Through the magic of Netflix Watch Instantly, I watched Hackers last night. Despite it being a favorite of a long-time friend, I’d never managed to see it before (though I imagine it had probably been on in the background somewhere at some point or other, because my wife was sure she’d seen it with me). I was an interesting experience.

It got a LOT of things wrong, and mostly made “hacking” look way too much like video gaming (and indirectly suggested that being a master h@xx0r equated to mad skills at playing Wipeout for the PS1), represented computer viruses as digitally processed footage of a vitruvian Seattle grunge reject, and I’ve never seen a laptop display that could project a perfect mirror image of the screen on the face of the user.

Still, I hit a lot of good notes – you could tell that the people making the movie actually did a little research (and read a lot of William Gibson). The fact that the first big hack shown in the film was more a matter of social engineering (the “hero” talked a security guard into giving up information over the phone) rather than 1337 computer skills was nice to see, and largely true to life, as were the organic inclusion of phone phreaking and other classic hacker lore. Also, it worked in the now all-too-common warning to not choose totally obvious passwords as a plot point, which was a nice touch.

Mostly, though, the movie, as fun as it was, felt dated. “Dated” is actually a poor description; a better one would be “So 90s it hurts”. The bizarre fashion, the music, and the technology were certainly top-of-the-line at the time, but it all seems to quaint now. “A 28.8kpbs modem!” “It’s a P6, five times the power of the Pentium…too much machine for you!” and the like are all now merely amusing artifacts. Even the streaming transfer, in glorious non-HD 4:3 pan and scan, fed into the embarassingly nostalgic feel.

Still, I enjoyed it, for all it’s weirdness and requisite representations of virtual reality goggles (though I’ll give them points for wedging a Nintendo Power Glove into the background) and faux cyberpunk trappings. Plus, there’s a young Angelina Jolie doing a reasonably good sexy vulcan impression (as well as a quarter second of nudity!), which probably had more than a little bit to do with the film’s relative success. If nothing else, the film an interesting artifact of a time long gone, when the internet was still new, exciting and dangerous, and all your embarassing relatives weren’t sending you Farmville requests on Facebook.

I actually kind of miss those days.