Best Hacker and Surveillance Movies: 10 Films About Being Watched
Almost every film about computers ages badly, because it filmed the screen. The ones that last filmed the person instead. Sneakers is the best of them, a 1992 caper that says out loud that the war will be about who controls the information. The Conversation is the greatest film about the surveillance operator's conscience. The Lives of Others is the greatest about the person listening on the other end. Start with those three and you have the entire subject.
Sneakers (1992)
A team of security experts break into systems for a living and are handed a box that opens everything. Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, River Phoenix, Dan Aykroyd and Ben Kingsley.
Ben Kingsley's speech about a war fought over information rather than bullets was written in 1992 and reads like it was written last week.
The Conversation (1974)
Gene Hackman's surveillance man is the best character in the genre, a professional listener who cannot live with what he heard. Coppola's most personal film.
The Lives of Others (2006)
A Stasi officer listens to a playwright and is slowly changed by it. The film that puts the humanity on the other side of the headphones, and one of the great debuts.
WarGames (1983)
A teenager dials into the wrong computer and nearly starts a war. It is charming and it also got the actual mechanics of early hacking closer than almost anything since.
Blow Out (1981)
De Palma's sound recordist captures a car crash that turns out to be an assassination. The other half of The Conversation, with a crueller ending.
The Social Network (2010)
Fincher and Sorkin on the founding of Facebook, and the only film that treats writing code as a performance with stakes. The deposition structure is the trick that makes it work.
Enemy of the State (1998)
The popcorn version, and better than it needed to be. Gene Hackman plays essentially the same man from The Conversation twenty four years later, which cannot be an accident.
Citizenfour (2014)
The documentary, shot in the hotel room in real time as Snowden hands over the archive. It plays like a thriller because it is one.
Michael Clayton (2007)
Not a hacking film, but the best modern film about institutional surveillance and the people paid to make things disappear. Tilda Swinton rehearsing in a mirror is the scene.
Three Days of the Condor (1975)
Robert Redford's analyst survives because he reads books for a living and notices a pattern. The pre digital version of the same job, and the closest ancestor Sneakers has.
- Films about computers age badly when they film the screen and well when they film the person.
- Sneakers, The Conversation and The Lives of Others are the three essentials.
- Blow Out is the direct companion to The Conversation, and Enemy of the State is the blockbuster echo of both.
- For the true story told as it happened, watch Citizenfour.
The whole idea
Watch one movie this week. Talk about it Friday.
We pick one film. You watch it alone, on your own time. Friday at 7:30pm PT you get ten minutes on Zoom with one other person who watched it too. No club, no homework, no small talk.
See this week's pick $5Common questions
- What is the most realistic hacker movie?
- Sneakers (1992) and WarGames (1983) are the two usually named by people in the field, mostly because they treat social engineering and dial-up realities seriously rather than inventing visual nonsense.
- What should I watch after The Conversation?
- Blow Out (1981) for the direct answer to it, The Lives of Others (2006) for the view from the other side of the headphones, and Enemy of the State (1998) for the thriller version.
- Where can I watch Sneakers?
- It usually sits on Prime Video with ads or is available to rent. Availability moves around, so check before you build a night on it.