10 More Hacker Movies You Have Missed
Everyone loved the first one of these, so a follow up was inevitable.
These are ten more hacker related movies you have probably missed that aren’t the traditional three or four choices everyone always picks like Hackers, Sneakers, Swordfish or WarGames.
This time around it is a very 1990s heavy affair, with 1995 being the real opening of the floodgates for movies about hackers or techno-thrillers where hacking plays an important part in the movie plot.
Keanu Reeves in Johnny Mnemonic (1995)I am by no means a professional movie reviewer and I tend to be very indulgent of movies that feature hacking, especially lower budget movies where they are trying something a little new.
I plan to do an entirely separate list of best hacker documentaries.
10. Fair Game (1995)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5zrZnV-4dk
Watching this will make you think of better movies like Die Hard, The Net or maybe even Enemy of the State. Fair Game is a movie about a cop who hates computers (William Baldwin) having to team up with a somewhat tech savvy lawyer (Cindy Crawford) to dodge a team of KGB assassins who need to do computer stuff to steal millions of dollars.
William Baldwin got the role after they couldn’t get Sylvester Stallone and boy is he not a good actor in this, Cindy Crawford does her best and Steven Berkoff and Miguel Sandoval could sleepwalk through portraying villains and still be fantastic.
Watching even a crappy 90s movie like this reminds me how good movies used to look though, real sets, real effects, real explosions, this now doesn’t seem as bad as people thought it was 30 years ago.
9. Tom Clancy’s NetForce (1999)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBSiWxqzoyE
From the master of “technically detailed espionage”, Tom Clancy.
This movie was a little late in the day to portray technology as essentially magical and branch out into the world of science fiction but it was set in the far flung future of 2005. Scott Bakula runs a government agency attached to the FBI that has to solve digital crimes and police the internet and my god this is a funny movie. Even back in 1999 a newspaper critic described it as “pretty silly stuff”.
I think you can find this movie in various languages and in fifteen minute chunks on YouTube, be warned it is over two and a half hours long as it was made for TV.
8. Fled (1996)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcI_nr9zgr0
Second Baldwin brother on this list and he’s even worse than William, in Fled we get Stephen Baldwin as a computer hacker who winds up fleeing a prison work camp with Laurence Fishburne.
The film meanders a lot, there isn’t much hacking involved really, although listening to Stephen Baldwin recite his lines talking about computers, phones and hacking is absolutely hilarious. There is some little charm to this movie though.
7. Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (1996)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfbI3yRTrYM
This movie is just really insane and I have a real soft spot in my heart for it as a result, I didn’t even know they made a sequel with some of the original cast returning in 1996 until a few years ago. Imagine my surprise.
Jobe survives the first movie, although he is severely maimed, and is made to work on a virtual reality operating system chip, he also crashes various forms of transportation as part of some big conspiracy to pursue world domination by the people behind the magic microchip.
The kid from the first movie is now part of a teenage hacker gang who live in a subway tunnel. Just check it out, it is hard to describe.
6. Webmaster (1998)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvdOYwyVfd8
This was described in marketing at the time of its release as the Danish Bladerunner” and I think that sets the bar way, way too high for what is a likeable little cyberpunk movie.
The story is centered around a guy who helps run the online infrastructure of a major mobster in a dystopian future, something goes wrong though and he has to figure out who is responsible before the mobster killed him.
This is yet another 90s movie on the list with VR goggles, a very rudimentary understanding of tech or the internet and a plot that at times veers drastically off course, but I really like it.
You may struggle to find the english dubbed version, though subtitled copies are easier to track down.
5. Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lnvvh9PLWGQ
Sandra Bullock is back from the first speed movie to make her second hacking related movie (see The Net) and also star in a movie that spawned a ton of jokes about sequels having “Cruise Control” appended to the title.
Willem Defoe plays a deranged former cruise ship employee and hacker who decides to sabotage the cruise ship Sandra Bullock’s character is vacationing on with her new boyfriend and that is probably as much as you need to know.
Everyone hated this when it came out but I think once again attitudes have mellowed a little with time. Worth watching just for Willem Defoe being diabolical.
4. Nirvana (1997)
You may struggle to find a copy of this with the english dub, there are various subtitled versions floating around though.
Christopher Lambert is a video game programmer who accidentally creates an artificial intelligence within one of his games that he then has to try and save from an evil corporation.
This movie looks really beautiful in parts and like an 80s episode of Dr Who in others, I really enjoyed it though as it brings a 90s intensely European sci-fi aesthetic that just feels different to the usual fare.
3. Avalon (2001)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXRXclj99Xg
Avalon is a cyberpunk movie that is a Japanese and Polish international co-production with a Polish cast and a Japanese director, if that doesn’t make you curious nothing will.
Another unique looking movie, Avalon is beautiful in parts but at times it really feels like a movie that should be on screens in a cool nightclub with the audio off for people to admire as they dance.
This is another on the list that involves gaming, VR and a gritty dystopian future. If you wish the Matrix looked like an art house movie and made slightly less sense then look no further.
2. Mercury Rising (1998)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lodj3ZT4tOU
This movie is firmly in the camp of 90s movie that is related to hacking where the protagonist is a cop or professional who isn’t a hacker, with Bruce Willis playing an FBI agent. We also get our third Baldwin brother on this list, arguably the best Baldwin, Alec.
Willis has to protect a little autistic boy who can crack a secret NSA code (named “Mercury”), I went back and forth on even including this as I really don’t like media that portrays autistic people as human supercomputers but here we are.
Before Willis was cast the had considered Nicolas Cage for the lead role and I kind of wish we had seen that version of the movie.
1. Johnny Mnemonic (1995)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFJY_BZ55sI
As R.U. Sirius and St. Jude wrote in the Cyberpunk Fakebook “This is a motion picture with a serious moral: if you somehow offend the gods of cyberspace They’ll have Hollywood make a movie from your dreams”.
Like many of the movies on this list have a warm place in my heart for this movie, I think there was a genuine attempt to produce something that stayed true to the source material. I also think people have generally mellowed on this, especially given how people love Keanu Reeves now.
Reeves plays a data courier, with his own memories replaced with data that is stored in his head that he needs to deliver before it destroys him.
There is a black and white version of this movie that I have yet to see that is supposedly a revelation.
Conclusion
That’s it for now, I want to do a top ten “proto-hacker” movies from before 1980 and a list of the best hacker documentaries soon, so look out for those and sign up for updates if you’d like.
You can also follow realhackhistory or Bluesky and Mastodon, I’d love to hear what you think of this list and if there are any movies I’ve missed.
#1980s #BruceWillis #ChristopherLambert #CodeMercury #FairGame #film #hacked #hacker #hackers #hacking #JohnnyMnemonic #KeanuReeves #LaurenceFishburne #LawnmowerMan #Matrix #MercuryRising #movie #Movies #SandraBullock #Speed #TomClancy #WarGames #WillemDefoe #WilliamGibson
