Hackers and Sneakers are maybe the only decent movies about so-called hackers.
Startup.com is pretty good as a movie about startups (I lived just about every minute of that movie, just at a different company) but it doesn't have any actual hackers in it.
I hear Risk and Citizenfour, both about Wikileaks, and Revolution OS, about Linux and the GNU and open-source movements, are pretty good, but I haven't seen them.
The Internet's Own Boy in particular has 8/10 on IMDB, 93% "Fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes, handily beating both Hackers and Sneakers, and is under a Creative Commons license: https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaro... which
I found it very hard to watch because Aaron was a friend of mine.
The Matrix is nominally about hackers (and even, like Hackers, computer security) but, as with Startup.com, hacking doesn't really enter into the movie much; instead it's all running firefights and magic disguised as computers. Like Hackers and Sneakers, it bears the same relationship to hacking as https://axecop.com/ (a comic scripted by a five-year-old) bears to law enforcement. However, it's enormously more popular than all the movies above, even if its Rotten Tomatoes ranking is lower than The Internet's Own Boy.
I hear Masters of Doom is pretty good but I haven't watched it.
... though the all-nighter scene in Hackers where they just "flow" out some code while techno plays over the montage is also pretty accurate.
All those great visuals, the pumping music, it captures the emotion of getting your teeth into a really gnarly problem, and the exuberance of eventually coming up with a solution. People watching over the shoulder of a developer at work are just going to see a bunch of scrolling text and tedious iterations of red, red, red, green, reload, alt-tab, change a thing, wait, red, red, red, green, and so on. But that workflow - if you dig the work - is enthralling. And when you solve the problem, it's worth throwing your hands up with glee, and (internally) belting out a cheesy action hero oneliner.
Not to mention when you are real-time dealing with attackers trying to compromise your systems, the chaos and exasperation and desperate attempts to block them very much match the climactic scene of The Plague and his hapless techno weenies typing "cookie".
I'm probably biased because of my age and the time in my career when I first watched the movie (around the same time as my first job) but to me it still feels like the most authentic silver screen portrayal of what I do. More modern shows often capture the cold, hard reality of the work better, which admittedly is just a bunch of text scrolling on a screen. And there are definitely works that better satirize the office culture, like Office Space and Silicon Valley. But there still hasn't been much that captured the excitement of the time, and can really explain to people outside of the industry why at least a certain subset of 1990s teenagers felt compelled to get into this apparently boring and nerdy career.
I suppose it's very "of its time", because nowadays everyone understands why kids want to get into IT - it's one of the most flexible and lucrative careers there is.
I also like Swordfish for this. Him dancing at the keyboard while programming is very much what it feels like when you have a good hack going.
I came of age during the height of the demo scene in Europe, and enjoyed the pre-warez offshoot where pirated games always included exciting intros/cracktros. So hackers making electronic music and cool visuals was the baseline that every noob had to meet to be "elite". Of course in real life we still all wore "normal clothes" and lived careful, quiet lives - but the dream was to be these rockstars that the movie Hackers turned to 11.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
I'm going to borrow this, it will make many future discussions much shorter than with my current approach of floundering around this sentiment.
The hacker stuff is pretty legit though. Characters use Termux on their phones, Kali Linux, python scripts etc
I wasn't convinced about this hacker having problems to compile a program...
OR
There is another possible explanation but I have to check dates since I think the movie was released way before the first version of Rust!!!
https://archive.org/details/23-nichts-ist-so-wie-es-scheint-...
https://archive.org/details/Hackers_-_23_part_-II_-
The second one says part II but is the complete movie.
Was this a reference to Mitnick's phone calls to Tsutomo?