Killer soundtrack. Killer visuals. Costume design on point. Perfect amount of camp, never takes it self too serious or gets too ridiculous.

I think my favorite thing about the movie is how endearingly weird the ensemble is. They're weird characters in a scene where being weird and different is celebrated, rather than the normal "they're nerds and nerds are weird, so let's laugh derisively at them".

This movie turned me and my friends in middle school into social engineers. After this we were trying that recordning the phone tones trick (even though none of us really had any reason to make long distance calls) one friend was phishing for AOL passwords, trying to get free pizzas, etc. Those early days of the internet felt like a new wild west.

Jolie was a revelation to 15 year old me. Since the only way to really see her back then was to watch Hackers over and over, I watched Hackers over and over.

This is a favorite hacker movie of mine. My three favorite hacker movies are Hackers, Sneakers, and of course, Wargames. 😊

I remember explaining to friends (regarding this movie) "that's now what hacking is like, but it IS what hacking FEELS like."

This movie did for computer culture what Fast and The Furious did for street racing I still love both And excellent video!

At around 14 min, it was mentioned that they wanted to show how hacking felt on the screens, and not just text. Many people I knew criticized the lack of "actual" hacking in place for this visual. I always told people that I interpreted that as how it feels when hacking, based on my own experiences hacking and learning. It's awesome to hear that is what was actually meant by the creators. Just another reason why I love this movie!

"Johnny Mnemonic is still kind of awesome" You're god damn right.

Hackers is my second favourite movie of all time. Like said in the video, it inspired the young teen I was at the time to pursue an interest in computers and technology and drove the career I'm in today. But besides my career path, the soundtrack also played a large role in my life as the catalyst to a burgeoning obsession with electronic music that was on the fringe of popular music at the time in Canada. I had watched and rewatched Hackers with friends up until our mid 20s, and I continue to watch it every couple of months after ripping a DVD copy to watch on my phone at any moment. This copy has saved me numerous times. Listening along to the movie during a long stint in traffic late last year, I rattled off line after line as if I were each character in the show. I cannot articulate how important this movie is to me, and how much I love it. Thank you for doing the film justice rather than knocking it's unauthentic yet artful representation of hacking!

2 movies sent me down my cybersecurity path. Hackers and Ghost in the Shell. I remember when both were brand new. It all seemed so magical back then.

Hackers is still to this day in my top 5 favorite movies of all time. Absolutely love this film! Just watched it earlier this week, they just put in on one of the streaming services I have

I went to watch Hackers at the mall on its second week high on LSD. Mind blown and deeply in love with a B-movie actress named Angelina. What's even crazier is that I saw it with 2 defense information specialists from Quantico who not only loved it as well, but were also tripping balls.

Hack the planet!!!! I love this movie. The soundtrack is killer. This is one of the films that made me wanna move to NYC. The beginning when the city turns into a motherboard always made me smile. They finally released the score soundtrack not too long ago with the finale music when they're a grand central station. Prior you had to have rip it from the credits. This is also when I realized fisher stevens was the same guy from mario and short circuit...and he wasn't Indian 😂

I remember being 15 and seeing laptops for the 1st time watching Hackers...blew me away

I memorized this movie. Not sure how many times I've seen it. Bought my first 486 after seeing it. Crash and Burn!!!

This movie in 1995, through 2001 with "Swordfish" is the golden age of movies during the dark age of the internet/social media lol. Both flicks have great techno soundtracks and I was OBSESSED with that kind of music during that era (and not just the popular techno music on the radio at the time either. I used to find this stuff wherever I could back then).

A personal favorite of mine.

This one holds up, I re-watch it every now and then. The entire movie is just a great vibe from a bygone era.

Love, love, love this movie. I’ve worn out two different VHS tapes and am on my second DVD since it’s arrival. Still love this movie over 20 years later. Fantastic actors were chosen. Still an awesome movie to watch today.

Did you just rewatch this on Amazon Prime as well? lol If you were a clubber in the 90s, the soundtrack of this movie always puts a smile on my face.

This is a 90's guilty pleasure for me. I love it and I love that you guys covered it.

Me and my mom watched this movie a lot in the 90s. She even bought the Soundtrack.

Jolie was cool back then in this movie.I thought she and Jonny had incredible chemistry.Oddly enough I became aware of the concept of hacking from Tron when Flynn is trying to break into the Encom computer system.

