HN Explorer

Ask HN: What are some (good) hacker movies?

94 points by rogercosseboom ↗ HN
One of my favorite movies is the 2004 film Primer which was written, directed, scored, and stars a mathematician and software engineer. Aside from the obvious (gems like Wargames, King of Kong- stinkers like the Matrixes and Hackers) what other (good) tech films are there?

185 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] thread
mschwar99
Fan of:

The headache inducing blue ribbon winner: Pi - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/

The slightly corny but worthwhile: Sneakers - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/

artlogic
Sneakers may be corny - but it's actually based on some serious math. Essentially one of the characters has developed a way to solve a prime factorization in what appears to be constant time (i.e. O(1)). Once you do that - well that's the end of basically all public key cryptography based on the RSA algorithm (pretty much everything in common use). Much more realistic than say, Hackers.
mschwar99
Very true. Must be the one of first times a major Hollywood studio employed a consultant that had taken something beyond College Algebra.
tptacek
On the other hand, Hackers did take the time to name its characters after handles taken from 2600.
biohacker42
It also had Angelina Jolie.

It... motivate me to be a hacker.

And yet now that I am a hacker... I am no closer to Angelina, funny that.

froo
(I know I'm going to get downmodded to hell for this but it has to be said)

The reason why you're not closer to Angelina has a simple solution - you haven't yet hacked The Gibson.

jdavid
When I was young, I thought mechanical engineering would be my ticket to the space race, but after seeing the movie hackers for the 1st time on the engineering floor in college, I thought hacking was COOOOL.

I know it sounds lame, but I have to think that that movie got me fantasizing about it.

So, later on when I was struggling with Statics and Dynamics my teacher recognized that I was really a hacker and not an engineer. He asked how I did all of that stuff on my calculator, I then showed him my serial cable mod for the TI-82, and the other software i had written to make his class easier, because S&D was so hard. He suggested I change majors.

I AM SO HAPPY I DID, and today I have a job where I get paid to design the OpenWeb, and work on side projects. Maybe one will break out.

I still think I owe the campy fantasy of hacking to the movie 'Hackers,' for letting me think i had a better chance of getting a girl via hacking. I guess today i am still hopeful.

there
but that's probably because Emmanuel Goldstein was a consultant on the production of the movie.
tlrobinson
And there are a few other realistic bits:

                      PHREAK
                            (to Cereal)
                D'you bring those Crayola books?

                            CEREAL
                Oh yeah, technicolor rainbow.

     Cereal brings a book out of his bag.

                            CEREAL
                Green one.

                            JOEY
                What is that, what is that? Lemmie see. What
                are these?

                            DADE
                International Unix Environments.

    Cereal pulls out another book.

                            CEREAL
                Luscious orange?

    Cereal hands the orange book to Phreak.

                            DADE
                Computer security criteria, DOD standards.

    Another book comes out.

                            DADE
                The Pink Shirt Book, Guide to IBM PCs. So
                called due to the nasty pink shirt the guy
                wears on the cover.

    Another one.

                            CEREAL
                What's that?

                            DADE
                Devil book. The Unix Bible.

    Another one.

                            CEREAL
                What's that?

                            DADE
                Dragon book. Compiler design.

    Cereal brings out a large red book.

                            CEREAL
                Oh yeah? What's that?

                            DADE
                The Red Book. NSA Trusted Networks.
                Otherwise known as the Ugly Red Book that
                won't fit on a shelf.

    By now Phreak has made a pile of the books, and the Red
    Book looks wholly out of place on the top of the pile.
joe_bleau
Every time I'm watching "Hackers" with someone, I can't help but point out which of those books I own. Inaccurate as hell, but still a fun hacker mindset movie.
hachiya
In Hackers, I never understood how the bad-guy hacker arranges a drop-off (he comes in on a skateboard no less!) of a floppy disk from Zero Cool that had the "garbage file".

