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?