The movie was just so immensely stylish and cool, the soundtrack was awesome and it's style and story just hit my nerve as a rebellious teen back then. I still love it to this day and watch it at least twice a year 🤘

During my degree in computer science starting in 1998, it was pretty much everyone's favourite film, there were quite alot of people who decided to become IT professional because of that film. Yes I laughed at the Hacking graphics but once you get the mindset that we are visualising the mind of a teenage hacker, then it makes a bit more sense, quite brilliant actually.

Love this movie so much. Still absolutely 1 of my faves.

10:34 I love it when a deep dive into a beloved movie includes getting the main character's name wrong.

worked with Fisher Stevens when he directed an episode of Dear Edward. It took ever fiber of my being not to bring up this movie. had no idea it had some real life links behind its creation.

I remember seeing this during its (apparently very short) theatrical run! My friends and I loved it and quoted it endlessly... no surprise, as we were 100% the target audience ("geeky"/intelligent teenagers, early adopters of computers and the internet... the kinds of guys who would discuss phreaking ideas over a BBS and then actually build a blue box and try to make long distance calls with it on a payphone at the local mall).

I unashamedly loved this movie and still do. At the time, I was renting a room and the owner of the house wasn't about to "put internet on the phone" (let me use the landline for dialup). So I went out and got an IT job with a local ISP and paid for a 2nd landline into my room. So thankful for growing up on the frontier of a new age.

I saw it at release, and over the years I have re-watched it a few more times. Such a classic!

Hackers, Strange Days, Johnny Mnemonic, and Virtuosity are classic movies with technology and futuristic ideology. I love them all for many different reasons. Plus, I'm into IT and computers myself. Lol!

The first time I saw Hackers was at a Thanksgiving dinner at my cousin's place. It just happened to be on HBO that night. My brother was already a fan of the film and had a huge crush on Angelina Jolie. I remembered not only how cool it looked, but also how fun it made computers look. When I bought the movie on DVD almost a decade later, I was hooked. A screenshot of the mainframe became my wallpaper, and I ended up looking up all of the "crayola" books and downloaded their respective pdf files, minus the NSA book, of course. Hackers was the movie that got me into computer hardware and software, and it will always be one of my favorite movies.

The editing on this was phenomenal. One of the best JoBlo videos EVER

As I was one of those teenagers who fell in love with the movie when it came out and continues to love it to this day: thank you for making this video.

I love this movie. Its one of the reasons I went into IT in the first place.

It came out. It was and still is one of the greatest movies of 1995 and all of time.

I love this movie so much I'm sure I've seen it over a hundred times. The soundtrack was a huge part of my teenage years it's awesome. Mess with the best, die like the rest 😎

I have no idea why Jonny Lee Miller wasn't a much bigger star. he is greatly underutilized. imo of course. his take on a modern day Sherlock Holmes was excellent. the attorney suffering musical hallucinations from a brain tumor as Eli Stone was just as amazing.

To me, Hackers looks like Hollywood's idea of cybercrime, totally over the top. Sneakers (1992) is a much less flashy and grounded representation of hacking. The techniques used are still valid.

The visuals looked cool, they didn't need to look realistic. This was an awesome movie to watch as a teenager.

I had such a crush on Angelina in this movie. Just off the charts with that pixie look.

Oh Man! This will always be one of my favourite movies of all time. It came out here just when I got internet for the first time. Best memories ever.

This is the best documentary about the greatest movie about hackers ever made. Not even those where Kevin Mitnik appeared nor some movie star got sucked while coding. That surely ain't real. Hackers from the 90's ate chips, drank coffee and reverse engineer server guards after office hours just for kicks. Amazing info. I've read a lot about this movie and a lot of things here where really new to me. Many many thanks to you for sharing and caring. Hack the planet!

Hackers my favorite movie had it on tape and watched it hundreds of times. So much info in this video i never knew before, unreal!!!

I watched this movie when it came out. I was 13, a geek and my favorite thing in the world was my IBM 386. Needless to say, I was captured, these characters became idols for me. I started drinking Jolt and experimenting with social engineering angles. My finest moment in those days was grabbing the admin password to my schools network. I didn't do anything bad, I didn't even change my grade, I just installed some games like Duke Nukem so I had something fun to do in computer class while everyone was learning to type. I was the king of the computer geeks which was, like, 5 people including myself. But still, it was a huge promotion in my social ladder. I work in cybersecurity today. No, not the sexy red team stuff, I do digital forensics and cyber awareness training. But hey, it scratches the itch, I get paid to do it and I stay out of trouble. Don't know if I'd be doing this today if it wasn't for this film, goofy as that may sound. It left an indelible mark on my young mind portraying my computer nerd obsession as something sexy and cool. I never learned to roller blade or hooked up with Angelina Jolie, but other than that, my Hackers inspired fantasies mostly came true.

