Tournaments, brackets, and cut-down basketball nets aren't the typical currency here at Ars, but we like any excuse to apply seasonal sports analogies to nerdy fare. No, really. Look: We're taking a giant logical leap and applying the world of college basketball to, er, the world of hacking movies!
Just go with us here. For decades, Hollywood has had a strange relationship with hacking, computer crime, and cyber warfare, and the results have ranged from fun to tense to so-bad-it's-good hilarious. As a result, the movie-hacking rainbow is pretty diverse and, importantly to us, difficult to rank from best to worst.
Rather than make a definitive, ordered list, we decided to hand the debate to you, our esteemed sci-fi super-fans. And with Spring coming around the corner, we're going with a March-related theme and presenting our picks for best, weirdest, and most interesting hacking-related movies in an elimination tournament. Starting this week, we're pitting 16 films against each other—a sweet selection, really—in eight vote-based contests. (64 would have been way too many, so we've already listed some losers.)
Read our descriptions, watch some relevant clips, and place your vote. Then we'll do this again on a weekly basis until we pick a clear Ars-community pick for the best hacking movie ever.
Steel versus staplers
Office Space, 1999
Film it already beat: Antitrust
Why it's l33t: The ultimate dream of technology is to never have to work again, right? Well, this movie brings all the satisfaction of following a couple of nobodies who not only fight for the dream, but beat a printer to death, to boot. Trapped in a fluorescent-lit workspace, Peter Gibbons and his two software engineer buddies alter the company's account system to embezzle fractions-of-cents, but end up stealing much more than that. Along the way, Gibbons imparts a philosophy of work that many have tried and failed to live up to: “I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be." Happy weekend! —Megan Geuss
Vs.
Superman 3, 1983
Film it already beat: Die Hard 4
Why it’s l33t: Back when the Son of Krypton was still top of the heap when it came to superhero movies, Superman 3 may have been the series’ zenith. Richard Pryor brought his edgy comedy stylings to the film, catching Superman’s attention by hacking the bank he worked for to siphon off rounded-down pennies on transactions—called salami slicing, something this film's opponent, Office Space, would eventually copy to good effect. After Lex Luthor finds out about Pryor’s skills, he entices him to design and build a supercomputer hidden in the Grand Canyon, which starts launching MX missiles at Superman and then transforms our hacker into a cyborg. —Jonathan Gitlin
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Sweet '90s fashions
Hackers, 1995
Film it already beat: The Echelon Conspiracy
Why it’s l33t: Rabbits. Flu shots. "Hack the Gibson." A bunch of high school hackers (including Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller) break into a supercomputer known as the Gibson. The company who owns the Gibson hires a former hacker who goes by the handle "Plague" to fend them off, but Plague has his own plans to defraud the Gibson’s owners by crashing some supertankers. The graphical representation of the actual hacking has more in common with TRON than reality. Oh, and the film also features salami slicing. —Jonathan Gitlin
Vs.
Sneakers, 1992
Film it already beat: The Fifth Estate
Why it’s l33t: One might think the presence of Sidney Poitier, Robert Redford, and Ben Kingsley would be the guarantee of a quality movie. Not so much. A group of hackers are tasked with stealing a black box that can break any encryption. They think they’re working for the NSA (who will expunge the Robert Redford’s criminal record), but in fact it’s a con being perpetrated by Redford’s former friend who’s intent on destabilizing the global economy after spending decades in prison. —Jonathan Gitlin
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Would you like to play a game?
Enemy of the State, 1998
Film it already beat: The Net
Why it’s l33t: A nefarious NSA bigwig has his goons murder a politician who stands between him and a sweeping domestic surveillance law. Will Smith gets caught up in the plot and turns to former spook Gene Hackman to turn the tables on the evildoers. The NSA’s hacking powers are basically unlimited, led by chief keyboard basher Jack Black, whose skills rival those of the machine Deckard uses to enhance in Blade Runner. Hackman’s extremely paranoid nature involves living inside a faraday cage. The premise seemed somewhat outlandish at the time, but at this point, the movie may as well be a documentary (apart from that bit with Jack Black). —Jonathan Gitlin
Vs.
