Hackers

Hackers (1995) is an American cyberpunk thriller directed by Iain Softley — watch online on iFILM. Dade Murphy is seventeen and already has a federal conviction for crashing 1,507 computers via a phone modem when he was eleven. Moving to New York, he can't stay off the keyboard.

He falls in with a crew of teenage hackers, including the sharp and fearless Kate Libby played by Angelina Jolie in one of her earliest roles. Johnny Lee Miller and Jolie generated a chemistry that outlasted the shoot. The group stumbles onto an embezzlement scheme hidden inside a corporate data virus — engineered by a crooked system security officer called The Plague, played by Fisher Stevens. The Secret Service closes in from one side, corporate muscle from the other. Matthew Lillard, Jesse Bradford and Renoly Santiago round out the ensemble.

The film's version of cyberspace involves absurd 3D fly-throughs and hacking that involves skating on rollerblades, which tells you everything about how seriously to take the technology. It doesn't matter. As a time capsule of mid-nineties underground culture — the slang, the fashion, the paranoia about corporate surveillance — it holds up with a kind of goofy conviction. Stream Hackers (1995) online on iFILM.