This is one of my favorite films next to War Games with Matthew Broderick. Thanks for this video.... It's nice to get the behind the scenes info on how the film was cast and eventually produced.

This was the first movie I ever watched by myself on one of those free premium cable weekends. Changed my life for real.

Still my all time favorite film! 20 years later I got to train Renoly Santiago's dogs and tell him how much I love that movie.

This was the film that introduced me to the world of IT. Now, years later I still work with IT as digital data analyst & cloud architect. All thanks to this llitle, strange movie.

Seeing them going through reams of perforated paper printouts was so nostalgic to me. It reminded me of when I would fire up the dot matrix and print out computer files in hexi-decimal and scour them looking for any chain of values that coincided with whatever information I was looking for. Then editing those chains to change values in the program. I wouldn't have called myself a "hacker" as I don't think I knew anywhere near enough to be that. I just knew enough to play around with it. I ended up going more in to the hardware side when 486's became so common and parts to build much more affordable. I still do my own systems today. Today it's easier in some ways since you don't have a bunch of jumpers to set up on the MB for the various processors, ram and such. Back when Cyrix was making PC processors.

A few months before the movie came out, a relative on my dad's side managed to get ahold of one of the VHS copies that they would send out to theaters as a tester, for the theaters to watch and decide if they wanted to screen the movie or not. So, I had a legit VHS copy of the movie before it even was in theaters. 12 year old me loved the shit out of that movie. 39 year old me still loves it.

"Hack the planet!"

This started my crush on Angelina Jolie. I remember being high school and and seeing the computer craze happen

I remember hounding the local record store for months to get the soundtrack, which eventually came out the following year, and I found out they had trouble getting it made because no record company wanted to make it. Director Iain Softley was told "They said nobody in America listens to techno, so this is just going to go over everybody’s head." Anyway that explains why the original CD looks last-minute slapped together, using weird group poses and none of the fonts or colours from the movie... only for it to go on and have two more discs released of music "inspired by" the movie, and a 25th anniversary re-release with new tracks added. Also one of the few soundtracks I can listen to from beginning to end.

Probably the most unrealistic hacker movie ever…but still ‘90s nostalgia personified! Plus, the soundtrack is awesome with “Halcyon On and On”!

This movie's soundtrack changed my life. Such a superb compilation, and that compilation took the movie to a whole other level. The chase scene where Prodigy - Voodoo people plays will always be burnt into my mind, in a good way. It still gets me pumped!

This was incredibly thorough- great work!

I am a Gen X slacker.. I saw the movie on opening weekend.. I laughed when they bragged about having a 28.8 kilobaud modem, because at the time X2 56K modems were out, so it felt dated already.. Now I know why.. Still love the movie and the nostalgia it brings..

I still remember them shutting down my high school over a weekend to film a bunch of scenes for this. Good times.

Hackers is a classic and that will never change!

i will never get tired of watching this movie it slaps hard, killer soundtrack too

This movie embodies the 90’s- early 2000’s and brings me back before everyone became crazy

man i loved this movie back in early 2000s, the music still makes my heart warm.

The very first VHS I purchased for myself was Sneakers. The second, Hackers. These shaped my life.

I loved it when it first came out and still love it to this day. Whenever I see in some of my streaming services I hit play and sit back and quote every line. I even have the CD's that had the music from and inspired by the movie.

Thanks, maan! Nice video with facts I never knew about the movie.

This movie was like nothing else at the time. Halcyon at the start of the movie was perfect and ever since it reminds me of hackers. The cast worked wonders and sparked more interest in the Net. Things were so much different back then that people today on the internet wouldn't recognize it.

If it wasn't for Hackers there's a decent chance I would never have gotten deep into computers, linux, programming... I'm now a software engineer, it's crazy how one epic movie can change your life.

A great movie. Angelina and Jamie gorgeous. Changed my adolescence. The soundtrack put me into club culture until my thirties

For clarification, IBM was developing a computer network, and communication between machines, well before DARPA got interested in the idea and scooped it up. So there was more history there than what was mentioned. As for the movie, while certainly a guilty pleasure, it always felt like it was written by someone who had just read a small book of 90's computer 'fun facts' and thought "No I am a programmer!", since the characters keep repeating the same 'facts' over and over again. Pretty much they know about 5 basic things and pass it as "elite" knowledge.

