One of the things I love about Hackers is that it portrays the feeling of hacking and programming to someone who might not have done it. Yea I think a lot of people have the green text hackerman image when they think about hacking but it hardly conveys what's happening inside the head of the hacker, it's just something cryptic magic that solves a problem and advances the plot. In Hackers, the Gibson is a space, somepeople live there and oversee it, other's have to transport themselves (there's a montage with fast shots of a subway, then computer circuit boards, then the "buildings" of the gibson that work really well imo). Not every film has to convey all of this but I really appreciate that Hackers does.
Mr Robot is another great one at that. It has layers of trippy stuff, but the hacking stuff is both real-ish and pretty well explained by the main character's monologues.
Because it was the tool for when you want anything to do with recon or scanning, especially back in the day, network aspect was a big part (no cloud no api etc) and not that complicated (no vpn no zero trust) so if you managed to scan the network you get a lot of goodies.
It’s better than how “hackers” usually portrayed, and ruining the word for generations.
