The Only Winning Move

When is politics not allowed in literary criticism? When it acts like a filter, that’s when. If, upon encountering so much as a hint of a political theme you dislike, you instantly shut down and refuse to look further, then you have a little homunculus censor living in your brain who is interfering with your ability to fully appreciate life.

Roger Ebert has this problem. I think he’s a good movie critic for the most part. As a general rule, I can read his reviews and know whether I will enjoy a movie. Sometimes, I even come to reconsider how I feel about movies I’ve already seen by reading what he thinks about them. And then there are those other times when I can read a four-star review of his and know for certain I’ll hate the film. Or, as was the case this weekend, a one-star review that tells me without a doubt I’ll love it.

The movie is 3 O’Clock High, a cult 80s high school film (no, not one of those 80s high school films) that I’d caught scenes from over the years but never sat down and watched all the way through. It’s not a great film. But it is entertaining, a brilliant nostalgia vehicle (for those of us who were born in the 70s and grew up in the 80s), and even if it’s not a stand-out classic, it’s at least one of the better examples of its genre.

Ebert gave it one star. Why? Because it’s “fascist.” Because the story involves a kid shitting his shorts all day scrambling around trying everything he can think of to get out of a confrontation with the school bully that goes down at 3 o’clock and - horror of horrors - the bully doesn’t have a “human side.”

If there is a pathological bully in the student body, no attempt is made to understand him, sympathize with him or encourage the audience in the difficult process of empathy.

It’s too tough on today’s teenage moviegoers, I guess, to ask them to hold two ideas in their mind at once: that a kid could be a bully and that he could also have some big problems and be in need of understanding.

Yeah, nice try, but I call bullshit, and here’s why:

The Thompson character, for example, is not just a distant, unattainable symbol, but a young woman with feelings. The tomboy doesn’t just pine from afar, but helps Keith in his campaign to win a date with this girl of his dreams. And in the final sequence, in which the tomboy acts as chauffeur on the dream date, the dialogue isn’t about sex; it’s about learning to be true to yourself and not fall for the way people are packaged. By the movie’s end, everybody has learned something about themselves.

That’s from his review of Some Kind of Wonderful, the actual John Hughes installment from the same year. Anyone who’s seen it will have noticed a glaring omission. Yes, that’s right, Some Kind of Wonderful has a class bully too - or at least an unreasonable bad guy. And no, this bad guy in Some Kind of Wonderful hasn’t “learned anything about himself” by the end of the film either. Mostly he just gets egg on his face - which is what stock bully characters show up in movies to do.

So what’s the difference? Why is it OK for the bad guy in Some Kind of Wonderful to be a stock plot device, but not in 3 O’Clock High? I think it’s the leather jacket. You see, in Some Kind of Wonderful, the bad guy is a Rich Snob, but in 3 O’Clock High he’s working class. And one-dimensional bad guys are only ever allowed in Roger Ebert’s world if they’re making an Acceptable Political Point^tm.

I know what you’re thinking, and no, it isn’t that Some Kind of Wonderful is the more thoughtful film. It certainly takes itself more seriously, but the plot contrivances in it are every bit as transparent as those of every other movie of the genre. There’s the working class kid who wants to be an artist, he’s in love with the popular girl who won’t give him the time of day and is in turn loved by his tomboy working class friend. He has a shot with the popular girl, but only because her jerk of a boyfriend is every fratboy child-of-privilege stereotype in the book turned up to 11. If Ebert rates this one higher than other study hall ’sploitation movies, it’s only because he never took the time to ask himself why this or any girl considers this guy serious relationship material in the first place. Trophy date, sure, but no girls I know would be in love with him for “who he is.” No, Some Kind of Wonderful is entertaining, but it’s a comic book, right up to the last scene where our hero makes The Right Choice in what has got to be one of the more implausible Moments of Realization in 80s cinema. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

