Movies are an ideal way to capture our deepest fears and dreams about coming technology, allowing us to indulge in our wildest imaginations. For information specialists, it’s mostly about curling up on the floor in the fetal position because there have been far more misses than hits when it comes to computers.

Oddly, older movies about computers and software date far better than newer ones, writers so clueless how the machines worked that they wrote actors interacting with machines by simply talking to them. Which, as it turns out, foreshadowed Alexa and Siri.

And what’s a movie about the bleeding edge of technology without hackers? To outsiders, terms like backdoors, DDoS, ransomware, and phishing sound like confusing jargon. Based on what we see in movies about hacking, they are just that. Which is why most films communicate hacking by merely showing an actor in front of a glowing screen, pupils dilated as they type 300 words a minute, keyboard beeping incessantly.
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There are few scenes that better represent a 40-year-old screenwriter’s vision of information warfare than a Secret Service guy spouting “Someone’s tampered with the POTUS mainframe,” into his wristwatch (as seen in Michael Bay’s Transformers). As we transferred from a gymnasium full of reels of tape to row after row of blinking servers, screenwriters have gotten much more savvy about what hacking really entails. But they still have no clue what hacking, or hackers, generally look like.

A Gigabyte of RAM …
Dovemead FilmsCantharus ProductionsMajor Studio Partners

As of 1995, no one making movies seemed remotely sure how electronics worked, though a version of phone “freaking” was shown in War Games. Not that there weren’t some valiant attempts. The German film World on a Wire was the first to popularize the idea of VR or the Metaverse. It had one feature that rendered it unrealistic; unlike Facebook’s product, it had more than five users. Colossus: The Forbin Project, a 1970 film shockingly ahead of its time, featured a sentient AI that holds the world hostage, hooked up to a world-wide surveillance system with facial recognition software through an “internet of things.” Colossus predated the Matrix baddies and Skynet from Terminator lore.

Superman III in 1983 was notable for having a famous recreation of the “salami slicing” scam, where embezzlers divert tiny amounts of cash, pennies at a time, making it one of the few plausible comic-book villain plots schemes in history. The idea was later referenced in Office Space, though most companies were on to the scam at that point. Savor that, because it is probably the first and only time anyone will ever praise Superman III.

Related: Hackers 2 Is Under Active Consideration Confirms Original Director

It was pretty much all downhill from here. In one of the first real international espionage-hacking events, an East German used telephone lines to break into American university networks, essentially the earliest form of modern internet hacking. Taking cues from real life, the early-90s were chocked full of misguided attempts to dramatize hacking, culminating in one of the greatest unintentional comic scenes in film history when Eric Bogosian’s hacker insinuates that storage somehow affects security in the Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. But it was a movie about Steven Seagal kicking people in the face on a train, so maybe we should cut it some slack.

Accurately depicting computers on screen is outweighed by the need to make sure the audience doesn’t pass out in boredom. “I didn’t want to do people riding motorcycles on 3D grids,” director Michael Mann told IndieWire, referencing the 1982 sci-fi film Tron. He might as well have said he didn’t want his hackers ordering pizza on pizza.net, as in the 1995 Sandra Bullock film The Net, or engaging in hacking duels like in Hackers while techno thumps in the background. Realism vs. dramatic license is a fine line to walk, but drama usually kicks realism’s ass.

The Color-Coded Hat Spectrum
Forward PassLegendary Entertainment

2015’s Blackhat is a fascinating study of the subject of hacking by Michael Mann, inspired by a real event. That was straight out of a CIA playbook. Casting Chris Hemsworth as a hacker? Like Sandra Bullock and Angelina Jolie, that was all Hollywood. Blackhat succeeds where other films fail for showing hackers separating themselves from state actors and credit-card number thieves. Identified as “ethical hackers” or “white hats,” the “good” hackers merely demonstrate vulnerabilities through proof-of-concept exploits.

A lot of hacking is down to luck, not typing frantically. The most damaging espionage-related hacking documented being rather boring, someone simply tricks Iranians to click on a link containing malware. World governments are as susceptible to ridiculously basic viruses as your grandmother who shared her private information with that nice Nigerian prince. And we guarantee you these hackers did not look like Angelina Jolie.

Related: 10 Great Movies That Tell Their Stories Through a Computer Screen

Anyone who watches movies knows that when a mother of virus is ripping through a major company file at one in the morning, there’s not much you can do but throw some numbers to a shirtless man. We’re not sure where the super-hunk-hacker stereotype started, but it ran rampant in the nineties and aughts, thanks to films like Swordfish and Hackers. These films single-handedly making hacking sexy thanks to ladies in crop tops and brooding male models.

Flaws in the System
MGM/UA Distribution Co.

In the defense of bad movie scripts, hacking is secretive and highly illegal by its very nature, not something you should really have expertise in. Thus, few people will ever spot the errors. Truth is stranger than movie fiction. In reality, the “elite” hackers are after celebrity nude pics or Fortnite exploits to sell to 13-year olds. Obtaining top-secret-clearance files? Not particularly hard, so it seems. Not to mention, the market is much smaller.

As opposed to movies, real life hacking is usually painfully unimaginative and slow. “Brute-force attack” programs are made to enter every imaginable password combination possible. (If you’re still using “password” as your password, now would be a great time to stop.) Which is why you never see it in TV or movies. It is insanely dull compared to hackers in Gucci suits and eyeliner hijacking nuclear missiles as a timer counts down.

As we, as a culture, grow more sophisticated, our computer literacy expanding, it still appears most people either in the movie business or culture in general know incredibly little about hackers, CNN’s “technology analyst” once referring to 4chan as a person. Hey, movie studios, maybe have the person in the IT department check your script, it’s not like they aren’t reading your private emails already anyway.