War Games, 1983
Film it already beat: Wargames: Dead Code (Three words: direct to DVD)
Why it’s l33t: Remember the Soviet Union, the Cold War, and fallout shelters? The reality of mistrust between the USA and USSR formed the backdrop for this thriller. In his first starring role, Matthew Broderick plays a young hacker who hacks into a NORAD supercomputer. Not knowing he’s messing around with military hardware, he ends up playing the games installed on the machine. It starts innocuously enough with the likes of chess and backgammon, but then proceeds to a cool-sounding simulation called Global Thermonuclear War. Problem is, he can’t access it until he cracks a password. After an assist from some hacker friends, he figures out the password, and gets to play the cool-sounding game. Only problem is that everyone at NORAD thinks it’s the real deal and a Soviet missile launch is immanent. The hacking scenes are very dated, but as a teenager who spent every minute possible in the computer lab, I could only dream of having the kinds of hacking adventures Broderick’s character did—not to mention having a girlfriend as hot as Ally Sheedy. —Eric Bangeman
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Mow? Or "whoa"?
The Matrix: Reloaded, 2003
Film it already beat: Johnny Mnemonic
Why it's l33t: Forget the fact that Neo "hacking" the computer simulation that we all supposedly live in is integral to the Matrix trilogy's plot. Forget the subtle nod to phone phreaker culture in the use of "hardline" phones for travel between worlds. Forget that the series' falling lines of green foreign letters have become practically universal visual shorthand for "impenetrable hacker data."
Forget all of that, and the second entry in the series still deserves to move on because of the scene, about two-thirds of the way through The Matrix: Reloaded, where Trinity runs an actual nmap hack on screen. In a Hollywood environment where on-screen hacking is focused on looking cool rather than being accurate, this touch of realism puts The Matrix: Reloaded ahead of the pack. —Kyle Orland
vs.
The Lawnmower Man, 1992
Film it already beat: Fear Dot Com
Why it’s l33t: Bleeding edge CGI for the time, for starters. It’s the tale of how virtual-reality goggles unlock the mental powers of Jobe, a cognitively challenged gardener. Jobe gets smart, then gets evil, and then develops telepathic powers, which he uses to take revenge against the people who’d mistreated him. Finally, he ditches meatspace all together, signaling his rebirth as a planet wide AI by making everyone’s telephones ring simultaneously. Fun fact: Stephen King successfully sued the film's distributor to get his name taken off of the posters. —Jonathan Gitlin
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Hacking is a universal language
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, 2009
Film it already beat: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (American version)
Why it's l33t: This is the only entry on our list to follow in The Matrix: Reloaded's footsteps and include an Nmap security scanner (though, to be fair, a ton of movies have done so in the past ten years). Beyond that, this is also the only entry on our list whose lead super-hacker is a badass woman, and while David Fincher's American take on the novel also did the original book justice, we're partial to the Swedish film's more hardened portrayal of Lisbeth (played by Noomi Rapace). The hacking scenes take an obvious backseat to the film's many disturbing scenes, but the Swedish version shows an adept hacker quickly solving mysteries via her computer to get back to the dark heart of the story, as opposed to magically waving her hand to "hack the system" or whatever. —Sam Machkovech
Vs.
GoldenEye, 1995
Film it already beat: Eagle Eye
Why it’s l33t: James Bond is back, this time looking like Pierce Bronson. Alan Cummings plays Boris the hacker, who loves crappy puns and hacking American networks from a secret Russian base in Siberia. After Bond drives a tank through much of St Petersburg, the action moves to the Arecibo radio telescope where almost everyone dies. While it’s not one of the better Bond movies, it did spawn the N64 game of the same name, which remains a true classic—and added a lot of gadgetry and computer-hacking objectives to the first-person gaming pantheon, to boot. —Jonathan Gitlin
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Bikes and babes
TRON, 1982
Film it already beat: TRON Legacy (duh)
Why it's l33t: Nevermind that this was the first really, really cool movie about video game culture, it also did a great job splitting its bad-guy duties between a soulless suit and a sentient computer named Master Control Program. The whole film revolved around masked, unwanted entry into a computer system, so in many ways, this flick is the grandaddy of our entire list. That being said, Flynn's actual command-line efforts in the film are pretty minimal; once he breaks into ENCOM's labs and gets his hands on a keyboard, he's digitally transferred to the system's game world, and from there, every early '80s computer concept imaginable becomes a living object. But, hey—light cycles! —Sam Machkovech
Vs.
