10 Classic And Absurd Examples Of Computer Hacking In Movies
Hollywood is well known for taking artistic liberties and rewriting history for dramatic effect. When it comes to Tinseltown movies about hacking, logic and intelligent writing are usually well in the back seat. However, not all hacking movies are absurd. Some are even visionary. Yet the industry's habit of delivering high-stakes cyber narratives with a generous dose of absurdity makes for a better story.
These movies often make viewers endure worlds where hacking is more than a skill. Some might send you on an over-the-top ride of hacking adventures accentuated by questionable technical jargon, bling-bling graphics, and moments where logic (and often the laws of physics) are blatantly disregarded.
Despite Hollywood's nasty habit of over-exaggerating the art of hacking in film, some movies have actually come out the other side and earned respect in the cybersecurity community. These movies strive for a semblance of accuracy and offer glimpses into the fascinating world of hacking without the need to resort to ludicrous exaggerations. There's always a place at the table for these types of movies, but who doesn't love a cheese-fest with a healthy dose of techno-babble, too?
Swordfish
As long as you can leave the realm of reality firmly behind you, "Swordfish" is both wildly entertaining and utterly absurd. With such Hollywood glitz in the form of John Travolta, Hugh Jackman, Don Cheadle, and the captivating presence that is Halle Berry, you wouldn't think twice about tuning in if you found it when browsing through Netflix. That is, of course, unless you have already endured even five minutes of it.
As a hacking movie, "Swordfish" gets almost everything wrong. It's riddled with the amateur errors we now expect in Hollywood blockbusters, from misspelled technical terms (algorythm!) to code lines obviously repeating over and over during hacking scenes that the audience is supposed to be taking seriously.
The absurdity peaks when Jackman's character effortlessly deciphers unbreakable 512-bit encryption keys in a snap, an impossible feat in reality. Scriptwriting intelligence doesn't end there, either. At one point, Travolta's government operative character forces Jackman into hacking the Pentagon while receiving the unwanted attention of a female and a gun pointed at his head, which he does, of course, just in the nick of time.
John Travolta received a Razzie Award nomination for his eccentric performance. In fact, he managed to get himself nominated for two separate movies that year. However, if you're one for over-the-top acting and action sequences, you may well enjoy this ridiculous movie. That is provided you can put aside its disregard for complex hacking techniques.
Live Free or Die Hard
Everyone loves "Die Hard". Everyone. Everyone also loves a good trilogy, and this franchise gave us that with "Die Hard" and its following two sequels. Like all good trilogies, Hollywood always finds room for another installment, and finding one that is actually good can be a challenge. Unfortunately, once John McClane moved away from airports and Nagasaki buildings and into the realm of hacking, everyone had already had their fill.
It's little wonder because "Live Free or Die Hard" — or "Die Hard 4.0" — is utterly absurd. Not only are the action sequences way over the top (even for a "Die Hard" movie), but the movie's portrayal of hacking is just downright ridiculous. The film goes beyond the realms of possibilities for dramatic effect and displays the usual Hollywood gibberish regarding sophisticated hacking while Bruce Willis beats everybody up.
This time, McClane's terrorist adversaries are a team of genius hackers. In fact, these guys must be hackers beamed down from another universe because they can infiltrate everything from the stock market to traffic lights on a whim. However, they don't use this magic to promote their cause or empty bank accounts. Instead, they set off on a relentless pursuit of said policeman and his hacker sidekick. The result is a chaotic mess and a slew of hacking gobbledygook.
Sneakers
Despite some moments of reality stretching, "Sneakers" remains one of the most respected hacking movies to date. What makes this all the more impressive is the fact that it was made way back in 1992.
An all-star cast is led by screen legends Robert Redford, Ben Kingsley, Dan Aykroyd, and two late greats in Sidney Poitier and River Phoenix. Each captures the essence of hacking while remaining highly convincing in their respective roles. It's a movie that was considered well ahead of its time, and rewatching in the modern era allows us to see just how visionary Hollywood once could be.