My axe to grind here is that people who think Some Kind of Wonderful is deep don’t get to diss 3 O’Clock High - not if they really paid attention. Yeah, sure, our resident bully is a stock plot device, but then, that’s rather the point. The movie isn’t about the fight, and it isn’t about giving the bully his comeuppance. It’s just a nice, light-hearted exaggeration of having “one of those days.” You know - “those days” … of the kind we all have in high school. In college, for that matter. At work. In the nursing home. With the difference being that when you’re in high school everything always seems so much more important than it really is. 3 O’Clock High has the same basic message that every high school movie has: that you’ve got more in you than you think, but sometimes it takes a little pressure to bring it out. I liked this one better than most because the comical exaggeration is better than most. The bully isn’t really even a character. He’s an implausible force of nature - ridiculous by design, because the whole point is that it be ridiculous. What the movie is trying to capture is that feeling we all had in high school of being under huge amounts of pressure but unable to complain about it because we know that “it’s just high school” and the Real World is gonna be so much worse, all the while unable to ignore the reality that it actually is hard - sensing a disconnect in there somewhere. 3 O’Clock High nails that feeling and manages to be really entertaining in the process. I give it 3 stars at least.

The take-home message is that “stodgy” is a common word because it’s a common concept. I get that it’s impossible to turn off your moral radar when watching movies. Movies are about people and values and all that good stuff, and I can see how it would be impossible to like a movie that’s cheering for something you think is evil. But I think you don’t get to trash a movie based on the costumes alone. If you’re going to write about a movie’s values, you need to at least make an effort to understand what they are. Not all bit characters need to be real people - but if you’re going to be so silly as to insist that they always do, you don’t get to make special exceptions for those vaunted caricatures you happen to approve of.

Politics are bad in criticism when they get in the way of seeing what’s on the screen in front of you.

There are a million ways to get out of a fight, but not in the Hollywood of Rambo. Even a dumb teen movie such as this has to end with one of those fist fights where every blow sounds like the special effects guys are whacking bicycle seats with Ping-Pong paddles. Is that all life is? The vicious define the terms? They say we will fight them, and so we have to? And we win because someone slips us some brass knuckles so we can coldcock the guy? Come on.

Well, yes, actually. What would Ebert suggest instead? Isn’t it sometimes the case that the vicious say we have to fight them, and so we do? Did he sleep through history class or something? There are those fights you can avoid, and there are those you can’t. There are those that only make things worse if you avoid them. And if your enemy brings brass knuckles to the fight intending to coldcock you, even though he’s naturally stronger and taller than you, then yes, I think it’s OK to pick them up off the ground and use them to fight back. So, for that matter, does everyone else. And so, for that matter, does Roger Ebert - when the movie is called Some Kind of Wonderful and the protagonist shows up to an easily avoidable fight with a gang of ruffians for backup. Feh.

One of my alltime favorite moves is Donnie Darko. Someday I’ll give it the post it deserves, explaining why I like it so much and what I get out of watching it. But for now I’ll stick to pointing out some complications that I noticed this time ’round.

Yes, I saw it again (twice) this weekend. And one of the things that always impresses me about it is how well thought-out the plot is. It’s ingenius, really, how it sort of lulls you into thinking that there are holes, but the more you think about what seem like holes, the more obvious it is that either they’re not really holes, or that they’re intentional. I really appreciate that in a film - or novel, or short story. When something is so cleverly put together that you can relax and try to puzzle out the things that don’t fit rather than making the more normal assumption that the author was just lazy. Rather like that famous example of the single inconsistent date in William Faulkner’s chronology. I apologize, I can’t remember the details, but it was pointed out to me as an undergraduate - that in one timeline of Yoknapatawpha County one of the dates is off by a year, if you cross-reference it with the events from some of Faulkner’s novels. It’s the exception that proves the rule in the completest possible sense of the term - so much so that my professor was convinced that Faulkner had done it on purpose to underscore the point - a common refrain in his novels - that there is accuracy in storytelling and accuracy in history, and that they are not the same thing.

It’s rare that I trust an author that much, but I trust Faulkner, and I trust Richard Kelly’s writing in Donnie Darko (I make no claims about his other films). So when I come across inconsistencies, I assume that there is some reason for them.

There are two that bugged me this time through.

