Insomnia File #76: Hackers (dir by Iain Softley)

What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable or streaming? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!

If you’re having trouble getting to sleep tonight, you can always go over to Prime or Tubi and enjoy 1995’s Hackers.

Hackers is a film about …. well, it’s right there in the title. They’re hackers. They’re cool. They’re hot. They’re sexy. And they are way into computers! They know everything that there is to know about exploring the internet, breaking into protected accounts, and rewriting code. They know all about viruses, both how to spread them and how to cure them. And they’re all teenagers! The coolest kids at school are totally into computers and they’ve all got nicknames.

Hackers is very much a film of the 90s. When this film came out, the Internet was still exotic and it was assumed that anyone who could write code had to be an eccentric genius with a larger-than-life personality. Johnny Lee Miller is Dade Murphy, a.k.a. Zero Cool. When he was a kid, he almost crashed the global economy. Matthew Lillard is Emmanuel Goldstein, also known as Cereal Killer. Lillard is hyperactive and he yells a lot but one can be sure that he’ll be a Silicon Valley billionaire by the time he’s 22. Angelina Jolie is Kate Libby, also known as Acid Burn. Hackers was early in Jolie’s career, back when she had so much personality and charisma that she seemed like she might literally step off of the screen and ask you if you wanted to step outside to smoke a joint or maybe do something a bit wilder. All of the hackers go to high school together. They all hack computers together. And they all find themselves targeted by The Plague (Fisher Stevens), a super hacker who is so evil that he rides a skateboard to work.

It’s a perfectly ludicrous film but it’s so cheerfully and excessively stylish and Miller and Jolie have so much chemistry that it doesn’t really matter whether or not the film makes any sense. This is one of those films where The Plague hatches his evil scheme while standing in a neon room surrounded by screens, as if the film is suggesting that The Plague actually lives in the middle of the Internet. The music is early EDM. The action is fast. The cast has charisma to burn. This film is about as 90s as a film can get.

Johnny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie (who was 20 when she shot this film) were married shortly after the film’s release and, though the marriage may not have lasted, their chemistry is explosive. For lack of a better term, they are totally into each other and it’s exiting to watch them interact. The end credits roll over a scene of them undressing and making love in a pool and it’s the perfect ending for this film, a jolt of energy that feels like the proper way to celebrate having saved the world from collapse. It’s also the type of thing that few studio films would be willing to do today. Somehow, 2026 has turned out to be more puritanical than 1995 and progressiveness has, for many, come to mean either chastity or performative asexuality. It’s as if both Hollywood and many modern critics have been captured by Orwell’s Anti-Sex League. (Just consider the bizarre reaction that many had to Christopher Nolan including a sex scene in Oppenheimer.) Hackers may not be a realistic portrayal of programmers or hackers but it is reminder of a time when movies were not only fun but they were also sexy. Watching the film, one regrets that Johnny Lee Miller never became a big star and that Angelina Jolie is no longer the unpredictable force a nature that she once was.

Hackers is a trip to a time that may have only existed in our imaginations but it’s still nice to go back and visit on occasion.