In the mid 1990s, the internet was a vastly different place – nowhere near as ubiquitous as today and much more primitive in technology, run by a language seemingly beyond many and often portrayed with great difficulty in movies and on television.
Hackers were also seen as a different breed – often seen as young digital anarchists exploring a new frontier and fighting against authority figures as opposed to today where hacking is seen as the domain of entire divisions of government and corporate interests, using various whitehat and blackhat methods to manipulate billions of people in a digital world war of information and misinformation.
In those more innocent times though came 1995’s “Hackers,” the Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie-led feature about a group of high school hackers and their involvement in a corporate extortion conspiracy. Opening to bad box-office and mixed reviews, opinion about the movie has risen in the time since its release.
Even so, its portrayal of the Internet remains an interesting one, director Iain Softley using a mix of primitive browser pages, floating equations, fantastical (and relatively easy to access databases), and in its prettiest form a metropolis of glass in a void, all of it bathed in cool blue light and filled with file listings. Softley recently spoke with Nerdist about how he portrayed the online world on film and says there’s a very specific reasoning for that:
“The areas where we were criticized were for being unrealistic, but I wasn’t trying to make a tech film. I wanted to be accurate about what it meant to these kids, what it felt like, the imaginative projection of the fantasy world that this represented for them. I wanted the film to reflect that.
Which brings us to the ‘City of Text’. You don’t see anything when somebody is hacking. It’s data, it’s naughts and ones. So the challenge for me was to create a parallel environment on which the story could take place. I think I saw an MIT suggestion of a three-dimensional way data could be stacked to make databases easy to navigate. I wanted the inner world to reflect the outer world, to be a parallel or mirror, so I created a digital Manhattan.
But I didn’t want it to be digital, which was very 2D at the time, as text or numbers on a screen. My inspiration in many ways was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, where they’re approaching the space station. [Cinematographer] Andrzej Sekula shot it on 35mm on a slow shutter speed, which means it’s incredibly dense and rich and colorful. We built this huge set on a small stage at Pinewood Studios, probably 50-100 yards long, and we had a motion control camera. We shot it almost like animation; we’d change the text on the cells. But it gives this incredible physical reality, like you’re moving through this three-dimensional world.”
“Hackers” was one of the earliest studio films made speficially about the Internet, alongside the Keanu Reeves-led “Johnny Mnemonic” and the Sandra Bullock-led “The Net” with all three films hitting cinemas in 1995.