Ask HN: What are some (good) hacker movies? | Hacker News Reader

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

94 pointsrogercosseboom181 comments

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?

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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

Thats been one of my favorite scenes since I was a kid!

Ugh, I feel so old.

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".

I second The Dish

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.

In the Shadow of the Moon

http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/shadowofthemoon

That's the only thing I liked in that movie.

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.

Excellent, excellent movie. It always inspires me in some strange quirky way. Or maybe it just inspires me to be quirky.

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.

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.

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]

I once walked past John Lithgow in Harvard Yard.

I was so surprised I blurted out "Dr. Lazardo!"

"Laugh while you can, monkey-boy," he replied, and kept walking.

This comment genuinely made my day.

that's awesome

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d682xV0n1YY

The Prestige (competing magicians inventing new tricks, cameo by Nikola Tesla):

http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/prestige

Iron Man (fun movie where the main character is hacker/inventor):

http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/ironman

There Will Be Blood (not a hacker movie per se, but still kind of startup-relevant, it's about creation of the oil empire from scratch):

http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/therewillbeblood

Odyssey 5 (TV series about a group of astronauts sent back in time to prevent destruction of Earth, AI plays a significant role):

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318236/

Few Japanese cyberpunk animated classics:

Ghost in the Shell 1 & 2:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113568/

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0347246/

Akira:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094625/

Bonus: if you liked Primer, you may like also Timecrimes (even though it's not a hacker movie):

http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/timecrimes

I second "Odyssey 5", great TV show.

Regarding Iron Man: It is hard for me to suspend my disbelief when movies feature world-shatteringly advanced artificial intelligence and yet pay no attention whatsoever to the obvious implications of such technology. Forget the silly flying suit!

That was exactly what I took from the movie- not the suit or whatever was interesting but how great a user-agent setup he had!

I named my ubuntu box Jarvis that day, after seeing it twice. ;-)

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/

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.

Very true. Must be the one of first times a major Hollywood studio employed a consultant that had taken something beyond College Algebra.

On the other hand, Hackers did take the time to name its characters after handles taken from 2600.

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.

(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.

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.

but that's probably because Emmanuel Goldstein was a consultant on the production of the movie.

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.

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.

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!

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

Indeed, Adleman, the A in RSA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Adleman) was a consultant on that movie.

Man, I just lost 2 hours of my life to Sneakers. How did Redford, and company get sucked into that. What a horrible movie.

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.

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).

Perhaps you should have suggested "Acme Stoner Toys." ;)

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.

Pi is amazing. It's also the only full length movie that I've watched with the director's commentary.

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.

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. :-)

But it can't beat "Young Einstein" in number of geniuses: Edison, Darwin, Marie Curie, Rutherford, Freud and Einstein himself.

Agreed, Real Genius captures the insanenes (sic) of Caltech and the people who go there perfectly.

Antitrust: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/

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

I got a real kick out of watching Pirates of Silicon Valley.

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.

Though Steve Jobs thought Noah Wyle was so good that he invited him to trick the audience at one of his keynotes.

I also highly recommend both films.

Pirates is a great nerd party movie. Popcorn, soda, and just reveling in the melodrama :-)

Antitrust always gets me in the mood to code

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.

I love Pirates of Silicon Valley. Second/third/fourthing.

Slightly off topic, but a good hacker TV show is "Big Bang Theory" on Monday nights on ABC. It's about 4 physics PhD students at Cal Tech.

The best part is that they don't water down the physics at all. One guy got dumped by his girlfriend because of their differing opinions on string theory.

I just got the season 1 DVD and it's great.

I love this show! I was going to mention it but refrained as its not a movie.

I can't believe this is on network television.

They are not PhD students, more something like postdocs. The only one of them without PhD is a target of jokes because of this.

Yeah, you're right. I was just trying to summarize. Either way, still very rare for network TV.

Whoops, it's on CBS.

I've been following the show since the pilot, and have been extremely impressed that it has developed a following enough to warrant a second season. I was initially worried it would get killed mid-season like so many other great geeky/sci-fi shows.

GATTACA might be worth adding to the list.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca

Gattaca is an underrated classic. Andre Niccol's other movie The Truman Show is even better.

His other other movie, Lord of War, was also pretty good. It does involve entrepreneurship. The Terminal, his other other other movie, was ok, but no hacking. I haven't seen his other other other other movie, S1m0ne.

I've seen s1mOne; the basic premise is very hacker-y. A guy living in his house develops photo-realistic CG, telling no one, and delivers it to a movie producer and then dies. What should he do with it? His choice == the film.

Gattaca is currently free on Hulu: http://www.hulu.com/watch/46029/gattaca

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.

