One of the things I love about this movie is how much it got right. The general attitude of the time, the feeling that we had in that era. This film shows what it feels like to spend all night reading through hexdumps trying to solve a complex riddle. I don't know anything else that captures that.
Of course it had to be "inaccurate" to show visually what that feels like without it being super boring. It glorifies a particular set of attitudes and styles that many of us were a part of in that era.
I agree and tend to think of it in terms of how the movie 300 depicted the Persians as monsters. They were nowhere near as monstrous in real life but the Greek saw them that way. And the only way to convey the sense of how the ancient Greek viewed them to our modern eye was to make them hulking giants.
In much the same way, Hackers had to do something to depict how we felt about computers at the time. I remember thinking how silly it looked at the time but I also remember it resonating.
Though, I have to say, I was much more inspired by Sneakers a few years earlier which was much more accurate from a visual and technical standpoint.
> They were nowhere near as monstrous in real life
In fact, they weren't monstrous at all. No more than any other army.
One overlooked factoid in 300 is that despite all the "we fought for FREEDOM!" stuff, the Greek city-states were slave-keeping societies (and Sparta was friendly with infanticide), whereas the Persians invading them were Zoroastrian - a religion that forbids slavery. :)
Something interesting that might change your view of 300. The movie is a story being told by a narrator who wasn't present for much of the events. The first bit of the story was fairly realistic, or at least plausible, but then his eye gets injured and he's sent back to town to get reinforcements. After he leaves things start to get more fantastical.
Hm, interesting. I hadn't though about it that way. So basically, he's the Greek equivalent of my Grandfather who walked to school up hill both ways in 6' of snow.
If you're ever looking for something that captures the Sneakers spirit then I very highly recommend the TV show Rubicon that was on AMC a few years back. Unfortunately cancelled after one season but if you look around you can find it.
True. I guess I never considered the actual device to be all that realistic. I think more about the UI they used. It was DOS and curses based which was predominant at the time. Well, except for the flight tracker scene. I guess that wasn't as true to life either.
The structure of 300 is it is the atory told by the lone survivor of the 300, to drum up support back home and to motivate the troops. The only "real" part of the film is the charge at the end, everything else is the visualization of an oral retelling.
I was at Summercon the year before Hackers was released and I remember there being some kind of presentation about it, with the point being made repeatedly that we shouldn't get hung up on the technical details, and that it had the same director as _Backbeat_, which I gathered was a good thing.
It always amused the hell out of me that they had Matthew Lillard playing Emmanuel Goldstein. They should have cast Steve Buscemi.
Of course it had to be "inaccurate" to show visually what that feels like without it being super boring. It glorifies a particular set of attitudes and styles that many of us were a part of in that era.
Love it.