Back in the late 90s (98 maybe?), this was the first DVD I ever bought. It was the first time I had seen Johnny Lee Miller in anything. It is still one of my top 5 movies ever and I still think Johnny Lee Miller and Matthew Lilliard are some of the best actors in the last 30 years (not specifically for this movie lol... just in general, this is just the first place I encountered both actors).

Such a cult film. Back around the beginning of the pandemic many fashion pages had a fanatic obsession with hackers and cyber fashion

Great deep dive.

Glad to see this review so much

HACKERS is one of my favorite movies of all time. So much so, I had to buy the 20th anniversary edition. #HackthePlanet!

This movie is like a warm sweater. They pegged the lifestyle we pined for. An underground flamboyance.

One of my all time favorite 90s films. Also Urban Dance Squad is dope AF!

The 90's and early 2000's had so many anti-corporate, power to the people movements. I wonder why that stopped?

Great video about the movie. My friend told me about it and look forward to watching it. It is so cool to know that it is based on the experience of real hackers.

Absolutely one of my favorites and definitely in my top five of all time. I will watch it every time I see it on.

Saw a 35mm print of it last year. The colors just pop, and add to the creative feel of the characters, like it's hand made. 35mm audio just puts you there, and makes you feel this is important, you need to listen.

I am into IT work now, and while I have never been a hacker, I always loved and respected this movie. It helped push my interest into learning more about computers and software, which is my passion today.

love all the comments that reflect my own feelings about the film and surrounding inspirations, etc. makes me miss the days of walking into a B&N bookstore and flipping thru the new copies of 2600. and of course, the music (which I don't miss because I still constantly listen to it).

I am in cyber security because of this movie. While I was never truly leet, I hung out with a crew who ran multiple bbs and cracked protection code for video games. These characters were as real as my friends were at the time.

The music choice was amazing. Still love listening to Carl Cox, Orbital, Prodigy, and Underworld.

"Duck and Cover" drills happened in the 1950s. By the 1960s the reality was realized on how stupid the concept was. I highly doubt anyone was still practicing "duck and cover" in the mid 1980s.

I was 13 when this movie came out and I was already a computer geek in middle school. After seeing it, I made my passwords and screen names some variation of Zero Cool and Crash Override. It was such a cool movie in 1995. Every weekend, my parents would take me and my sister to the local Video Tyme rental store and let us pick out one rental. I usually went for a SNES or Genesis game but once this movie hit VHS, it was my pick 3 or 4 weeks in a row. After about the 3rd or 4th time of me picking it to rent, my mom finally just bought it for me so she could stop wasting money on the rental. It was my favorite movie until 99 when The Matrix came out. And we had a computer in our house ever since I was 8 or 9. Our first one was an Apple IIe. When this movie came out, we were using a Packard Bell with Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. I spent a lot of hours on that little machine playing games and on the intetnet via Prodigy and AOL. I taught myself HTML and learned to get into places on computers and the internet that you aren't supposed to get into. 2:09 By the way, no one was practicing duck and cover drills in 1995. That was more my dad's era. The Berlin Wall came down in 89-90 so by 1995, the Cold War had been long over. The only drills we did in school were for fire and tornados. We loved the internet because it was cool, not to "block out the noise" or "as escape". It was just cool and fun. I even got a job at AOL when I graduated high school. This movie, and others like it including War Games, directly influenced my career decisions later in life. Computers were just cool, man.

It is still one of my all-time favorite movies...

The scene where Dade digitally signs for the laptop The Plague sent him was pretty forthtelling of the future we were entering. Although nowadays, they just yet it on your porch. I watched this video, so I had to watch the movie, and came back to make this comment 😅

Such a lovely video.

As a '90s geek kid, growing up in a family too poor and a mom and siblings with 0 interest to have a computer, hackers was a movie that blew my mind away and in the same vein as Tron or Lawnmower Man and so many tv shows, kept me on track to eventually becoming a software dev. It kept the fire going for everything computer related up until I was old enough to buy my own shit.

I've enjoyed your content many times. I adore this movie is every way. +1 Subscriber here! =)

One of my earliest childhood movies!

I was thirteen when this came out and I’ve never seen it, but this video made me want to check it out. Thanks.

Great video!

Inspired me to poke around my schools network. Where I discovered the IT guy had made entry as easy as entering your school ID without a password. Which gave me access to editable grades. I was too good a guy to change them. Told my teacher. Got into trouble suspended, nearly expelled, and got a record for it. XD but I feel like I did the right thing. The 3 weeks detention was worth it. The IT guy on the other hand nearly lost his job.

I love that siscal said the computer stuff was silly. Dude was too old to get it. I still listen to the soundtrack Great retrospective! Great video