Triumph of the Nerds is great. Hopefully Cringley will make a version for this decade about Web empires.

He did make "Nerds 2.0" about the first web boom. Sadly, this has never been released on vhs/dvd.

It has been released on the Intertubes apparently: http://www.torrentbox.com/torrent_details?id=29078&filel...

Sadly I tried to download this a while ago and it turned out to be fake... its another (not-so-interesting) documentary on the internet.

This one seems to be the real deal, I'm downloading it now, and I saw Robert X. Cringely in the preview.

Evidently there is VHS / DVD out there. Didn't find anything streaming, but didn't look too hard. Mr Cringley was nice enough to point us in the right direction:

http://www.pbs.org/opb/nerds2.0.1/

http://www.amazon.com/Nerds-2-0-1-Brief-History-Internet/dp/...

I second "A Beautiful Mind" - one of my favorite movies...

"Pirates of Silicon Valley" is -much- better than Triumph. Both are must-sees.

Not all are hacker movies per se, but these have great general geek appeal:

Existenz http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0120907/

Cube http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0123755/

The Nines http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0810988/

The World's Fastest Indian http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0412080/

October Sky http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0132477/

Three Days of the Condor http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0073802/

+1 for Cube. Cube 2: Hypercube and Cube Zero, not so much.

Totally agreed. The others were dismal.

I actually refused to show the third to friends because it was so bad it actually ruined the first a little bit.

october sky is AWESOME!

And did anyone else find it really sexual when Jenifer Jason-Leigh was plugging Jude Law in?

Don't forget the 13th Floor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Floor)

Let me know if you spot the 3dFx vs Power VR joke.

Good movies about startups: "Tucker", "24 Hour Party People", and "Ghostbusters".

Wow, Ghostbusters is a movie about a startup. It seems so obvious once it's pointed out, but it never occurred to me before.

It's also very much a product of the Reagan era: the bad guys are the scientists, academia and the EPA.

Uh, hello? Venkman: "Back off, man! We're scientists!"

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

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

DOT http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi1956839705/

Looks amusing... in the vein of a Christopher Guest classic. Bought the cheap copy on ebay.

At the other end of the hacker spectrum (the cry-yourself-to-sleep reality end not the fantasy end), there's Office Space.

I also enjoyed Mike Judge's other film "Idiocracy". It's not explicitly a hacker film, but it's a sci-fi story about an average guy in a world of idiots, so it verges on hacker territory. It also has some examples of hilariously bad human/computer interface design.

(And if you're into cry-yourself-to-sleep-reality movies, there's also Outsourced, a recent comedy about a call center manager who must train his replacements in India. I found it surprisingly enjoyable. Its primary themes are culture clash and figuring out what's important in life, so it shares similarities with Office Space and Gung Ho.)

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!)

I thought about "Matrices" but decided that there was only one Matrix (in all senses of the word...)

What former physicist could resist? It's like trying to resist saying boxen, only more so, because matrices is an actual word.

I still recall a guy 2 rows in front of me in the cinema stood up and shouted, somewhat uncontrollable, "YEAH!" when he saw the Trinity (actual) hack in the Matrix reloaded (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/05/16/matrix_sequel_has_ha...). LOL.

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.

More sci-fi than pure tech, I just saw: "The man from earth", http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0756683/

Highly recommended.

If you liked this, you might enjoy another religion what-if TV movie, starring the Ninth Doctor: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0353104/

"The man from earth" was awesome, I wish more movies explored topics like this. As cheap as the movie was obviously made, I was glued to it the whole time.

I've watched The Man From Earth about 30 times. Favorite movie of the past few years by a long shot.

Bixby also wrote a Star Trek TOS episode with basically the same story: http://www.cbs.com/classics/star_trek/video/video.php?cid=64...

You already had the best (Primer) After that, in no particular order:

Sneakers. Brilliant film.

Hackers - I think it's old enough now to be allowed but it was really laughable at the time - in the kind of way swordfish will be almost respected 20 years from now.

Wargames is the Hackers of the early 80s.

Pirates of Silicon Valley is also worth a watch.

Three Days of the Condor is a fantastic film if you're even slightly old school.

The nines is one of those films you'll either get and love or won't - I loved it.

Battle Royale is an amazing film that happens to have some hacking in it.

2001 is the ultimate hacker film, even though there's not much that you could associate hacking with it. The way it's put together, the dedication to realism, the way the special effects were implemented a year before man went to the moon defines it as a hacker film for me, although YMMV.

There was a sort of 'unofficial' 'hackers 2' with Skeet Ulrich playing Kevin ("My kung-fu better than you kung-fu!") Mitnick in Takedown (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/) - the story following the book of the same name by Tsutomu Shimonura. Also, I think they recently screened 'Wargames 2 : the dead code' (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0865957/) over here in the UK. Don't forget Tron! Ah.. just hearing the sounds of the video arcade at the beginning...

