I think the only part that really pulled me out of the movie was when they were testing the device and it was decrypting a dial-up feed random character by random character on the screen. It wasn't "Hackers" bad but it was still pretty unbelievable.
Oh yeah. It snapped me out of immersion the first time too.
But upon reflection, I find it forgivable, because if you think about what it would've taken to make it accurate, and then enough narrative to explain it to the fraction of the audience not up on the technical details, you've got a recipe for 15 minutes of yawns.
The story is no more or less valid for that directorial shorthand, and it could easily be replaced with an authentic scene if you really wanted to. It would break the pacing but not the plot.
Hackers does a great job at answers the question “How do you make hacking, which is literally just typing, visually interesting?” It is kind of like Pixar anthropomorphizing things like emotions. The software becomes a semi-physical landscape with viruses moving across and through that space (like the rabbit virus literally multiplying rabbits). It isn’t trying to be “accurate”, its playing with the idea and concept of hacking. I think it is a really fun movie.
Agreed, just saw the remaster in a theater and it holds up surprisingly well. What seemed like glaring inaccuracies in 1995 now seem like whimsical visualizations and over the top silliness. Except of course "It's got a 28.8 bps modem".
The other thing I noticed was that it is chock-full of gender non-conformity. Not in the plot, but visually - almost every hacker character wears androgynous clothing or makeup or something along those lines. The over-representation of trans people in computer security is a common trope now and I wonder if Hackers was the first time that was depicted in media.
Little known fact: in the late '00s, PGP Corp had developed a free standalone "Viewer" to decrypt email if you didn't have the full PGP email product installed (the onboarding process walked you through initial key generation and publication on a keyserver).
The decryption process showed the encrypted PGP Message block and used a similar Sneakers-inspired animation to transform it into your plaintext email. It was incredibly cool and I remain sad that the product never saw the light of day.
