Taglines: You thought your secrets were safe. You were wrong.
Hackers movie storyline. In 1988, 11-year-old Dade “Zero Cool” Murphy is arrested and charged with crashing 1,507 computer systems in a single day and causing a single-day 7-point drop in the New York Stock Exchange. His family is fined $45,000 for the events and he is banned from using computers or touch-tone telephones until he is 18 years old.
Seven years later, Dade (Jonny Lee Miller), is now living with his divorced mother in New York City. On Dade’s 18th birthday, he receives a computer and uses social engineering to hack into a local television station’s computer network, changing the current TV program to an episode of The Outer Limits. However, Dade’s intrusion is countered by another hacker (handle “Acid Burn”) on the same network, and they briefly converse, with Dade identifying himself by a new alias: “Crash Override”.
Dade enrolls in a local high school (for which Stuyvesant High School is used as the filming location) where he meets Kate Libby (Angelina Jolie) who pranks Dade by claiming that there’s a pool on the roof of the school. Ramon “The Phantom Phreak” Sanchez (Renoly Santiago) observes Dade accessing the school network during computer class to put himself in the same English class as Kate, and invites him to a hacker nightclub, Cyberdelia, where Dade beats Kate’s high score in the Wipeout arcade game.
Soon after, Dade exacts revenge for the earlier prank by scheduling a test of the school’s sprinkler system the next day. Dade begins integrating himself into Phreak’s circle of hacker friends: Emmanuel “Cereal Killer” Goldstein (Matthew Lillard), Paul “Lord Nikon” Cook (Laurence Mason) (so named for his photographic memory), and Joey Pardella (Jesse Bradford), an aspiring novice hacker without an alias. At a party, Dade learns that Kate is “Acid Burn”, the hacker that kicked him out of the TV network earlier.
Meanwhile, Joey, out to prove his skills, successfully breaks into “The Gibson”, an Ellingson Mineral Company supercomputer. He attempts to download a garbage file as proof of his feat, but his mother disconnects his computer so he’ll sleep, leaving Joey with a fragmented file. However, prior to Joey’s disconnection, the company’s IT employee Hal (Penn Jillette) detects this unauthorized entry and summons computer security officer Eugene “The Plague” Belford (Fisher Stevens), a former hacker.
While going through the files, Plague realizes the garbage file being downloaded is a worm he inserted to defraud Ellingson. The Plague pretends the hackers are to blame and enlists the US Secret Service to recover the file, claiming it is the code to a computer virus (named “Da Vinci” for an image of the Vitruvian Man that accompanies it) that will capsize the company’s oil tanker fleet. In fact, The Plague had inserted the virus as a red herring to cover for his worm.
Hackers is a 1995 American crime film directed by Iain Softley and starring Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Renoly Santiago, Matthew Lillard, Jesse Bradford, Lorraine Bracco, and Fisher Stevens. The film follows a group of high school hackers and their involvement in a corporate extortion conspiracy.
Made in the 1990s when the internet was unfamiliar to the general public, it reflects the ideals laid out in the Hacker Manifesto quoted in the film: “This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch […] We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. […] Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity.” Hackers has achieved cult classic status.
The school scenes were filmed in Stuyvesant High School and the surrounding areas in the TriBeCa and East Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in November 1994. Many scenes included real school seniors as extras.
The cast spent three long weeks getting to know each other and learning how to type and rollerblade. They studied computers and met with actual computer hackers, including Nicholas Jarecki who served as a technical consultant and credits his experience on Hackers as inspiring his later career as a screenwriter and Director of the award-winning film “Arbitrage.” Actor Jonny Lee Miller even attended a hacker’s convention.
Hackers (1995)
Directed by: Iain Softley
Starring: Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Jesse Bradford, Matthew Lillard, Laurence Mason, Alberta Watson, Renoly Santiago, Fisher Stevens, Lorraine Bracco
Screenplay by: Rafael Moreu
Production Design by: John Beard
Cinematography by: Andrzej Sekuła
Film Editing by: Chris Blunden, Martin Walsh
Costume Design by: Roger Burton
Set Decoration by: Alyssa Winter, Joanne Woollard
Art Direction by: John Frankish
Music by: Simon Boswell, Guy Pratt
MPAA Rating: G-13 for some sexuality and brief strong language.
Distributed by: Metro Goldwyn Mayer
Release Date: September 15, 1995
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