CNET Remembers 1995, the Year Hollywood Finally Noticed The Internet (cnet.com) 43
CNET is celebrating its 25th anniversary with articles remembering the 1990s — including that moment "when Hollywood finally noticed the web," calling it "a flawed but fun snapshot of the moment the internet took over the world..."
"Twenty-five years ago, cinema met cyberspace in a riot of funky fashion, cool music and surveillance paranoia. It began in May 1995 with the release of Johnny Mnemonic, a delirious sci-fi action dystopia matching Keanu Reeves with seminal cyberpunk author William Gibson. In July, Sandra Bullock had her identity erased in conspiracy thriller The Net. In August, Denzel Washington pursued Russell Crowe's computer-generated serial killer in Virtuosity, and in September Angelina Jolie found her breakthrough role in anarchic adventure Hackers. In October, Kathryn Bigelow served up dystopian thriller Strange Days. It's hard to know what's most dated about these mid-'90s curios: the primitive-looking effects, the funky fashions or the clunky technology depicted on screen. But now, 25 years later, they've proved prescient in their concerns about surveillance, corporate power and the corruption of what seemed to be an excitingly democratic new age...
Most tellingly, Johnny Mnemonic and the other tech-focused films of 1995 all express fears around the misuse of surveillance in a connected world. The Net updates the paranoia of '70s thrillers The Conversation and The Anderson Tapes, and each movie features an unholy alliance of avaricious corporate bad guys and authoritarian law enforcement. Or as Matthew Lillard's character puts it in Hackers, "Orwell is here and livin' large!"
But the whistleblowing heroes of Hackers, The Net and Johnny Mnemonic use their skills to subvert and unpick the establishment's grip on technology. Hackers in particular radiates an infectious idealism as the diverse crew of anarchic youngsters rollerblade rings around the greedy suits and clueless cops, "snooping onto them as they snoop onto us". The movie highlights technology's potential to be a tool for wrongdoing and a democratic, open medium where you can be who you want to be... Sadly, 1995's wave of technology-themed movies have one other thing in common. They all bombed.
CNET's reporter gets new quotes from the director of Hackers — as well as one of that film's then-15-year-old technical advisors, Nicholas Jareck. "For all its exaggerations," he says, "it does a decent job of showing the hacker spirit — those kids were tinkerers, experimenting, reveling in their ability to figure something out. It's a celebration of human ingenuity."
Johnny Mnemonic. "Speaking on the phone from New York, Longo's memories are peppered with entertaining asides about who was 'evil,' 'a dick,' 'an idiot' or 'a fucking idiot.'"
"Twenty-five years ago, cinema met cyberspace in a riot of funky fashion, cool music and surveillance paranoia. It began in May 1995 with the release of Johnny Mnemonic, a delirious sci-fi action dystopia matching Keanu Reeves with seminal cyberpunk author William Gibson. In July, Sandra Bullock had her identity erased in conspiracy thriller The Net. In August, Denzel Washington pursued Russell Crowe's computer-generated serial killer in Virtuosity, and in September Angelina Jolie found her breakthrough role in anarchic adventure Hackers. In October, Kathryn Bigelow served up dystopian thriller Strange Days. It's hard to know what's most dated about these mid-'90s curios: the primitive-looking effects, the funky fashions or the clunky technology depicted on screen. But now, 25 years later, they've proved prescient in their concerns about surveillance, corporate power and the corruption of what seemed to be an excitingly democratic new age...
Most tellingly, Johnny Mnemonic and the other tech-focused films of 1995 all express fears around the misuse of surveillance in a connected world. The Net updates the paranoia of '70s thrillers The Conversation and The Anderson Tapes, and each movie features an unholy alliance of avaricious corporate bad guys and authoritarian law enforcement. Or as Matthew Lillard's character puts it in Hackers, "Orwell is here and livin' large!"
But the whistleblowing heroes of Hackers, The Net and Johnny Mnemonic use their skills to subvert and unpick the establishment's grip on technology. Hackers in particular radiates an infectious idealism as the diverse crew of anarchic youngsters rollerblade rings around the greedy suits and clueless cops, "snooping onto them as they snoop onto us". The movie highlights technology's potential to be a tool for wrongdoing and a democratic, open medium where you can be who you want to be... Sadly, 1995's wave of technology-themed movies have one other thing in common. They all bombed.
CNET's reporter gets new quotes from the director of Hackers — as well as one of that film's then-15-year-old technical advisors, Nicholas Jareck. "For all its exaggerations," he says, "it does a decent job of showing the hacker spirit — those kids were tinkerers, experimenting, reveling in their ability to figure something out. It's a celebration of human ingenuity."
Johnny Mnemonic. "Speaking on the phone from New York, Longo's memories are peppered with entertaining asides about who was 'evil,' 'a dick,' 'an idiot' or 'a fucking idiot.'"
Max Headroom (Score:4, Informative)
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Weak sauce; they licensed the name and the top line of the plot, but they are not otherwise the same thing at all.
One is a dystopic short film that everybody who saw it loved, but since it wasn't commercial nobody saw it, and the other was an awful television show with a great intro that people watched for the opening credits before changing the channel. One is still a cult classic today, the other is remembered only through its advertising promotions.
Furthermore, it had nothing to do with the internet, it
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Sounds like this one:
https://yts.mx/movies/strange-... [yts.mx]
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Brainstorm, now I gotta watch that, totally missed it. Love Walken, and if it is like Strange Days, I'm curious to see who did what first.
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The most realistic portrayal of the
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The Internet as we know it didn't exist back in the 1980s when
...Johnny Mnemonic came out.
As a result it's a bit odd using that one in the article. It'd be like using A Scanner Darkly as an example of Millennial fears of police surveillance.
there was a speculative 1960s film
There were dozens of speculative "what will the future look like" things across the decades, so it's to be expected that some of them will get it right.
