"We gotta find a way to make this [holds up square peg] fit into the hole for this [holds up round peg] using nothing but that [points to random assortment of crap that they know is on board].": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNDuGuerpf8

Another space/hackish movie would be "The Dish" about the Australian engineers in charge of one the (of course) dishes used to communicate with Apollo 11. Cliffhanger scene: the dish goes out of alignment for some reason and they need to scramble to regain contact in time to televise the moon landing.

And of course there's always "The Right Stuff".

I did, but I didn't know what it meant at the time.

My dad on the other hand wouldn't stop talking about it during the drive home afterward. He was a mechanical engineer at West Point and it got him going on the laws of thermodynamics and the time he calculated the condensation point of a drop of water on a steel pipe and realized that engineering is no different from magic at a certain point.

http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/shadowofthemoon

There's just something about the character that rings true. He's a famous superhero, but he doesn't wear a costume or come from another planet. He's a mad scientist, but he doesn't cackle or plot or soliloquize. He's an odd guy with a diverse collection of obsessive hobbies and an even more diverse collection of friends, who are world-class experts in their fields while also being strange and geeky people. And somehow these people aren't his minions or his sidekicks: They're colleagues. He and his band work on things that nobody on Earth has ever heard of, but they don't seem too excited about that -- there are no breathless gasps. It's just part of their usual routine.

There's something about this guy, his lab, and his team that reminds me of the actual basement of the physics department at Cornell, and of the actual people who you might find wandering the hallways of such a place. A place where the pile of junk in the corner is actually the remains of a Nobel-winning experiment from 1967, and the guy who just asked you how to find the men's room is the Secretary of Energy.

I was so surprised I blurted out "Dr. Lazardo!"

"Laugh while you can, monkey-boy," he replied, and kept walking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d682xV0n1YY

Having John Lithgow, Jeff Goldblum, and Christopher Lloyd in secondary roles was amazing; they really go all out to push the intentional corniness over the top. (Lithgow's intentionally bad fake Italian accent is wonderful; Lloyd, as usual, really does seem like someone not of Earth; and I still don't understand why Jeff Goldblum spends most of the movie dressed like a cowboy from a 1940s serial.)

Having so much great acting around him made watching Peter Weller kind of painful to watch.

See, I think that Peter Weller's take on the character is one of the movie's charms. The guy plays Buckaroo Banzai as a perpetually preoccupied, frighteningly odd physics professor with a slight amount of Asperger's. A person who is sometimes painful to watch. [1] In other words, he's the kind of character whom you normally meet only in real life, not in the movies.

Without picking on any individuals by name, let me assure you that many real-world geniuses are even more painful to watch.

And the last thing the movie needed was more corniness. The central character is kind of deadpan, but that provides a valuable contrast with the silly antics going on around him.

Let's tie it up:

[1] This is the famous recursive footnote. [1]

http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/prestige

Iron Man (fun movie where the main character is hacker/inventor):

http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/ironman

There Will Be Blood (not a hacker movie per se, but still kind of startup-relevant, it's about creation of the oil empire from scratch):

http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/therewillbeblood

Odyssey 5 (TV series about a group of astronauts sent back in time to prevent destruction of Earth, AI plays a significant role):

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318236/

Few Japanese cyberpunk animated classics:

Ghost in the Shell 1 & 2:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113568/

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0347246/

Akira:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094625/

Bonus: if you liked Primer, you may like also Timecrimes (even though it's not a hacker movie):

http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/timecrimes

The headache inducing blue ribbon winner: Pi - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/

The slightly corny but worthwhile: Sneakers - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/

                      PHREAK
                            (to Cereal)
                D'you bring those Crayola books?

                            CEREAL
                Oh yeah, technicolor rainbow.

     Cereal brings a book out of his bag.

                            CEREAL
                Green one.

                            JOEY
                What is that, what is that? Lemmie see. What
                are these?

                            DADE
                International Unix Environments.

    Cereal pulls out another book.

                            CEREAL
                Luscious orange?

    Cereal hands the orange book to Phreak.

                            DADE
                Computer security criteria, DOD standards.

    Another book comes out.

                            DADE
                The Pink Shirt Book, Guide to IBM PCs. So
                called due to the nasty pink shirt the guy
                wears on the cover.

    Another one.

                            CEREAL
                What's that?

                            DADE
                Devil book. The Unix Bible.

    Another one.

                            CEREAL
                What's that?

                            DADE
                Dragon book. Compiler design.

    Cereal brings out a large red book.

                            CEREAL
                Oh yeah? What's that?

                            DADE
                The Red Book. NSA Trusted Networks.
                Otherwise known as the Ugly Red Book that
                won't fit on a shelf.

    By now Phreak has made a pile of the books, and the Red
    Book looks wholly out of place on the top of the pile.

It... motivate me to be a hacker.

And yet now that I am a hacker... I am no closer to Angelina, funny that.

I know it sounds lame, but I have to think that that movie got me fantasizing about it.

So, later on when I was struggling with Statics and Dynamics my teacher recognized that I was really a hacker and not an engineer. He asked how I did all of that stuff on my calculator, I then showed him my serial cable mod for the TI-82, and the other software i had written to make his class easier, because S&D was so hard. He suggested I change majors.