The one - why does the movie start when it does? That opening scene is a great one - Donnie sleeping in the middle of a mountain road, to which he apparently sleepwalked (erm, sleep-biked) the night before. It seems wrong. The time bubble in which the movie takes place surely starts when Frank (the giant ghost-bunny) wakes him from his sleep and prevents him being killed by the falling jet engine. So … why does he go back to the mountain road to unwind time, and why does the movie start there? It’s especially interesting given that Donnie himself must realize that the events of the movie - such as they are - started there - the night before he first encountered Frank - rather than on the more plausible-seeming October 2. And it’s especially confusing given that the countdown Frank gives him starts from the meeting on the golf course, not from the mountain road.

The other - Gretchen has an assignment for Dr. Monnitoff - to write about the most important invention in human history. Donnie’s response makes it sound like he’s not in her Physics class. He first makes the assumption that she has Monnitoff (”It’s Monnitoff, right? That’s easy…”), which seems strange, given that they’re in the same English class and thus the same grade. More than that, he already knows the answer: soap. So all told, it sounds like Donnie took the class and had the assignment the year before. And yet - from later scenes of the movie we know that Gretchen and Donnie are both currently in Dr. Monnitoff’s class as they’re lab partners when they present their “Infant Memory Generator” project. Not only that, but the project they co-present seems to be following the theme of “great inventions.” Previously Monnitoff asked them to write about great past inventions, now he’s asking them to imagine the kind of thing that might be invented in the future, right? But if that’s the case, then why didn’t Donnie have the same essay due at the same time Gretchen did? Or - if Gretchen was doing a makeup assignment (this conversation happens on her second day of school; she’s a transfer student) - it seems somewhat implausible that (a) Monnitoff would’ve given her the exact same assignment as the rest of his students given that he’s already told them his preferred answer or that (b) Donnie would act the way that he does in telling her what the answer is. It’s certainly not going to help her to regurgitate an answer that Monnitoff will surely know someone tipped her off to, but more to the point, Donnie acts like he has to search his memory for it. It isn’t as much what he says but his general manner that makes it sound like he’s recalling something from further in the past than the previous week. Or that he would act like Gretchen is not in his Physics class when he must know that she is.

I have no clue what’s up with the first one. I would be really interested in suggestions. For the second one, I wondered if maybe it has to do with Donnie being held back a year. He mentions earlier in the same conversation that he’s held back, but if he said specifically what year I didn’t notice it. I have, however, the impression that it wasn’t the previous year, but further in the past. But I don’t really know where I get that impression, and anyway it would make sense if it were the previous year, given that his medication and therapist visits seem to be revent developments in his life (his father has to be reminded of the therapist’s name, for example, and Donnie’s sleepwalking, which apparently correlates with going off his pills, is relatively new, judging by his mother’s attitude to it). So maybe the assignment is a makeup assignment for Gretchen culled from last year’s batch, and it was one Donnie’s remembering from last year when he was in the same class for the first time. It still doesn’t really explain why he doesn’t seem to be sure that Gretchen’s in Monnitoff’s class, but the whole conversation is awkward, so it’s not hard to chalk that up to posturing.

Some things, like wine, mellow with age, gaining in quality with passing years. Others, like fresh fruit, have a brief blush of usefulness and must thereafter be discarded. I put Steven Spielberg in this latter category.

All my life I’ve been proudly “not impressed” with the man. Which is to say that post-Temple of Doom, there’s not a single movie of his I can remember having enjoyed. And as for Temple of Doom itself - well, I love it, but probably not for reasons of artistic merit.

But recently I’ve had the opportunity to see a lot of his early movies, and it turns out that there was a time when Spielberg did some truly fantastic stuff. Alright, so I’m not a big fan of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (truth be told, I can’t stand it) - but Raiders of the Lost Ark is just brilliant, and Jaws, which I saw for the first time ever about a week ago, turns out to be very well done. Maybe best of all is Duel, which I’ve only just seen today. Very impressive indeed.

The plot is straightforward. A man passes a particularly obnoxious truck on a lonely highway, inadvertently sparking a drawn-out - and increasingly bizarre - roadrage incident that lasts for the rest of his trip. There is very little dialogue (and what little there is mostly gets in the way), and we as good as never see the driver of the evil truck. All of which leaves me very little to sink my teeth into by way of explaining what was so great about this movie - it just was, that’s all.