As if Zero Cool didn't have the technical expertise to make his own copy of the disk's contents first. A drop-off wouldn't protect the bad guy in any way!

artlogic
Actually The Plague (the bad guy) was just trying to determine how much of the "garbage file" they had - how much they knew... I have to admit that the movie sort of is a guilty pleasure...
hachiya
artlogic, I must have missed that detail. Now at least the plot won't be bother me so much then. I'll have to see it again sometime ;) It was overall fun to watch.
rbanffy
The soundtrack is great.

They also did quite a lot of research in names and related "hacker stuff" (a Jolt Cola can in Plague's bedroom comes to mind)

And, of course, there is Angelina Jolie in her 18's. That more than compensates for any screenplay flaw.

toypaj
The Soundtrack is the first thing I bought on eBay (it came from the US)

I also wanted the headset that Zero wears. Now all I need is a spinning Phonebooth.

Angelina hubba hubba

dantheman
He still had a copy of the disk, that's how they were later able to figure out what Mr. The Plague was up to, and subsequently stop it.

Hackers is a great movie.

jbrun
Man, I just lost 2 hours of my life to Sneakers. How did Redford, and company get sucked into that. What a horrible movie.
greendestiny
Sneakers is my favourite film. I don't find it particularly corny, but it's very deliberately paced and most of the acting is understated (I guess apart from Dan Ackroyd) which is why I think it never got the recognition it deserved.
icey
I seriously wanted to name my first startup "Setec Astronomy", but the business people I worked with complained that it had nothing to do with data security (we were working on airgap software for secure file storage).
Setec_Astronomy
Perhaps you should have suggested "Acme Stoner Toys." ;)
Retric
As a funny aside I know the guy who actually built the little dog that does the back flip. The guy is a fun loving hacker type who loves to go caving around the world is really into http://www.wfmu.org/ etc. Basically the direct opposite of the supporting charter.
jballanc
Pi is amazing. It's also the only full length movie that I've watched with the director's commentary.
mechanical_fish
My Caltech friend assured me that Real Genius perfectly captured the spirit of Caltech. (It borrows a lot of legendary Caltech hacks.) It certainly is the best fictional depiction of grad school I've ever seen, though it's kind of confused about the distinction between undergrad and grad school. On the other hand, perhaps that's normal at Caltech as well.
DaniFong
It's supposed to be undergrad, which is like that at Caltech (and for that matter, many physics departments).

Real Genius is a terrific movie, and it leapt to mind as being definitive. :-)

narag
But it can't beat "Young Einstein" in number of geniuses: Edison, Darwin, Marie Curie, Rutherford, Freud and Einstein himself.
friism
Agreed, Real Genius captures the insanenes (sic) of Caltech and the people who go there perfectly.
kobs
Antitrust: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/

Pirates of Silicon Valley: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/

Shamiq
I got a real kick out of watching Pirates of Silicon Valley.
jimbokun
I much prefer "Triumph of the Nerds."

http://www.pbs.org/nerds/

The real Gates, Jobs, etc. are far more compelling, interesting, and charismatic than actors trying to portray them.

petercooper
Though Steve Jobs thought Noah Wyle was so good that he invited him to trick the audience at one of his keynotes.
baddox
I also highly recommend both films.
lallysingh
Pirates is a great nerd party movie. Popcorn, soda, and just reveling in the melodrama :-)
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
agotterer
Antitrust always gets me in the mood to code
tlrobinson
It always bugged me that they used HTML in the Antitrust title sequence to represent code.

As far as I could tell they weren't really doing any sort of web programming in the movie.

swivelmaster
I love Pirates of Silicon Valley. Second/third/fourthing.
hachiya
"Antitrust" is cheesy, but if you suspend disbelief and just treat it as fiction, it's a very entertaining movie. And even Bill Gates is spoofed in the movie.
Zev
As far as computer movies go, Antitrust wasn't too bad; It at least had real code whenever it was needed to be shown on screen.
prakash
I liked the King of Kong: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0923752/.