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/

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.

thanks! will check it out.

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.)

I just saw Man on Wire, it's a must-watch.

On the social engineering tip, I'd say "Catch Me If You Can" is a good watch. It's a little too hollywood, but there are some good bits.

There's no computers in it, but Coppola's "The Conversation" is a classic - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation - it's about electronic surveillance. There's a great scene near the end that reminds me of debugging - the wikipedia article has a picture and descriptive caption of that scene:

"At the end of The Conversation, Gene Hackman, as paranoid audio surveillance expert Harry Caul, plays the saxophone in his apartment, which he took apart piece by piece trying to find a bug. The scene vividly illustrates Caul's complete emotional isolation by having him literally tear away practically every vestige of the material world that surrounds him, shattering the safety and security of his carefully-constructed womb."

I always thought Gene Hackman's character in "Enemy of the State" (opposite Will Smith) was Harry Caul 30 years later.

Never thought of that, but yeah. He must have brought some of the first role to the second role.

On the documentary side of things (all of which are available free/legally online):

1. "Code Rush", documentary about Netscape open sourcing Mozilla.

http://www.viddler.com/explore/coderush/videos/1/

2. "Revolution OS" was a pretty interesting documentary on Linux and the free software movement.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7707585592627775409&...

3. "Freedom Downtime", a documentary about Kevin Mitnick. There's also "Track Down", but that's more of a fictional portrayal loosely based on him.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6746139755329108302...

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/

The Dam Busters (1955 - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046889/ ) is excellent. You can see real-world examples of the hacker problem-solving mindset right from the start of the movie and it continues on throughout.

(PC Warning: One of the main characters has an unfortunately named black dog, which I suspect is the reason this superb film is only rarely seen).

E-Dreams: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0262021/ Startup.com: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/

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).

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.

23 (not the jim carrey one)

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0126765/

if you've ever read the cuckoo's egg, 23 is sort of the other side of the story, following karl koch and the germans (though stoll was mostly tracking markus hess in the cuckoo's egg, not koch).

I've been looking for a version of this with English subtitles for a while now. Do you have any suggestions?

thepiratebay :(

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.

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...

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.

i always remember the bit about trying to flip light switches in a dream to determine whether you're really dreaming or not.

Primer - Ultra low budget film about a couple of engineers who accidentally invent a time machine in their garage while working on a startup.

Blow - Not really a hacker movie, but it's rags-to-riches-to-rags storyline should be interesting to a lot of entrepreneurs.

Day of the Jackal - Not a hacker movie either, but the main character's methodical preparation for an assassination will appeal to a lot of hackers.

The Net - A pretty good thriller about a hacker who has her identity stolen in a big conspiracy.

Fat Man and Little Boy - Slow but well done movie about the Manhattan Project.

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!"

"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.

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.

5th Element, I think is the ultimate guy/hacker movie. Disutopian reality, future, flying cars, spaceships, tech and gadgets, weapons, awesome soundtrack, action, funny, love story, and hot chicks...

What do you want more from a movie?

I think they could make a whole series of prequels to the 5th element. I would love to see the adventures of "Corban Dallas"

Its sci-fi, but I have no doubt 2001:A Space Odyssey inspired many a hacker to go into AI.

I can't believe no one's mentioned Back to the Future! Favorite scene: opening scene with the robotic arm automation Favorite quote: "You'll have to forgive the crudeness of this model, I didn't have time to paint it or build it to scale."

Perhaps it's more of a good "science movie" than a good "hacker movie", but I adore Carl Sagan's Contact. I get chills whenever I watch the scene where the signal is first detected.

thats a hacker film. they had to find the signal, and then prove they were there!

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.

August was pretty bad. I just watched it Friday. What did LandShark do?

E-everything

"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.

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.

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

Project Ardvark about a group of interns at Fog Creek Software

EDIT: The actual name is Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks With Geeks

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=984060502281891679

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.

Dup. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=396120

Ask HN: What's a modern equivalent of the 80's "War Games" movie?

4 points by gur 45 days ago | 5 comments | flag

I saw "Hackers are people too" recently. I is a very good documentary about Hackers and the culture.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1279942/

Dare I say "Italian Job", the guy who hacks into the Traffic System. I think they said in the movie that napster was his idea, but someone stole it while he was sleeping.

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.

As an aside millenium actress was really a great movie I thought... But of course not a hacker movie at all

I like The Lawnmower Man a lot too. Stunning graphics and it really captures the spirit of a computer enabling you to do much more cooler things than Real Life.

