Why the User Interface in Hackers Hasn't Aged That Badly

Illustration for article titled Why the User Interface in Hackers Hasn't Aged That Badly

A lot of the stuff about the movie Hackers looks really dated now, especially some of the fashions and the way it depicts hacking. But the user interface still looks pretty good, compared to a lot of other stuff from the era. Paul Franklin, the Academy Award-winning special effects designer who's worked on all Christopher Nolan's recent movies, also worked on Hackers and holds it up as an example of a weird choice that panned out:

The best directors are those who are collaborative and will actually invite you to bring your own ideas along. That's the great thing about working with Chris, for example: he is extremely collaborative and solicits our ideas. An intelligent filmmaker will always listen to what the visual effects people are actually saying because we are filmmakers too and want to make the best film we possibly can. At the same time, sometimes they say, "I want this," and you just go off and do it. And sometimes afterwards you say, "That didn't work," but I can think of lots of films I've worked on where there has been a questionable decision which turned out to be exactly the right call....

I remember a movie I worked on a long time ago called Hackers, which was one of Angelina Jolie's first films and was about hacking and the early Internet. The director [Iain Softley] was insistent that he didn't want to base any of the computer graphics we were creating for the film on existing computer technology. He didn't want it to look like any interface at the time. We thought, "This is just dumb, it doesn't look like a real computer". But I saw the film recently, and it hasn't aged as a result, the ideas behind it still work as they did nearly 20 years ago. Had we used Netscape 1995 as our computer interface, I think it would be showing its age terribly.

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[via GQ UK]

DISCUSSION

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Chip Overclock®

I happened to catch WAR GAMES on cable a month or two ago and was struck by how archaic the computer interface seemed, in part, I think, because they were trying to make it look contemporaneous for its period, 1983. OTOH, I was just finishing up my masters in CS that year, and even then that movie seemed a little dated compared to what I was seeing at school.

I sometimes wonder how the GUI in JURASSIC PARK will look a decade or so from now.

I find the GUI technology in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY holds up pretty well.

I think the GUI technology portrayed in MINORITY REPORT is remarkably predictive. It's basically a whiteboard-sized iPad (iBoard?), or Microsoft Surface when it was a coffee table. I want one.

I like to say that every time I use my iPhone I feel like I'm in an episode of STAR TREK. But in fact the apps I use on my iPhone, at least in terms of GUI, seem way beyond anything we saw in any of that franchise.

Maybe when it comes to GUIs portrayed in television or movies, it's like firearms: less is more.