I think if there’s something to say about this movie it’s that it’s easy to miss the skill that went into making it. There’s this popular trope about Hamlet and Othello, whereby Othello is meant to be technically superior … in that it follows to the letter Aristotle’s prescriptions for tragedy, the plot makes solid sense, and the story merely exaggerates a situation we’ve all been in … but that it’s Hamlet that’s somehow, inexplicably but undeniably, better - even though the plot makes little sense and we the audience can’t relate to the situation at all. The idea is that mediocre drama tends toward some ideal that good drama (Othello) achieves - but that great drama is drama like Hamlet, where it doesn’t exactly make sense, but something in it compells us to believe in it anyway. So - the punchline isn’t that Duel is great drama like Hamlet, because it isn’t at all. But as a horror movie, I think it’s an Othello.

I can’t remember who wrote it, but I once read a really convincing essay to the effect that the templatic pattern of the horror genre is one of denial. Characters find themselves in a situation characterized by a sequence of events that are slightly abnormal, suggesting that something truly impossible/supernatural is going on. But of course, impossible things are impossible, and at the outset of the story there’s nothing really compelling anyone to believe that the impossible is occurring. There are all those “perfectly rational explanations” that keep stretching the limits of plausibility the longer the story runs until finally, in the moment that defines a work as part of the genre, they have to face the fact that what’s going on REALLY IS supernatural/”impossible.” And so like with all genre literature the trick to writing masterful horror is largely a technical one: it’s a matter of stretching out the time before the big revelatory moment as much as you can without getting repetitive or boring, and then bringing things to a satisfying end reasonably quickly after the revelation. The worst thing you can do (and what often kills Stephen King novels for me) is letting the story continue too long after the big revelation - because that’s just pointless. The other way you can go wrong is to flub your buildup - whether by uneven pacing, overly credulous characters, whatever.

Duel is a by-the-book horror story. A man comes across a truck on the highway that’s just slightly over-the-line obnoxious. It’s striking the first time you see it, but not so striking as to be unbelievable. He passes it and soon finds himself in a road rage incident that, again, seems to be outside the bounds of normal experience, but isn’t so egregiously so that he can’t write it off. But as the movie rolls on it becomes harder and harder to deny that the situation is extraordinary, and it’s only resolved when our hero finally gives up on trying to get out of it fully intact.

The story alone would carry this movie, and for that reason it’s tempting to look at it and see nothing special. Give X, X a director, a shot at this, and the end result is bound to be acceptably entertaining. And it must be said that this one is not without its flaws. There’s some annoying internal monologue that it really could’ve done without, and one scene of expository dialogue (for those of you who’ve seen it - I’m talking about the bit where Mann reminds us that he was warned about the radiator hose) that would have been completely unforgiveable had it actually mattered to the resolution. But those bruised bits aside, this film is very well done. It’s true that we save most of our admiration for the likes of Stanley Kubirck and his Midas Touch - geniuses who can take second-rate novels like The Shining and rework them into something truly special. Spielberg isn’t Kubrick, and this definitely isn’t that. But it’s very good all the same.

Nowadays I find Spielberg equal parts boring and sentimental. But there was a time in the 70s when he was at the top of his game. I think what we’re in the presence of with Spielberg is someone without a lot of talent but huge amounts of dedication. He’s obsessed with movie-making, and like any dedicated professional he does his job well. There’s no genius here, but there is a lot of technical competence, and that’s good enough. Such people tend to wind down with age, I think, because in their early years they really have to struggle to worm their way in. Once they’re “in,” there’s no longer anything pushing them to greatness, because such skill as they show is never based in inspiration anyway. It’s a lot of sweat and hard work instead, and so take away the obstacles and you take away the mainspring. (A genius, by contrast, will produce brilliant work at his pleasure, whether or not his career is going anywhere as a result.) For an analogy from science fiction, I hold up Robert Silverberg - born without any special writing talent, poor guy, but so diligent and determined to succeed that he became a very good writer all the same. He’s earned a well-deserved place on SciFi’s A-list, Tower of Glass remains one of my favorites, and he’s easily one of the most “readable” of the genre. It isn’t what hand you’re dealt so much as how you play it, as they say.

