Crybercrimes and Misdemeanors: The Best Hacker Films

Hackers, as Hollywood has proven over the years, make for very interesting subjects in film. Stereotypically young and anarchic in nature, it was conceptually easy to fabricate a world full of teenage cyber terrorists fighting against rogue capitalists or government agencies that also managed to draw in audiences like flies to honey.

As the years passed and technology eventually caught up with the dreams of science-fiction masters from the ‘50s and ‘60s, the narrative switched from fictional storytelling to intimate documentaries about the blackhat and whitehat armies hacking their way through the wired highways and intersections that make up the digital world they inhabit.

Michael Mann’s latest film, Blackhat, centers on Nicholas Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth), a furloughed hacker who helps the American government track down top level criminals working within a cybercrime network that sends Hathaway and his team around the world. To celebrate the release, we put together a list of six other movies about hackers that are worth checking out.

Citizenfour (2014)

Chances are that if people are discussing hacking in any kind of capacity, the name Edward Snowden will be brought up sooner or later. Laura Poitras’ 2014 documentary follows the series of events leading up to the meeting between journalist Glenn Greenwald, Poitras, and Edward Snowden in an unknown Hong Kong hotel room just weeks before one of the largest NSA leaks in history would occur. Poitras’ intimate and in-depth look at the life of a man with a strong moral conscious and his desire to release information about a nation spying on its citizens is enthralling from beginning to end. Citizenfour sparks a level of paranoia in Americans about the fault of their government we haven’t seen since the Nixon revelations and the realities about what’s happening behind closed doors is positively terrifying.

Hackers (1995)

Most point to WarGames as the definitive movie about hackers. While fun, I would argue Iain Softley’s 1995 cult action thriller turned best represents what the mid-90’s thought the future of cyber warfare would look like. Softley’s film manages to combine small hacking techniques that were used in real life, like recording the sound of change and playing it back when you wanted to use a payphone for free, to completely unrealistic depictions of incredibly fast internet network connections and hacker collectives. In Hackers, a young computer prodigy played by Jonny Lee Miller relocates to a new high school and meets a charming group of stoner computer enthusiasts. Together the hacking hoard must operate together to take down an evil corporate miscreant who has plans for an illegal get rich quick scheme that will restrict their own internet freedoms. Add in the fantastically corny rollerblading sequences and you’ve got one of the best hacker movies in existence.

Ghost in the Shell (1995)

It’s impossible to write a list of hacker movies without mentioning Mamoru Oshii’s genre defining animated film, Ghost in the Shell. Adapted from Masamune Shirow’s manga of the same name, Ghost in the Shell helped define the importance of leading female characters in the new wave of cyber science fiction films. In a dystopian future dominated by technology, the film follows Major Motoko Kusanagi of Tokyo’s Public Security Section 9 as she tracks down a vicious biohacker known as the Puppet Master. The Puppet Master has the ability to ghost hack another body and use it for whatever he desires without their knowledge. As the story progresses, Section 9 discovers the Puppet Master isn’t the sole criminal and there are larger bodies of evil behind the hacking project. Visually disturbing but aesthetically breathtaking, the animations of Oshii’s beloved film still hold up twenty years later. Ghost in the Shell is currently being adapted into a live action film with Scarlett Johansson reportedly taking on the role of Kusanagi.

23 (1998)

While exaggerated for film purposes, the true story of a few young hackers based in Hannover, Germany is so outrageous and thrilling that it’s hard to imagine it actually happened in the late ‘80s. When Karl Koch is left an orphan, he decides to invest his inheritance into a small apartment and a home computer. At first he decides to hit up various forums and discuss how cool technology is, but eventually his knowledge of hacking increases and he decides to start breaking into the backend of secure government servers. When the young blackhats realize there’s a whole underground network of criminals who would pay big money for a couple of young knowledgeable hackers, they start seeking out jobs that eventually leads them right into the hands of Russia’s contentious KGB. The technology seems dated now, as it should, but there’s a level of typical espionage storytelling thrown in that doesn’t leave much breathing room during the 100-minute film.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

Niels Arden Oplev’s adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s best selling crime novel has become one of the definitive movies involving a hacker of the past decade. When disgraced journalist Mikael Blonkvist is invited out by a wealthy family to look into the disappearance of a woman that went missing over forty years ago, he enlists the help of a young hacker, Lisbeth Salander. Although her hacking seems small in nature, especially in comparison to the other characters mentioned in previous titles, the devastating life she leads and the way her life is framed in conjunction to her skill as a hacker is rather unique. She’s not a privileged child who was allowed to mess around with her parent’s computer, and it makes her whitehat ventures seem all the more important and profound because of her past. She’s become one of the most beloved characters in contemporary cinema and literature, and a feminist powerhouse that was left vacant in the genre for years.

The Matrix (1999)

We all knew this was going to be on the list. Perhaps the defining hacking movie of all time, The Matrix’s dialogue has been tattooed on the arms of thousands, quoted in first year theology essays, and parodied by just about every Fox cartoon comedy. While it may be overly celebrated by every person who watches it for the first time, the “real world” the Wachowski siblings created in 1999 still stands tall in 2015. The tale of the chosen one, Neo (Keanu Reeves), and his fight alongside the never wavering Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and the classily cool renegade Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) was released at the perfect time. The turn of the century and the beginning of people’s fear over what the future of machinery and global computerized networking would do for society is all captured within the cerebral world of The Matrix. Even more so, it examines the lives of humans and their relationships with technology as a whole instead of one person’s misuse of technology to benefit a small group. There’s a reason people return to it time and time again.