Notable really only for Angelina Jolie at age 20, in her first leading role, and also featuring the actor she met and married the year afterwards (Jonny Lee Miller). Unfortunately, despite its energy and pulsing electronic soundtrack, it isn't much of a film. The positioning of this group of high school hackers as counterculture heroes is as ridiculous as the depiction of literally anything about computers here, which are turned into what look like video games. Seriously, nothing feels authentic here, how these kids behave, the love story, or the computers. It's all very cartoonish.
"You wage wars, murder, cheat, lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals. Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity," one reads from The Hacker's Manifesto, a real text written in 1986. Ah yes, the hackers out there in this world committing fraud, financial crimes, identify theft, and espionage, or just maliciously wreaking havoc with viruses, are just "curious." Meanwhile, the villain is a guy who could have been in a James Bond film, an oil company's computer expert who is a hacker himself, and the government cartoonishly breaks into the homes of hackers, always one step behind. Lots of clichés and cheese in the script, not helped by poor acting. What the hell was Roger Ebert thinking?
"You wage wars, murder, cheat, lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals. Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity," one reads from The Hacker's Manifesto, a real text written in 1986. Ah yes, the hackers out there in this world committing fraud, financial crimes, identify theft, and espionage, or just maliciously wreaking havoc with viruses, are just "curious." Meanwhile, the villain is a guy who could have been in a James Bond film, an oil company's computer expert who is a hacker himself, and the government cartoonishly breaks into the homes of hackers, always one step behind. Lots of clichés and cheese in the script, not helped by poor acting. What the hell was Roger Ebert thinking?