My own cheesy favorite, The First $20 Million is the Hardest. Plus I love Rosario Dawson, so that's probably a contributing factor.

The Devil Wears Prada

Its about fashion, but I see a lot of parallels with fashions in software coming and going and returning.

BBS Documentary

no wonder the netflix prize is such a hard problem.

TRON

(Canadian?) TV show "Regenesis". Biology stuff, apparently a bit of real science mixed in from time to time. The first couple of seasons or so are in syndication, so watch for it at really bad times in the US, like 1AM Monday on minor TV stations.

I'm a little surprised "21" wasn't mentioned yet. The movie, like the book "Bringing Down the House", is a fictionalized account of a true story about how the MIT blackjack club took Vegas casinos for many thousands of dollars.

An excellent movie I enjoyed was: Dark City It was kind of like a precursor to The Matrix.

http://www.scifimoviepage.com/darkcity.html

I haven't watched it yet but I'm told that the directors cut is much better and should be watched first.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086856/

Not a movie but "The Adventures of Brisco County Jr." is great fun, and is available on DVD. There's something kind of hackerish about it.

Blade Runner's on there, too.

Oh, and cowboy bebop.

Another vote for: Hackers Sneakers

> Oh, and cowboy bebop

I think Ein, yes the dog, is my all time favorite character in any series/movie ever.

They are making a full motion movie. Supposedly the downside is they cased Spike as Keano Reaves. (i guess when i think about a 'film nior' space-cyber-punk-black-belt, i do not think about NEO)

How is it that you just completely made my day, and then absolutely destroyed it all in about 3 seconds? Oh yeah, Keano Reaves.

Might as well throw in all the Philip K. Dick movies. Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly, and some others.

Of the collection, Paycheck is probably the most hacker-related movie, as the main character is a reverse-engineer.

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey

Seriously. The timeline in those movies is an awesome puzzle. Not quite Primer, but the same vein.

Zack and Miri make a porno

Seriously, they're broke, they bootstrap and they make the porn, and it's really entertaining.

Primer - hackers doing a startup.

The last season of 24 had really good hacking scenes. Also, Anitrust is a decent one.

does Die Hard 4 count as one?

I'd personally say The Friday After Next just sneaks into the top ten.

Mission: Impossible (the first one, not so much the others)

Army of Darkness.

Revolution OS and Pirates of Silicon Valley

Swordfish.

Yah, that was a joke...

still a few more (some are in the works)

* Stargate

* "startup.com" - about the formation of 'govworks.com' i wonder what these guys think about Obama.

* Takedown - 'Kevin Mitnick's story'

* Serenity

* Star Trek: the Voyage Home

* The Last Starfighter

* Johnny Mnemonic

* Short Circuit 1 & 2

* Crest of the Stars (anime)

* Fahrenheit 451

* Equilibrium

* Batman (begins, dark night, the tim burten one)

* Edward Scissor Hands

* Space Balls

* Avalon ( http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/movie/decade/2000-current/ava...)

* LAIN: The Serial Experiments (anime)

* Cherry 2000

* Dune

* Ender's Shadow (in the works)

* Ender's Game (in the works)

* Diamond Age (in the works for sci-fi, 'a young girls illustrated primer')

* The Arrival

* The Terminator 1,2,3

* The Sarah Conner Chronicles

* D.A.R.Y.L

* Flight of the Navigator

* Explorers

* AI

* Batteries Not Included

* Blade Runner

* IRobot

* Appleseed (anime)

* Bubble Gum Crisis (anime)

* Ergo Proxy (anime)

* Virtuosity

* Metropolis (all of them are good)

* The Last Exile (anime)

* Cherry 2000

* Robocop (this so hold up)

* Primmer

* Probe ( the TV series, it took me 3 months to find the copies of this Issac Asimov based TV series on ABC ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probe_(TV_series)

* Infest Wisely

* Logan's Run

* Planet of the Apes

* Star Trek: First Contact

* CQ ( if you get it, you'll get why this is a hacker movie , 'la resistance')

* Amelie

* 2046

* Trigun (anime)

* Escaflone (anime)

* Tank Girl

* Twelve Monkeys

* THX 1138

* Bicentennial Man

* The Philadelphia Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philadelphia_Experiment_(fi...

* Seaquest ( some episodes )

* Strange Days ( new yeas hacker style )

* Freejack

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. I saw it during a company outing to the cinema when it first came out. Lots of fun. Not a hacker movie per ce, but very cool animation, set in the future,etc. Also my first introduction to "gaia theory" which was interesting though actually I am on the reductionist, "selfish gene" side of that debate myself.

Maybe not so much hacker, but let me suggest Slacker.

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