And so it is with Duel. It’s not a “great” movie, but it’s a damned good one, and it improved my appreciation for Spielberg quite a bit.

I’ve seen two iconic “hacksploitation” flicks in as many weeks: Hackers and WarGames. Whether they deserve to be or not, these two somehow managed to end up the representatives of the genre for the 1990s and 1980s, respectively. I will now load my taste module and tell you what I think of them.

Alright, I don’t really ask Roger Ebert’s opinion on everything, I just wanted to point out that this is one of those he got more or less right. I would’ve given Hackers a lower rating than 3 stars myself, but Ebert redeems himself yet again another time already by recognizing WarGames for the classic it is. It gets a well-deserved 4 stars, and more importantly, he “gets” that it’s superior to its 1990s counterpart.

Why?

That’s actually something of an interesting question. There’s a lesson here for how to make movies - indeed, how to tell stories in general - that needs pointing out. When I was brainstorming about this myself, the answer I kept coming back to was that WarGames is just “more real” than Hackers. But obviously that’s absurd. Hackers, for all its many flaws, actually has something like a realistic plot. Trying to show off to his hacker friends, a kid hacks an oil company and does a half-assed job of it, getting caught. Normally the company would let it go, but unfortunately the security expert who catches him has been indulging in some salami slicing, and the kid just happened to have downloaded an incriminating file. So rather than take the fall himself, the security expert decides to frame the kid, and the rest of the story is, in addition to being about a rivalry between two hackers, largely about trying to put the blame back where it belongs. I mean, when you really step back and think about it, this is not only “realistic,” it’s probably actually happened not once but several times. Some security experts estimate that salami slicing happens all the goddamn time without ever coming to anyone’s attention. And what criminal won’t frame an amateur if he thinks doing so will get him off the hook? Hacking rivalries, for their part, are real and common. So what’s not to like? Contrast this with WarGames - where we have at the center of the plot an AI so advanced that it isn’t even on the horizon now, let alone 25 years ago when the movie came out. Not to mention - there are a host of glaring continuity errors. Joshua, for example, speaks in the same voice at NORAD that “he” does through David’s terminal, even though David himself tells us that the computer isn’t “really” talking, it’s just being modulated by his own voice synthesizing system. Since that system either doesn’t exist or would be different at NORAD, this seems hugely unlikely. And then there’s the bit about the computer going straight from Tic-Tac-Toe to “Global Thermonuclear War” when “learning” that you can’t win any games. How? No one told it to play “Global Thermonuclear War” with “number of players zero,” or to play any games other than Tic-Tac-Toe, for that matter. And while we can believe that a computer can run through all the possibilities of Tic-Tac-Toe in a matter of seconds, there’s simply no way it can do the same for “Global Thermonuclear War.” There are way too many variables. Chess alone (one of the games Joshua “skipped”) has 10¹²⁰ or so possible games - it’s a good bet that “Global Thermonuclear War” has many more. Anyone honestly think a computer can go through all of them in about a minute? More to the point, if we granted that it could, then the story itself is implausible. Joshua/WOPR’s full-time job, after all, it to do exactly that. If it had been doing its job, it would’ve reached this conclusion a long time before David Lightman hacked it.

Alright, so Hackers is technically more “real” than WarGames. Why does it seem the other way around?

That’s today’s big lesson in fiction writing, kids. It’s not enough to tell a convincing story; half of the craft is in selling it. I’m reminded of the part in Stranger in a Strange Land where Michael Valentine Smith is trying to earn a living as a magician and doing a poor job at it. Which is ironic, since as a telekinetic from Mars with spatial awareness of more than just our three dimensions, Mike actually can make things disappear for real. And yet he doesn’t really impress the crowd. I always thought this was one of Heinlein’s more convincing bits of insight. Magic is only 40% about having clever tricks: the other 60% is all in the show. Cleverness is important, but showmanship counts for more. So it is with movies too, apparently.

And dear ol’ Roger Ebert seems to pick up on this too. Here are some choice quotes from his reviews for each movie.

For Hackers:

The movie is well directed, written and acted, and while it is no doubt true that in real life no hacker could do what the characters in this movie do, it is no doubt equally true that what hackers can do would not make a very entertaining movie.