Weird Science, 1985
Film it already beat: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
Why it’s l33t: Beyond the film’s premise—that a couple of horny geeks programmed the sexiest Teddy Ruxpin ever—this film also features a delightfully cheeseball hacking scene. The protagonists need to “fill this thing [a woman named Lisa] with data,” so they hack into a remote government server that, for whatever reason, tosses up an animated skull-and-crossbones and an Einstein formula as warnings. Makes sense; we figure most government systems in the ‘80s included log-in GUIs that resembled the classic arcade game Tempest. —Sam Machkovech
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Hold on to your butts
Jurassic Park, 1993
Film it already beat: The Core
Why it’s l33t: Putting aside the pseudoscience of cloning dinosaurs (just fill in the gaps with frog DNA!), I’ve always seen Jurassic Park as a film about how nothing is ever completely secure, especially a fence holding a bioengineered T. Rex. A disgruntled programmer is able to turn the once-novel amusement park into a land of horrors in a matter of minutes, and the only other person in the group who can work a computer is a teenage girl. If the movie was set in 2015, dozens of workers would be on hand to fix Dennis Nedry’s hack job (though based on the trailer for the upcoming Jurassic World, security is unsurprisingly still an issue at a park filled with caged dinosaurs).
For fun, click here for a site that replicates the park's central console. Fun for minutes! —Tiffany Kelly
Vs.
Independence Day, 1996
Film It already beat: Die Hard 4
Why it’s l33t: The hacking scene in Independence Day (ahem, ID4) is legendary, and it comes at the climax of the film. Capt. Steven Hiller (Will Smith) and David Levison (Jeff Goldblum) are flying in a captured alien craft straight into the belly of the beast. Humankind’s entire defense is premised on the fact that if Levison can upload a virus into the mothership, it will "filter down into all the corresponding ships below.”
Magically, in a pre-Wi-Fi era, Levison’s PowerBook 5300 (500MB, 8MB RAM, running MacOS 7) can somehow interface with the alien computer. Of course, he has what looks like a cell modem strapped to the outside of his laptop, so maybe that does it? How do we know that he’s actually sending the malware to the aliens? Thanks to a totally plausible window that reads UPLOADING VIRUS. Works for us.
Ars spent $5 to buy the DVD after learning that there was extended footage that explains how Levison was able to figure out so quickly how to infect the alien OS. In a scene around the 1:22:00 mark, Dr. Brakish Okun (Brent Spiner) gives Levison a tour of the captured alien craft housed at Area 51: “These patterns here, they’re repeating sequentially, just like their countdown signal. They’re using this frequency for computer communications. It’s how they coordinate their ships.”
So, pro tip: all you need to know how to design a virus that will wreak havoc on a foreign operating system is just whether its patterns repeat sequentially. National Security Agency, take note. —Cyrus Farivar
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A bunch of hacks
The Listening, 2006
Film it already beat: Firewall
Why it’s l33t: This is a relatively low-budget Italian movie (although everyone speaks English) that tells a Le Carre-like story of a young woman accidentally caught up in a web of espionage, and an NSA analyst’s attempt to stop her being killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Cell phones are turned into remote spying devices, and Echelon is listening to everyone, everywhere. When it was made, the world was starting to find out just how far the US government was prepared to go in the name of its war on terror. Thus, it’s a sober look at abuses of power and what happens when the people in charge think everyone else is expendable. —Jonathan Gitlin
Vs.
Blackhat, 2015
Film it already beat: Paranoia
Why it's l33t: In January, we spoke to Blackhat's hacking consultants about their efforts to bolster this very recent film's hacking legitimacy. Proper Unix line commands, shady bulletproof hosts, and GPG encryption to cover tracks can all be found in this high-octane Chris Hemsworth vehicle. "It's mostly what they don't do," consultant and author Kevin Poulsen said about the film's strides toward accurate hacker portrayal. We weren't entirely charmed by the film as an entertaining blockbuster, but we admired its care for the blackhats of the world. —Sam Machkovech
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