However, "Sneakers" is not without its absurdities. Much of the premise centers around a black box that can hack into any system, network, or device within a few seconds, which would obviously lead to global catastrophe if it fell into the wrong hands. Sound familiar? While powerful hacking tools and techniques do exist, even the most advanced cyberwarfare tools then or since has been able to perform near the level of the "Sneakers" black box.
Yet respect is garnered throughout the movie with its use of genuine hacking techniques, such as shoulder surfing and social engineering. The film also focuses on the teamwork generally deployed in hacking rather than concentrating on a brilliant and eccentric individual with superhuman hacking skills. "Sneakers" is an altogether well-made and respected movie that can also be liked by those who lean more toward action and espionage persuasions.
Superman III
Richard Pryor was cast in the third installment of the "Superman" movies that endeared audiences in the late '70s and early '80s. He played Gus Gorman, a computer programmer who brought light humor to the movie. And while there was always a place for humor in those early Man of Steel movies, the campy scriptwriting also packed in a ridiculous amount of hacking absurdities.
He utilizes salami-slicing, a method employed to siphon small fractions of money from multiple accounts. To do this, he must first bypass his company's accounting department security measures, which he does by simply typing "overide all security" when prompted for a security code. Despite his glaring spelling mistake, all security is easily overridden. The genius scriptwriting doesn't end there, either. Gus follows this with sophisticated coding examples, including "channel half cents from all Webscoe salaries into above expenses account."
Gus then hacks into the Metropolis City's infrastructure and causes all kinds of chaos, including the infiltration of traffic lights. As the nonsense ensues, streets become congested with stalled vehicles, and pedestrians are left stranded amidst blaring horns and frustrated shouts. The absurdity reaches new heights when the green man on the pedestrian lights becomes impatient, lifts himself up to the red man's level, and proceeds to beat him up.
The Net
Sandra Bullock plays Angela Bennett, a freelance systems analyst, in 1995's "The Net." While Bullock played the role well–in fact, she carries the whole movie, it was a bit of a critical flop, and its hacking scenes served up much of the usual Hollywood extravagance.
Bennett is a bit of a loner who mainly interacts with people online. She receives a floppy disk of a fictional game that features a backdoor with the potential to wreak havoc on the very fabric of digital security, turning her world upside down faster than you can say "Ctrl+Alt+Delete." Angela's attempts to expose it lead to her identity being erased, forcing her to navigate a dangerous world where she's pursued by adversaries seeking to — well, you get the picture.
The backdoor is blatantly represented by a Pi symbol in the corner of the screen. It's unlikely that hackers would leave such obvious markers while actual code is, once again, omitted and replaced by flashy graphics. Bennett's hacking actions mostly entail frantic mouse clicking and extensive use of the escape key. From a visionary point of view, it did, at the very least, predict the popularity of ordering pizza online.
Jurassic Park
Regardless of the feasibility of a real-life "Jurassic Park," you would still expect a Steven Spielberg film to go all out in the pursuit of plausibility. While it is indeed one of the most popular movies ever made and a clear Hollywood highlight of the '90s, one particular scene didn't go down too well with those in the know. The infamous "It's a UNIX system, I know this" scene raised a few chuckles among the tech-enlightened and still pulls a laugh or two today.
The portrayal of the UNIX system in "Jurassic Park" is often criticized for stretching the truth. While visually impressive, the depiction of a 3D file browser as the primary tool for navigating a complex system is far-fetched. Such interfaces were not the standard for system administration in the nineties.
It becomes even more implausible when you mix in the fact that a teenage girl (played by 12-year-old Ariana Richards) could operate the system without using the fundamental command line interface. However, you have to admire her confident assertion that she could miraculously save the day based purely on the fact that she recognizes the UNIX system. On top of that, she is able to perform said miracle despite being under pressure from a very hungry velociraptor.
Firewall
Harrison Ford has played iconic characters in many of Tinseltown's beloved movies, from Han Solo and Indiana Jones to Jack Ryan and Rick Deckard. It's safe to say that Jack Stanfield isn't remembered as one of his more memorable characters, but that's who he played in 2006's "Firewall."