In other words, Ebert isn’t convinced, but then, he argues, he doesn’t hafta be. The classic defense: “just tell me a good story!”

Interesting, then, what he says about WarGames:

The movie, however, could easily go wrong by bogging us down in impenetrable computerese, or by ignoring the technical details altogether and giving us a “Fail Safe” retread. “WarGames” makes neither mistake. It convinces us that it knows computers, and it makes its knowledge into an amazingly entertaining thriller. (Note I do not claim the movie is accurate about computers — only convincing.)

HA! What a nice way to put it. It’s not just that WarGames fails to be accurate. It’s way beyond that, actually. So isn’t it interesting that it nevertheless manages to be convincing? How?

Well, that’s the magic, of course. If we knew the answer, then presumably someone could write a “Scriptwriting for Dummies” book that would actually work and save us from all Hollywood’s tripe. I don’t know the full answer; I don’t think anyone does. But here are some things that occur to me in this context anyway. So here goes - some tips on how to make a hacksploitation flick and get it right.

(1) Show us a hack that isn’t magic. It’s worth noting, I think, that the only hack the audience can follow in Hackers is the social engineering hack that gets our hero into the cable company early on. He tricks a hapless hourly into giving him the number on a crucial modem. From there on, of course, it’s all black magic. YAAAWWWWNNN. There’s really nothing clever to see here. The “fraud” technique used is as old as the hills. If we were pulling this same trick before the computer age, the method would hardly change. We’d still need to mysteriously know enough about the company’s organization to know exactly which dude to call, we’d still need him to be naive, only back in the good ol’ days instead of ordering the computer to play us the video we want, we’d just have to fake some instructions from upper management. Big deal. Contrast this with the big hack in WarGames. In WarGames, David Lightman programs his computer to call every number in Sunnyvale and remember which ones answer with a computer tone. Not only is it within even the most computer illiterate’s grasp to understand how this might work, it’s a clever sort of solution that you can only do with a computer. Unlike Dade in Hackers, who is playing an old prank with a new tool, David’s playing a prank that wasn’t even possible before home computers. That’s crucial. More to the point, though, WarGames is light on “black box” hacks. In Hackers, we see a lot of people typing at a lot of keyboards and things happening as a result, but the mechanisms are all mysterious. We just have to trust that these people can do the things they can do, and that wears thin after a while. It’s like showing a wizard’s duel and asking us to understand when the characters start to run out of magic. Hard to relate, since none of US can cast spells and have no frame of reference for what’s “tiring” and not here. WarGames never strays from the path on this one. Yeah, sure, we can’t exactly see David’s (BASIC? *snicker*) code, but nothing that he does requires all that much suspension of disbelief. Logging in to the school’s computer to change his grades given the week’s password? Check. Dialing every number in Sunnyvale to find Protovision? Don’t know how he did it, but the point is I believe he could. And from there it’s really out of his hands. There’s no false tension built up by asking us to watch a duel in a medium we do not and CAN NOT have any familiarity with.

