The audience now knows and understands the attraction these talented teens have for hacking into other systems. Softley and his crew transformed the strange and unknown into a flamboyantly colorful universe that seemed enchanting and thrilling, a space where the uninvited and marginalized could feel like Indiana Jones exploring the undiscovered territory. The end result, of course, is the furthest from reality - a bunch of silly gibberish and ridiculous mumbo-jumbo - but it nevertheless turned the unfamiliar world of cyberspace into visually enthralling displays of fantasy. Director Iain Softley ('K-PAX') worked closely with cinematographer Andrzej Sekula ('Pulp Fiction,' 'American Psycho') and stage designers for creating the world of computers and their interior workings. In essence, the movie effectively turned its finger on the pulse of a revolutionary new trend into something cinematic.Īdmittedly, being ahead of its time or keeping to the latest craze is not reason enough to praise any production, but the fact that it does so in an entertaining fashion is. So, part of the fun in this 1995 sci-fi thriller was the fact that the subject matter was familiar to only a select few while also delivering enough action and excitement to attract a wider audience. The world of cyberspace was little known to most moviegoers, and they probably knew even less of the hacker subculture. The World Wide Web was still a strange and foreign world to the masses, made more easily accessible to the public thanks to early web browser Mosaic only a couple years earlier. At the time of its release, computers and the internet inside the home and in the hands of private citizens were still a relatively new concept. As cheesy and silly as it may be - riddled with lots of absurdly comical dialogue and tons of techno jargon - 'Hackers' still manages to entertain twenty years later.