Man on Wire is on my list of movies to watch: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1155592/

divia
If you liked King of Kong, you might like Chasing Ghosts: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0479879/

It has a different focus, but it's about a lot of the same guys (Billy Mitchell, Walter Day, Roy Schmidt), and is also really well done.

prakash
thanks! will check it out.
unalone
King of Kong is great, but beware of the controversy surrounding that movie. The director faked a lot of scenes, mislead viewers, and generally made Billy Mitchell look much worse than he actually was. (The entire plot featuring the actual breaking of the world record was fictional: events were shown out of order to establish a narrative.)
fuzzmeister
I just saw Man on Wire, it's a must-watch.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
vaksel
does Die Hard 4 count as one?
tptacek
Good movies about startups: "Tucker", "24 Hour Party People", and "Ghostbusters".
mechanical_fish
Wow, Ghostbusters is a movie about a startup. It seems so obvious once it's pointed out, but it never occurred to me before.
scott_s
It's also very much a product of the Reagan era: the bad guys are the scientists, academia and the EPA.
tptacek
Uh, hello? Venkman: "Back off, man! We're scientists!"

Also, didn't they give props to a Dem mayor of NYC?

scott_s
That's what he says, but they lack the skepticism of actual scientists. I love the movie - and the quote - but Venkman is clearly calling himself a scientist because it's convenient at the moment.
mechanical_fish
Wait, how do we know that Venkman isn't a legitimate scientist, again? Because he's insufficiently skeptical about ghosts? But in the universe of Ghostbusters ghosts physically exist!

If anything, the part of Ghostbusters that strains my credulity is that in their universe there seem to be scientists who don't believe in ghosts. You'd think that the accumulated evidence would be pretty overwhelming by the 1980s!

gravitycop
the part of Ghostbusters that strains my credulity is that in their universe there seem to be scientists who don't believe in ghosts. You'd think that the accumulated evidence would be pretty overwhelming by the 1980s!

Accumulated evidence has actually tended to slam into the brick wall of popularity contestance.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RiskandSafety.html

http://www.google.com/search?q=aaron+wildavsky

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress

http://www.google.com/search?q=john+mccarthy+sustainability

http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book

http://www.google.com/search?q=war+against+the+atom

http://jamesphogan.com/heretics

scott_s
I was thinking more of that scene, where his line before that one was "Are you, Alice, menstruating right now?" It's clear he's more interest in her than the study. Again, it makes for a funny movie, but it's also making fun of scientists.
jjs
IIRC, the spate of hauntings in the movie was brought on by the imminent return of Gozer the Gozerian (or by the same rare set of conditions that allowed Gozer to return).

By the sequel, the Ghostbusters had mostly closed up shop due to the collapse of the haunting bubble.

mixmax
I liked "a beauiful mind" about John Nash and game theory.

And "The Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires" is a must-see about how Microsoft, Apple, et al. started out.

mschwar99
Triumph of the Nerds is great. Hopefully Cringley will make a version for this decade about Web empires.
rogercosseboom
He did make "Nerds 2.0" about the first web boom. Sadly, this has never been released on vhs/dvd.
wenbert
I second "A Beautiful Mind" - one of my favorite movies...
jd
"Pirates of Silicon Valley" is -much- better than Triumph. Both are must-sees.
rms
E-Dreams: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0262021/ Startup.com: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/
dallasrpi
A little more info - Traces the birth and failure of new media company govWorks.com

If you are or were part of a start-up company you will be entertained by this documentary. It makes your head spin to see some of the mistakes and money this company goes through. They hired literally hundreds of people for an idea that could now probably be run with a dozen people (most of them sales).

chops
I'd like to second (third, really) Startup.com. It's a great documentary showing what not to do in a startup and the problems that faced many of the poorly run Web 1.0 companies before the nasdaq tanked in 2001.
mechanical_fish
Okay, I'll say this much in defense of the Matrices: (a) the first Matrix movie is emphatically not a stinker; (b) I appreciated the second two a lot better after reading these links [1]:

http://corporatemofo.com/media_and_mediocrity/the_matrix_rel...

http://web.archive.org/web/20071005000019/http://www.corpora...