(2) Real characters. I would guess that Hackers‘ biggest downfall in the computer believability department probably has little to do with actual computers at all. It’s just that these kids are all obnoxious, unlikeable, and - fair or foul - just don’t really jive with our stereotypes of what hackers are like. They come across as ravers who happen to have hobbies in computers. Everything about them is so over-the-top that it’s hard to shake the impression that the moviemakers are trying to hedge the inevitable “not realistic!” criticism from real-life hackers by hanging flashing neon signs everywhere that say “this isn’t really happening!” Contrast that with David Lightman. There’s a great scene where the FBI agent is talking about how Lightman “fits the profile” for espionage. He’s “intelligent, an underachiever, a loner, bad grades in school.” Heh. Now THAT’s a hacker! Espionage isn’t the only profile that fits. And the people making the movie know that, obviously, which is why they included that line at all. More importantly, the romantic tension between David and Jennifer works as well. David’s outside the normal jock dating rituals, not a very masculine guy. Girls aren’t a priority for him because they can’t be. So what kind of girl does such a guy get? Exactly the kind of girl that Jennifer is, obviously. Shy guys need the girl to sorta make the first move, and Jennifer is that girl for guys like David. She’s popular, probably, but seems likely to be bored with her normal options. She can party with the party crowd if she wants to, but sex isn’t really her thing, and she’d like someone with a bit more depth that she won’t have to share with everyone else. It works. So what is going on in Hackers? Despite what Ebert seems to think, cliche city, actually. It’s the standard story about a guy who gets a bit intimidated by a girl who might just be better than him at “his thing.” She’s aloof, untouchable, he bides his time, make his move by showing her up at her own game and … YAWWWNNN. Yeah, got it. This is the romantic subplot of every *sploitation movie on the market. But even more important, I think, are the background characters. In WarGames, aside from possibly David’s parents, everyone seems like a real human. They’re neither good nor bad, really, they’re just sorta pluggin along doing their thing. The debate between Mr. McKitrick and General Barringer about whether to completely automate the missile launch procedure is intriguing because we don’t really know which side is right - both men make good points. And as for Stephen Falken, he has the right idea about war, but the wrong solution to the problem. It’s a believable position for a brilliant researcher out of the 60s who’s lost his son to take, and demonstrating why it’s wrong serves a real thematic purpose in the movie. But in Hackers? Everyone is an annoying cartoon. The oil execs are conveniently hapless, the cyber criminal is conveniently a prick, the FBI guy might as well have “Moral Majority Certified Witch Hunter” stamped on his forehead, the group of hackers all act like bad high school stoner stereotypes, and so on and so on. The only bit of character innovation we really get is that there’s a Puerto Rican in this movie. Way to go out on a limb, there, guys.

Graphical Restraint. Hackers really pulls out the stops on the computer imagery stuff. If it doens’t exactly take it up to 11 like The Matrix did, it still gets a comfortable 10. There’s too much neon and techno dayglo, and it only takes the average viewer about 20seconds to get really sick of it. In fact, in my case, I can honestly say it’s the biggest barrier to my ever seeing this film again, superficial though that may sound (and be). I don’t like the style, and I can’t get away from it. So Done. WarGames looks like real life for the most part. Aside from the scenes at NORAD headquarters, there isn’t really anything in the movie that looks too technological. David’s computer equipment was dated even when the movie came out, and in any case we don’t get to see too much of it. This is a movie about the computer age, to be sure, but it mercifully doesn’t feel the need to make a fetish out of it. Unlike in Hackers, all the images we see in WarGames are things we’ve either seen before or can easily extrapolate from things we’ve seen before. There are no endless lines of purple code scrolling implausibly quickly across people’s faces.

Well, that’s my stab at it, anyway.

To be perfectly honest, I liked Hackers a wee bit better than I’m letting on here. Yeah, the romantic rivalry thing between the two main characters was cliched and irritating, and I really wanted the movie about computer culture they advertised rather than the one about rave culture I got instead. But it’s not as bad as it might have been. The central villain is interesting for being not too different from the kids we’re supposed to take as the “good guys,” which casts the whole story in a nice amoral light. Our villain isn’t doing anything these kids won’t try themselves someday - he’s only “bad” because circumstances have forced him to pick on their friend. Something to think about. Also, however unconvincing the final product turned out, it’s clear that they hired some real hackers for background research. I appreciated that the Dragon Book made an appearance, for example, and with the right cover and everything! And OK, the reference to RISC architecture was dopey, but hey, I’m pretty sure the scriptwriter doesn’t know how to fix that! Most importantly, I appreciated the general lack of sex. To the extent these characters do it at all, it’s for fun and not really an obsession of theirs. If this movie got nothing else about hacker culture right, at least it stayed true to that one. It isn’t that hackers are asexual people, but they’re certainly less obsessed with sex than the general population, and it’s nice to see that come across in a teen movie. WarGames did it better, of course, but then, WarGames did everything better.

So I’ll see Ebert’s three stars and raise him negative half a star. Hackers wasn’t good, but neither was it terrible. Tone the graphics (and wardrobe) down a bit and I might waste another two hours on it someday.

Which still gives it nothing on WarGames, of course. I’ll be watching that movie again and again till the Singularity.