In the tech/geek crowd there are 3 movies that stand above the rest. Here they are in chronological order:
TRON – 1982
A resourceful hacker breaks into a mainframe to find information that will prove his side of the story. The bulk of the movie is spent visualizing a world inside the computer, where programs live out their brief lives. With a strong emphasis on video games this movie appealed to many of the kids fascinated with the machines that populated arcades every where. This movie was more about the fantasy of the computer world than trying to give a reasonable portrayal of how things really were.
It was one of the earliest films to make use of computer graphics, along with The Last Starfighter in 1984. Such special effects, common place today, were a big deal at the time.
WarGames – 1983
A computer savvy high school student starts out by changing his grades and ends up in a military simulation for nuclear war while searching for new games to play. The main character, David Lightman, helped solidify the view of computer hacker teens as socially awkward and misunderstood by those in authority.
The term ‘war dialer’, where a computer program calls phone numbers automatically looking for other computers, was coined from the dialer program shown in the movie. With the wide spread use of wifi the term ‘war driving’ is a modern day version of same phrase.
Sneakers – 1992
A team that specializes in testing security systems gets in over their heads. This movie has a little bit of everything; cryptography, conspiracies, phreaking, social engineering, politics, break ins and a blind man driving a van.
The list of actors for this movie is impressive, combined with a fun story with plenty of twists. To top it all off this is perhaps the most reasonable portrayal of the geek/tech scene of any mainstream film.
I don’t think that it’s coincidence that these movies are all before the popular adoption of the Internet. With technology and computers being so integrated into the daily routine of so many it’s hard to make a modern film that shows their use in a story that doesn’t look exceedingly boring. The result is tech/geek movies become more like action/adventure movies.
What’s your favorite tech/tech movie?
22 replies on “The 3 Greatest Tech/Geek Movies Of All Time”
Sneakers is the BEST. Your post makes me want to rent the other two since I somehow missed War Game and was just a little thing when Tron came out.
But hey, no shout outs to Hackers and their really awesome Apple P6? 😀
And the music on Tron was exceptional!
No Star Wars?
You are missing some good ones…
1. Matrix – Easily one of the greatest geek movies of all time.
2. Jurassic Park – How about this line, “This is Unix, I know this…” spoken by the twelve year old Ariana Richards.
3. How about all of the even numbered Star Trek movies?
4. Blade Runner – Do I even need to say anything here?
Maybe I cross the line from straight up geek to sci-fi, but they all blend together for me. I mean think of all the geeky stuff in Star Wars!
TRON!!!!! I so have that movie on special edition DVD!
What’s on the special edition that the regular DVD doesn’t have? I need to know if I’ve missed something important!
Jurassic Park? The line you quoted killed the geek cred for that movie.
Star Wars would be good, but has a different feel than movies like Sneakers and War Games.
Yes, Star Wars is for Geeks, but not necessarily *about* Geeks. Is that how you’re ranking them?
I hated Tron the first time I saw it because it portrayed computers unrealistically. Always a pet peeve of mine but this was the first movie that really set me off. (Yes, I was 13. I was a weird kid.)
I’d vote for “The Matrix” instead. (The first one. It’s a shame they never made a sequel.)
I loved Wargames (although it wasn’t realistic either) and I loved Sneakers because it got so many things right.
Yeah, more about portraying geeks, although Tron stretches that a bit 🙂
The music really added to that video game feel.
I actually watched most of Hackers recently. It had glimmers of being a good geek movie, but those moments were over shadowed by the entire rest of the film 🙂
Having only watched some of “The Matrix” on TV I don’t have a full comparison, but it strikes me as being at least as much fantasy as Tron was.
I don’t know what your DVD has but mine is a 2 disc 20th Anniversary Collector’s Edition that was released in 2002. It’s got LOTS of goodies! Commentaries, deleted scenes, “making of” type stuff, storyboards, etc. Not to mention you could watch it in Spanish or FRENCH! That’s when you know you’ve got a really snazzy edition!
The matrix really was pretty exciting, but very unrealistic and I didn’t think the trippiness factor was as great as everyone says, but it was very computer geeky nonetheless.
I might have the 20th anniversary DVD, I’ll have to check. And if I’m going to get it out I may as well watch it again 🙂
Hi there,
I loved Wargames, I must say that I have watched it many times and I still don’t get bored. I must mention that Star Wars is probably one of my fav’s and I still watch them today.
Your old office mates just held the first “IT Movie Night” last Friday. Our feature presentation was Sneakers! (Especially appropriate given the CSU-wide security audit we’re going through.)
I totally agree with your comments re Hackers. If you want to see a *really* bad “tech/geek” movie, try The Net. (gag!)
‘The Net’, the movie that taught everyone to beware of the Pi symbol!
What about Real Genius?
Real Genius is pretty good.