I mean, I still don't think the sequels worked very well, particularly #3, but I admire the audacity of the experiment.

---

[1] (Alas, the second link now appears to be Wayback Machine material. Essayists, defend your archives!)

rogercosseboom
I thought about "Matrices" but decided that there was only one Matrix (in all senses of the word...)
mechanical_fish
What former physicist could resist? It's like trying to resist saying boxen, only more so, because matrices is an actual word.
lehmannro
First off I have to admit that I actually like Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions.

I appreciate those two essays and highly enjoyed reading them. But when interpreting such works I'm always cautious not to read too much into small details. I found the overview about philosophy refreshing but when the author begins to claim the movie got it wrong in some place but insists on some special philosophical trait I become suspicious.

utnick
I recently rented August from blockbuster.

Its about a VC funded startup with little revenue that goes bust.

It was a pretty terrible movie though and the web2.0 talk will make you cringe.

rokhayakebe
August was pretty bad. I just watched it Friday. What did LandShark do?
thomasswift
E-everything
rokhayakebe
"E is the highway, not the vehicle, we do not need traction." Well I would assume a highway is definitely built for vehicles, hence needs the traction to justify the investment.
tlrobinson
I don't think they were supposed to be doing anything in particular, they were just sort of a placeholder for the generic overfunded web startup during the peak of the bubble.
gcheong
Its sci-fi, but I have no doubt 2001:A Space Odyssey inspired many a hacker to go into AI.
blender
Swordfish.

Yah, that was a joke...

CaptainMorgan
Swordfish; if nothing for the totally cool monitor setup he had at Gabriel's place.

Alien; the original- the next couple of movies in the series were okay but the first I think is a classic in form of technology and all that good stuff. If you watch it, it may seem a bit old-school for our time, but for their time that was pretty cool! Finding a solution to space travel at light-year speed? Come-on- that's awesome.

Stargate; another one for space travel, but overall it was kind of corny- I just liked how the Egyptians, or whoever, discovered a way to transport across galaxies.

Enemy of the State; cool NSA tech stuff.

Deja Vu; the ability to go back in time only four days earlier or less... I like their setup and how they explained the plausibility of the technology actually coming to fruition.

tlrobinson
Swordfish did have a cool monitor setup, but he built a virus using some sort of graphical tool! I suppose that's a bit more exciting for most people than vi or something.

And, of course, there was the "break into this system in 60 seconds while I hold a gun to your head and some woman gives you a blowjob" scene. Hollywood...

scott_s
Apollo 13 has some great hacker scenes. It has, in fact, my favorite hacker moment from any movie.

"We gotta find a way to make this [holds up square peg] fit into the hole for this [holds up round peg] using nothing but that [points to random assortment of crap that they know is on board].": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNDuGuerpf8

rogercosseboom
Thats been one of my favorite scenes since I was a kid!
hernan7
The square peg/round hole sequence is of course the embodiment of the hacker spirit (not an original thought of mine, but I can't seem to find the original URL at the moment).

Another space/hackish movie would be "The Dish" about the Australian engineers in charge of one the (of course) dishes used to communicate with Apollo 11. Cliffhanger scene: the dish goes out of alignment for some reason and they need to scramble to regain contact in time to televise the moon landing.

And of course there's always "The Right Stuff".

brandnewlow
Q: How do you know if you're a hacker? A: If you get chills during that scene.

I did, but I didn't know what it meant at the time.

