Over at Tor.com, I talk about one of the great movies of our time: Hackers.

By all means, head over there to read the column, in which I tried to keep it together. Because below this cut, I just nerd out ridiculously.

Hackers: when cargo pants were king.

There is no good and bad. There is only fun and boring.

I remember watching this movie back in 1995 and thinking how awesome it would be to be a hacker, except that I could hardly DOS my way into our house computer to do my school assignments on ProWrite, and I didn’t even know how to Rollerblade, so it was really a war lost on two fronts.

I bought the soundtrack (with, babysitting money left over from when I was thirteen, I am pretty sure) and made tape copies that I played in my car until they wore out. Since my car was a 1989 Chevy Lumina the color of eggnog and a tape deck that looked like a miniature car wash, tapes usually lasted about a month. Also, my car didn’t go over 50 miles an hour without shaking, so every time I hit a major roadway I would have two baselines – one from the music and one from my car nearly exploding.

What I’m saying is, I think I should have just learned to Rollerblade instead.

Rollerblade nation! Woo! I still cannot get over Rollerblades as an indicator of the hip outsiders of the future, and the skateboard as a sign of an overage wannabe, since in the last decade those roles have pretty totally reversed.

P.S., this cast really was great. They managed to walk the fine line of playing a bunch of cool kids without making us hate them, mostly because they were absolute goobers and knew it. One of my favorite moments of this is when they go to Lord Nikon’s place and he’s dressed like a Jedi and demanding passwords, and when they get inside they eat snacks and watch TV. HACKERS!

I also like that the cast is casually multiracial, and that only one of the group looks at Kate as a sex object, which I had forgotten. It’s pretty nice that even though they acknowledge she’s hot, they really just want to fondle her new laptop. That shit has a 28.8 modem, yo! She’s going to triple the RAM! It’s fly!

I think the saddest thing is that once Phantom Phreak gets locked up, we never hear from that guy again. Is he just there to drop exposition in leopard print? Is he just a piece of MEAT, movie? Damn!

Look at him, all excited, thinking he has the whole movie to be helpful and won’t just be shuttled off because there are only five booths in Grand Central. It’s so sad.

(Hey, remember when Matthew Lillard was super popular, and was in half a dozen movies in one year, and then he disappeared off the face of the planet? What was that all about?)

The plot is so paint-by-numbers I won’t even talk about it, except to say that it employs one of my all-time favorite tropes, where the hero is on the verge of defeat…until the hero looks around and sees that backup has arrived, with a six-pack of kickass and a bag of Mercy Chips – and that bag is empty.

Razor and Blade, the world’s head hackers, with Fassbender’s grandfather! No wonder they’re proud. I bet that thing has, like, a TWO GIG hard drive!

Yeah. I guess there was no budget for extrapolating the near future of computer culture when this movie was written, so the tech stuff is largely laughable, but the subtle contempt for people who don’t understand what computers can do, and the way in which that manifests throughout the movie, is pretty timeless.

Here is what watching Hackers in the year 2009 is like. “Ha! Yeah, right! Please, that’s ridiculous! OH MY GOD IT’S TRUE.” Repeat for two hours.

ETA: Possibly the best moment of the movie is when hackers across the world are battle-notified…by phone. Thanks for nothing, proto-internet!