I AM SO HAPPY I DID, and today I have a job where I get paid to design the OpenWeb, and work on side projects. Maybe one will break out.

I still think I owe the campy fantasy of hacking to the movie 'Hackers,' for letting me think i had a better chance of getting a girl via hacking. I guess today i am still hopeful.

The reason why you're not closer to Angelina has a simple solution - you haven't yet hacked The Gibson.

As if Zero Cool didn't have the technical expertise to make his own copy of the disk's contents first. A drop-off wouldn't protect the bad guy in any way!

They also did quite a lot of research in names and related "hacker stuff" (a Jolt Cola can in Plague's bedroom comes to mind)

And, of course, there is Angelina Jolie in her 18's. That more than compensates for any screenplay flaw.

I also wanted the headset that Zero wears. Now all I need is a spinning Phonebooth.

Angelina hubba hubba

Hackers is a great movie.

Real Genius is a terrific movie, and it leapt to mind as being definitive. :-)

Pirates of Silicon Valley: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/

As far as I could tell they weren't really doing any sort of web programming in the movie.

http://www.pbs.org/nerds/

The real Gates, Jobs, etc. are far more compelling, interesting, and charismatic than actors trying to portray them.

The best part is that they don't water down the physics at all. One guy got dumped by his girlfriend because of their differing opinions on string theory.

I just got the season 1 DVD and it's great.

I can't believe this is on network television.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca

And "The Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires" is a must-see about how Microsoft, Apple, et al. started out.

http://www.pbs.org/opb/nerds2.0.1/

http://www.amazon.com/Nerds-2-0-1-Brief-History-Internet/dp/...

Existenz http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0120907/

Cube http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0123755/

The Nines http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0810988/

The World's Fastest Indian http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0412080/

October Sky http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0132477/

Three Days of the Condor http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0073802/

And did anyone else find it really sexual when Jenifer Jason-Leigh was plugging Jude Law in?

Don't forget the 13th Floor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Floor)

Let me know if you spot the 3dFx vs Power VR joke.

Also, didn't they give props to a Dem mayor of NYC?

If anything, the part of Ghostbusters that strains my credulity is that in their universe there seem to be scientists who don't believe in ghosts. You'd think that the accumulated evidence would be pretty overwhelming by the 1980s!

By the sequel, the Ghostbusters had mostly closed up shop due to the collapse of the haunting bubble.

Accumulated evidence has actually tended to slam into the brick wall of popularity contestance.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RiskandSafety.html

http://www.google.com/search?q=aaron+wildavsky

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress

http://www.google.com/search?q=john+mccarthy+sustainability

http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book

http://www.google.com/search?q=war+against+the+atom

http://jamesphogan.com/heretics

(And if you're into cry-yourself-to-sleep-reality movies, there's also Outsourced, a recent comedy about a call center manager who must train his replacements in India. I found it surprisingly enjoyable. Its primary themes are culture clash and figuring out what's important in life, so it shares similarities with Office Space and Gung Ho.)

http://corporatemofo.com/media_and_mediocrity/the_matrix_rel...

http://web.archive.org/web/20071005000019/http://www.corpora...

I mean, I still don't think the sequels worked very well, particularly #3, but I admire the audacity of the experiment.

---

[1] (Alas, the second link now appears to be Wayback Machine material. Essayists, defend your archives!)

I appreciate those two essays and highly enjoyed reading them. But when interpreting such works I'm always cautious not to read too much into small details. I found the overview about philosophy refreshing but when the author begins to claim the movie got it wrong in some place but insists on some special philosophical trait I become suspicious.

Highly recommended.

Bixby also wrote a Star Trek TOS episode with basically the same story: http://www.cbs.com/classics/star_trek/video/video.php?cid=64...

Sneakers. Brilliant film.

Hackers - I think it's old enough now to be allowed but it was really laughable at the time - in the kind of way swordfish will be almost respected 20 years from now.

Wargames is the Hackers of the early 80s.

Pirates of Silicon Valley is also worth a watch.

Three Days of the Condor is a fantastic film if you're even slightly old school.

The nines is one of those films you'll either get and love or won't - I loved it.

Battle Royale is an amazing film that happens to have some hacking in it.

2001 is the ultimate hacker film, even though there's not much that you could associate hacking with it. The way it's put together, the dedication to realism, the way the special effects were implemented a year before man went to the moon defines it as a hacker film for me, although YMMV.

Man on Wire is on my list of movies to watch: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1155592/

It has a different focus, but it's about a lot of the same guys (Billy Mitchell, Walter Day, Roy Schmidt), and is also really well done.

"At the end of The Conversation, Gene Hackman, as paranoid audio surveillance expert Harry Caul, plays the saxophone in his apartment, which he took apart piece by piece trying to find a bug. The scene vividly illustrates Caul's complete emotional isolation by having him literally tear away practically every vestige of the material world that surrounds him, shattering the safety and security of his carefully-constructed womb."