My dad on the other hand wouldn't stop talking about it during the drive home afterward. He was a mechanical engineer at West Point and it got him going on the laws of thermodynamics and the time he calculated the condensation point of a drop of water on a steel pipe and realized that engineering is no different from magic at a certain point.

zupatol
That's the only thing I liked in that movie.
ideamonk
I would go for some documentaries -

Triumph of the Nerds, Hackers : Angels or Daemons History of Video Games

another one on hacking from National Geographic, i can't recall the name

Antitrust too :P

mechanical_fish
Okay, I'm insane, I know that. But I have this strange urge to nominate The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai in this category. I'm not sure I can explain why. Perhaps it's just to be perverse. ;)

There's just something about the character that rings true. He's a famous superhero, but he doesn't wear a costume or come from another planet. He's a mad scientist, but he doesn't cackle or plot or soliloquize. He's an odd guy with a diverse collection of obsessive hobbies and an even more diverse collection of friends, who are world-class experts in their fields while also being strange and geeky people. And somehow these people aren't his minions or his sidekicks: They're colleagues. He and his band work on things that nobody on Earth has ever heard of, but they don't seem too excited about that -- there are no breathless gasps. It's just part of their usual routine.

There's something about this guy, his lab, and his team that reminds me of the actual basement of the physics department at Cornell, and of the actual people who you might find wandering the hallways of such a place. A place where the pile of junk in the corner is actually the remains of a Nobel-winning experiment from 1967, and the guy who just asked you how to find the men's room is the Secretary of Energy.

greaterscope
Excellent, excellent movie. It always inspires me in some strange quirky way. Or maybe it just inspires me to be quirky.
jimbokun
I just saw this recently, and the one problem I had with it is the actor playing Buckaroo (Peter Weller) is maybe the worst actor in the movie.

Having John Lithgow, Jeff Goldblum, and Christopher Lloyd in secondary roles was amazing; they really go all out to push the intentional corniness over the top. (Lithgow's intentionally bad fake Italian accent is wonderful; Lloyd, as usual, really does seem like someone not of Earth; and I still don't understand why Jeff Goldblum spends most of the movie dressed like a cowboy from a 1940s serial.)

Having so much great acting around him made watching Peter Weller kind of painful to watch.

mechanical_fish
Having so much great acting around him made Peter Weller kind of painful to watch.

See, I think that Peter Weller's take on the character is one of the movie's charms. The guy plays Buckaroo Banzai as a perpetually preoccupied, frighteningly odd physics professor with a slight amount of Asperger's. A person who is sometimes painful to watch. [1] In other words, he's the kind of character whom you normally meet only in real life, not in the movies.

Without picking on any individuals by name, let me assure you that many real-world geniuses are even more painful to watch.

And the last thing the movie needed was more corniness. The central character is kind of deadpan, but that provides a valuable contrast with the silly antics going on around him.

mechanical_fish
Hey, I've got a dangling footnote that I can't fix! Ah, the mistakes you make at 2am.

Let's tie it up:

[1] This is the famous recursive footnote. [1]

zandorg
Loads, but Revolution OS for Stallman fanservice, Johnny Mnemonic (which everyone criticises, but Gibson did write the script), Sneakers DVD commentary (Canadian R1 DVD), and I'll be cute and say Ferris Bueller for his hacks.
RiderOfGiraffes
Although not obviously related to startups or to hacking, I've found that all my hacker friends (yes - I have friends) love The Princess Bride.

"Never get involved in a land war in Asia"

"Inconceivable!"

cgranade
Sadly, it's kind of hard for me to come up with good hacker movies, but I can at least try to make a recommendation of interest to (most) hackers: Paprika. It's an anime film (by the same team that brought us Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress) that explores the ramifications of a device that allows someone to interact with someone else's dreams. Like I said, not a hacker movie per se, but I think it's one that most hackers will probably like.
gommm
As an aside millenium actress was really a great movie I thought... But of course not a hacker movie at all
geuis
My own cheesy favorite, The First $20 Million is the Hardest. Plus I love Rosario Dawson, so that's probably a contributing factor.
skmurphy
The Dish tells the story of the Australian downlink that provided communications support for the Apollo moon landing. True to life and truly funny picture of engineers collaborating on some hard problems against a deadline.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0205873/

streblo
Waking Life. Not so much a 'hacker' movie per say, but a great film for anyone who is interested in some heavy thinking and interesting cinematography.
there
i always remember the bit about trying to flip light switches in a dream to determine whether you're really dreaming or not.