\u201cI think he\u2019d enjoy Hackers,\u201d I say. \u201cHe\u2019s old enough now and into computers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat movie sucks,\u201d my husband says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So I load it up. I used to love this movie, but can\u2019t remember why. I\u2019m lying. It\u2019s because of a twenty-three year old Jonny Lee Miller.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Right away I know this is still something special. It\u2019s 1995 in Manhattan, and I point out the twin towers to our eight year old son. We have a short chat about terrorism and how I once flew London to NY with scissors, nail clippers and a box-cutter in my carry-on and how useful it was in opening my shrink-wrapped flight meal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An angel-haired neon hipster appears on-screen. Angelina Jolie is gorgeous with an iconic pixie cut that a million women tried to emulate, to their absolute ruin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMy God, she\u2019s spectacular,\u201d I announce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNo she\u2019s not,\u201d my husband says. He\u2019s lying. The eight year old is riveted, but with a suspicious expression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our hacker hero amazes us with his hacking skills and perfect jawline. He spray-paints his keyboard in camo, types very quickly and shouts \u201cI\u2019m in!\u201d at random intervals. He wields his mastery of the internet through a public pay phone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s that?\u201d asks our son.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHistory. Watch the movie.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Angelina is no slouch either. She has a set-up with a \u201ckiller refresh rate\u201d and a pretty chip \u201ctriple the speed of a Pentium.\u201d They crash and surf their illicit way through the back alleys of a nascent web in digital cityscape montages and traffic gamer aesthetic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI can\u2019t take this,\u201d my IT developer systems programming engineer solutions architect husband says. \u201cLiterally nothing works this way. I\u2019m gonna throw up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This movie is brilliant, awesome and the height of coolness. Jesse Bradford is here, adorably baby-cheeked before he\u2019d go on to be Kirsten Dunst\u2019s crush in Bring It On. Matthew Lilliard is a hyperactive couch-surfing tech-head in plaits, as yet unbesmirched by that Scooby-Doo shit. They race around on skate boards with their keyboards under one arm. These kids are so cool, nobody would ever be a fraction as cool ever again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jonny Lee Miller does a quick draw with floppy disks. Floppies!!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat are those?\u201d asks our son.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cLike memory sticks. The later ones held 1.44 megs of data,\u201d my husband says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A single photo on my phone is 3.8 megs. That can\u2019t be right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt is,\u201d he says. \u201cI used to do installs with twenty floppies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To facilitate the quick draw, Jonny has to wear a t-shirt that ends two inches above his navel. I am mesmerised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhy did he cut his t-shirt in half?\u201d our son asks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt was the nineties, darling, we could do whatever we wanted.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And we could. We could break into federal bank servers and criminal record databases like they were tins of beetroot and we were hyper-colored can openers. We could just dial up a gibson supercomputer, guess a password and hack the planet with our elite krump viruses and cyber-worms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis is not appropriate,\u201d my husband says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He\u2019s right. Angelina is a sex-positive uber-feminist hacker and now she\u2019s clearly not wearing underwear beneath her space-punk jacket. I\u2019m even more mesmerised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI mean the programming,\u201d my husband says. \u201cI don\u2019t want our kids believing they can use a computer in these bullshit ways.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI won\u2019t,\u201d says our son. He\u2019s lying. Already I can see his tiny dreams of speed-hacking a school schedule to get out of nerd maths and into ultra cool kids gaming class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On-screen, hackers unite and uncover the worm, avert a global environmental disaster and bring down the bad guys. They hack the TV satellites and broadcast their victory to the entire world, which is brought to its knees by their radical coolness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWho made the world wide web?\u201d our son asks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe did, honey.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNo, the world wide spider! It\u2019s a joke, get it?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNo, it was me. Gen X. We built it like we built pretty much everything while selling our kidneys to afford uni and housing and avocado and now we\u2019re broke and really tired, so can you bring me a cup of tea please?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Behind the closing credits, Jonny and Angelina are kissing in a pool in slow motion while their clothes magically dissolve and nothing will ever be this awesome ever again. This is the zenith of my generation. This is the dream we were given, and in a few short years it will be over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I drink my tea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cI think he\u2019d enjoy Hackers,\u201d I say. \u201cHe\u2019s old enough now and into computers.\u201d \u201cThat movie sucks,\u201d my husband says. So I load it up. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3641,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[23],"tags":[407,52,406,405,408,8,109],"class_list":["post-3640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-angelina-jolie","tag-elissa-mckay","tag-gen-x","tag-hackers","tag-jonny-lee-miller","tag-mountain-ash-chapter","tag-review"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/sff1uY-hackers","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3761,"url":"https:\/\/mountainashchapter.com.au\/?p=3761","url_meta":{"origin":3640,"position":0},"title":"Barbenheimer","author":"Kylie Eklund-Denman","date":"August 15, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"When the Barbenheimer social media frenzy began, I decided to remain detached from it at all costs. 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Universal Studios, or I Regret Everything","author":"Elissa McKay","date":"April 7, 2026","format":false,"excerpt":"And I do, I really do. I regret every choice I\u2019ve ever made in life that has brought us to this misbegotten moment. Everyone around us is screaming. I am screaming. The wail rips from my mouth as my stomach lurches downwards. 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