1. "Code Rush", documentary about Netscape open sourcing Mozilla.

http://www.viddler.com/explore/coderush/videos/1/

2. "Revolution OS" was a pretty interesting documentary on Linux and the free software movement.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7707585592627775409&...

3. "Freedom Downtime", a documentary about Kevin Mitnick. There's also "Track Down", but that's more of a fictional portrayal loosely based on him.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6746139755329108302...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0205873/

(PC Warning: One of the main characters has an unfortunately named black dog, which I suspect is the reason this superb film is only rarely seen).

If you are or were part of a start-up company you will be entertained by this documentary. It makes your head spin to see some of the mistakes and money this company goes through. They hired literally hundreds of people for an idea that could now probably be run with a dozen people (most of them sales).

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0126765/

if you've ever read the cuckoo's egg, 23 is sort of the other side of the story, following karl koch and the germans (though stoll was mostly tracking markus hess in the cuckoo's egg, not koch).

Alien; the original- the next couple of movies in the series were okay but the first I think is a classic in form of technology and all that good stuff. If you watch it, it may seem a bit old-school for our time, but for their time that was pretty cool! Finding a solution to space travel at light-year speed? Come-on- that's awesome.

Stargate; another one for space travel, but overall it was kind of corny- I just liked how the Egyptians, or whoever, discovered a way to transport across galaxies.

Enemy of the State; cool NSA tech stuff.

Deja Vu; the ability to go back in time only four days earlier or less... I like their setup and how they explained the plausibility of the technology actually coming to fruition.

And, of course, there was the "break into this system in 60 seconds while I hold a gun to your head and some woman gives you a blowjob" scene. Hollywood...

Blow - Not really a hacker movie, but it's rags-to-riches-to-rags storyline should be interesting to a lot of entrepreneurs.

Day of the Jackal - Not a hacker movie either, but the main character's methodical preparation for an assassination will appeal to a lot of hackers.

The Net - A pretty good thriller about a hacker who has her identity stolen in a big conspiracy.

Fat Man and Little Boy - Slow but well done movie about the Manhattan Project.

"Never get involved in a land war in Asia"

"Inconceivable!"

What do you want more from a movie?

Its about a VC funded startup with little revenue that goes bust.

It was a pretty terrible movie though and the web2.0 talk will make you cringe.

Triumph of the Nerds, Hackers : Angels or Daemons History of Video Games

another one on hacking from National Geographic, i can't recall the name

Antitrust too :P

EDIT: The actual name is Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks With Geeks

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=984060502281891679

Ask HN: What's a modern equivalent of the 80's "War Games" movie?

4 points by gur 45 days ago | 5 comments | flag

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1279942/

Its about fashion, but I see a lot of parallels with fashions in software coming and going and returning.

http://www.scifimoviepage.com/darkcity.html

Oh, and cowboy bebop.

Another vote for: Hackers Sneakers

Of the collection, Paycheck is probably the most hacker-related movie, as the main character is a reverse-engineer.

I think Ein, yes the dog, is my all time favorite character in any series/movie ever.

Seriously. The timeline in those movies is an awesome puzzle. Not quite Primer, but the same vein.

Seriously, they're broke, they bootstrap and they make the porn, and it's really entertaining.

Yah, that was a joke...

* Stargate

* "startup.com" - about the formation of 'govworks.com' i wonder what these guys think about Obama.

* Takedown - 'Kevin Mitnick's story'

* Serenity

* Star Trek: the Voyage Home

* The Last Starfighter

* Johnny Mnemonic

* Short Circuit 1 & 2

* Crest of the Stars (anime)

* Fahrenheit 451

* Equilibrium

* Batman (begins, dark night, the tim burten one)

* Edward Scissor Hands

* Space Balls

* Avalon ( http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/movie/decade/2000-current/ava...)

* LAIN: The Serial Experiments (anime)

* Cherry 2000

* Dune

* Ender's Shadow (in the works)

* Ender's Game (in the works)

* Diamond Age (in the works for sci-fi, 'a young girls illustrated primer')

* The Arrival

* The Terminator 1,2,3

* The Sarah Conner Chronicles

* D.A.R.Y.L

* Flight of the Navigator

* Explorers

* AI

* Batteries Not Included

* Blade Runner

* IRobot

* Appleseed (anime)

* Bubble Gum Crisis (anime)

* Ergo Proxy (anime)

* Virtuosity

* Metropolis (all of them are good)

* The Last Exile (anime)

* Cherry 2000

* Robocop (this so hold up)

* Primmer

* Probe ( the TV series, it took me 3 months to find the copies of this Issac Asimov based TV series on ABC ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probe_(TV_series)

* Infest Wisely

* Logan's Run

* Planet of the Apes

* Star Trek: First Contact

* CQ ( if you get it, you'll get why this is a hacker movie , 'la resistance')

* Amelie

* 2046

* Trigun (anime)

* Escaflone (anime)

* Tank Girl

* Twelve Monkeys

* THX 1138

* Bicentennial Man

* The Philadelphia Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philadelphia_Experiment_(fi...

* Seaquest ( some episodes )

* Strange Days ( new yeas hacker style )

* Freejack