A review by becksri29
Hackers by David Bischoff

2.0

It's no secret that I enjoy the cheesey 1994 movie Hackers starring Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie as superhero-like even hackers Crash (Override) and (Acid) Burn. I liked it as a kid, and I still like it now, but perhaps the only reason I still like it is because how much I liked it in the 90's. Who knows? It's really not that great, full of two-dimensional Gen X characters, a simplistic plot, and not a lot of actual computer science. Plus, Burn (literally the only female character who isn't one of the main characters' moms) comes across as little more than a love interest for Crash, who happens to have the same interest in hacking. The movie definitely does not pass the Bechtel test. But, since the guys are all equally one-sided and she really does have some mad skills, I can let it slide a bit. So basically, all this is a preface to explain why I actually read a novelization of the movie. Oh, the horror. Yeah, and this was a particularly bad novelization (my apologies to the author, whom I'm sure has produced some much more entertaining original work at some point). This book landed on my virtual shelf when I was trying to download a copy of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, a fantastic non-fiction book about the earliest players in the computer industry who really pushed the machines to their limits and led to the awesome tech we have today. Instead, I got punked with an e-copy of this. And.... because of my love for the cheesey movie, I actually read it. And it was bad. Like really, really bad. But I finished it, and maybe even liked it just a tiny bit. Please don't judge me.