Stanfield is the chief of security at Landrock Pacific Bank, and his family is kidnapped by criminals looking to use his expertise to bypass the bank's security systems to transfer a big pile of moolah into their offshore accounts. However, by leaving digital records of their transactions within the bank's system, they really would have been quickly nabbed by the law in the real world. With the additional and unnecessary charges of kidnapping, extortion, and violent crime, you start to ask yourself how they ever reached the lofty heights of criminal masterminds.
However, the movie's most absurd hacking moment involves Stanfield attaching a scanner head from a fax machine to an iPod to improvise a data transfer device. He quips, "I need my daughter's MP3 player to use as a hard drive," before hooking it up to the scanner head and adding, "10,000 songs, 10,000 accounts — it won't know the difference." In the real world, this would require significant (and compatible) hardware and expertise.
Hackers
With its outrageously excellent '90s soundtrack, cool stars such as Jonny Lee Miller and a young Angelina Jolie, and even some initially promising glimpses into the world of real hacking, "Hackers" is ultimately dated and cliched. The movie divides opinion today because of its shortcomings in realistic hacking against the fact that it is so utterly entertaining. Renowned movie critic Roger Ebert said of "Hackers," "The movie is smart and entertaining, then, as long as you don't take the computer stuff very seriously. I didn't. I took it approximately as seriously as the archeology in 'Indiana Jones.'"
Despite realistic depictions of social engineering and payphone hacking, the movie soon falls down into an abyss of absurdity. Among this festival of folly is a laughable keyboard battle between Lee Miller's Zero Cool character and Jolie's Acid Burn that features wild graphics and high-octane music for dramatic effect. Still, at least '90s British electronic music fans will find it in their hearts to forgive.
The movie culminates in utter silliness with its nonsensical "cookie monster" virus scene, which plays out like a scene from "Pac-Man" and showcases high-quality writing, such as "it's replicating eating up memory, what do I do?" as an animated cookie monster wreaks havoc on the monitor. "Type cookie, you idiot," comes the reply, "I'll head him off at the pass." Genius.
Independence Day
"Independence Day" is pure popcorn-popping fun. Luckily, it isn't usually taken any more seriously than that and certainly doesn't garner much respect in the world of cybersecurity. Jeff Goldblum plays eccentric tech genius David Levinson, who manages to wirelessly upload a virus to a colossal alien mothership and save the planet from certain doom.
While Wi-Fi was unavailable to the public until 1997, with this movie set in July '96, it's safe to assume that Levinson had some form of access to help him in his quest to save the planet. However, we shouldn't forget that he was hacking into alien tech on a colossal galaxy-traversing spaceship orbiting Earth. Thankfully, he was using an Apple product in the form of a Macintosh PowerBook 5300 with 64MB of RAM to perform his hacking wizardry, virtually ensuring his destiny as the hero.
With his uncanny ability, David Levinson is able to save humanity even though the alien race doesn't speak any English or use any operating system compatible with anything from Earth. However, a seven-minute scene was cut from the movie that would have offered audiences one fewer head-scratching moment. The deleted scene explains how Levinson overcomes language and compatibility issues using a crashed alien ship from Roswell.
Skyfall
While the 23rd James Bond movie is a wild and extravagant ride, it doesn't dodge criticism for its hacking depictions. It received favorable reviews following its release and went on to earn more than $1 billion at the box office and claim its spot on the list of highest-grossing movies of all time.
However, the movie's portrayal of hacking is criticized for its unrealistic depictions. These include a particularly visually captivating yet nonsensical scene with encrypted code transforming into a 3D subway diagram. Just prior to this, we have James Bond's logic-defying ability to recognize separate parts of plain text within the code that together make the name of a London tube station that magically unlocks the encryption.
During this scene, many hacking terms are thrown around for dramatic effect and credibility, but the dialog makes little sense. Any hacking expert in the audience in 2012 may have been forgiven for disrupting the scene's tense atmosphere with loud chuckles of disbelief.