Even down to the "She'll do the shopping and he'll have to pay for it" comedy.
It's not future tech predictions that make good sci-fi good. It's the exploration and examination of th
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That was from the rad 80s tho.
Strange Days (Score:4, Insightful)
Fantastic movie. The opening first person perspective shot took a year to complete because they had to design a special film camera that could be worn by the stunt actor.
Re: Strange Days (Score:4, Informative)
Die Hard is the perfect Christmas movie, and Strange Days is the perfect New Years movie.
Complete with its own ORIGINAL story (Score:4, Insightful)
Very underrated sci-fi flick.
It came complete with it's own original story as well, something Hollywood seems to be almost completely unable to do anymore.
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Agreed. It holds up surprisingly well considering most sci-fi ages like fish.
It bombed like hell in the theaters, which was a shame. I saw it in the theater, and the opening scene was freaking amazing. It's well worth watching, unlike Hackers which is a crime against man and God.
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Hahaha, I like Hackers but only because it's so terrible it comes back around for me. I'd certainly never say it was a good movie though :)
But yeah with Strange Days, I was always baffled by how poorly it did. It wasn't perfect but its concepts were great and there were (as you just pointed out) some really riveting scenes in it.
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Johnny Mnemonic pinball is better then the movie! (Score:2)
Johnny Mnemonic pinball is better then the movie!
Re: Johnny Mnemonic pinball is better then the mov (Score:2)
Unfair to the game. Moldy cheese is better than that movie.
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So when will someone make a Neuromancer movie
2021. Tim Miller directing.
Assuming of course that it doesn't fall through, just as the last 17 attempts have.
Hackers... (Score:1)
The cautionary tale of what happens if you connect a bunch of shit to the internet that shouldn't be, and something something Hollywood dudebro culture.
At the time of release, the movie seemed laughably inaccurate and a bad over Hollywood-ified depiction of the hacker subculture. Then things similar to scenes depicted in the movie started happening. Stuxnet, Aaron Swartz, swatting, etc. I hate to say it, but the movie was oddly prophetic.
I'm calling it now... Ready Player One is probably next.
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Really the worst part of hackers is the gibson with that crazy 3d interface. The social engineering aspect is spot on.
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Hackers did not show realistic hacking. It showed aspirational hacking. Back in the era when the school nerds were still being beaten up by the jocks, Hackers showed a world where the smart, tech-focused people were the cool ones, using their brain-power to fight for what they believe in, while holding exciting parties with computer games and music. Realistic? No. But a lot of people who watched films like Hackers really, really wanted it to be real, and did their best to live the fantasy.
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PHREAK Yo. Check this out guys, this is insanely great, it's got a 28.8 bps modem!
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I could have accepted the 3D interface if it wasn't being streamed over an acousticly coupled modern attached to a public payphone.
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We had that, VRML worked fine for creating useful 3D interfaces over dialup. They didn't have the bling of the movie, but that's mostly sugar on top of the useful part.
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I'm calling it now... Ready Player One is probably next.
Wait for the sequel: Ready Player Two :-)
Hackers got a lot right. (Score:4, Interesting)
The thing that Hackers got right more than anything is that people, especially those in positions of power neither understand technology nor want to understand technology, they just want it to work for them. The police in the film tried applying what works in the real world only to end up chasing their tails. The corporate executives on the other hand were baffled and angry while not understanding they are responsible for system insecurity. It was prophetic in that lots of things that shouldn't be connected were connected to the internet without proper security measures.
There were good lessons to be learned from that movie and few if anybody took them to heart.
Ah yes, "The Net" ... (Score:3)
The film that showed the "whois" command returning a photo of a person's driver's license. So stupid.
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It also showed ordering pizza via a website. That seemed like the coolest thing ever, and I was ecstatic when it finally became a reality.
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It also showed ordering pizza via a website. That seemed like the coolest thing ever, and I was ecstatic when it finally became a reality.
I'm not surprised to took so long. I remember pizza places only taking orders from landlines because they were losing too much money on orders they couldn't find, or were pranks. If they couldn't handle cell phones, they definitely weren't ready for the internet.
still doing modems in movies in 1992 (Score:3)
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And they got the cryptography pretty much right, which isn't too surprising that Len Adleman was a consultant on the movie (Adleman is the A in the RSA algorithm).
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This. Sneakers is at least partially responsible for my career choices over the intervening years. I remember commenting to the other geek I went to see it with that assuming one allows the premise (that it's possible to break RSA with a hardware black box, which was more outlandish in a pre-Quantum Computing world) the rest of the tech actually held together pretty well. Out of all of the 90s era movies, it'd be the one I'd not be horridly embarrassed to watch with my 11 year old daughter.
Rewatch it ver
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premise was discovery of a new algorithm for factoring large semi-primes to get the private key, much more comprehensive a feat than solving the RSA problem. Thus the amount of hardware/time tiny since not done by known methods.
Hackers: A hex listing at 01:08:29 (Score:1)
According to some reviewers Hackers [imdb.com] has acquired cult status. The hacking is laughable. I mean come on, the main plot is capsizing an oil tanker over the Internet. Best to watch it late at night when you're zonked
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What, you don't think there's an oil tanker, or oil rig, with a SCADA system available via the internet that could be hacked?
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According to some reviewers Hackers [imdb.com] has acquired cult status. The hacking is laughable. I mean come on, the main plot is capsizing an oil tanker over the Internet. Best to watch it late at night when you're zonked :]
Oh, it is definitely laughably bad. My favorite part is Penn Jillette as the IT fighting off all the hacks, worms, etc (and of course all the unrealistic visual displays).